Introduction

Editors Note: The views expressed in the following exchange may not necessarily represent the views of the authors, nor those of TG Publishing. This is a debate in which the aim is to explore two sides of a controversial issue, and should be treated as such.

Aaron McKenna: Hey Rob. The issue of copyright has been weighing on the minds of techies everywhere, since the music industry decided to start suing dead grannies and A+ students a few years back. With the rise of broadband Internet and the increase in the output of the videogame industry, the issue of piracy has come to the fore.

One of the core issues currently ticking off videogame execs everywhere is people sampling full games before buying them. Your average videogame costs a good $50 or so, and there are many dire games being released in the form of poor sequels, dodgy expansions and cash cows. Given that, can you blame users for wanting to try the full and finished product before shelling out their cash? I don't see a problem with people downloading and testing out a game for a day or two before making their purchasing decision. After all, this is basically how modern video gaming began in the era of Shareware. Doom, for example, was released in episodic, shareware format.

Demos are no longer entirely representative of games, however, as many developers and publishers can cherry pick what you see and what you don't. For example, the recent demo of Star Wars: Empire at War was specifically altered to make the game run faster than it will in the final product. Units and production values were changed to make the game a much faster experience, which is certainly a misleading representation - it moves away entirely from what a demo is supposed to be.

When the cost of gaming is going up, and the quality of games as a whole is arguably going down, I think that gamers should reach out and grasp the opportunity when games are available to be sampled. I do not see this as carte blanche to steal games, but rather as the demo experience being put into the hands of users.

Valve recently held an open weekend in which Day of Defeat: Source was free to everyone via Steam. The Steam system allows them to control user accounts and turn off access to a game once a trial has ended. The fact that not all publishers have a system in place such as Steam should not lead to users being punished. That's particularly the case when many stores, such as the GAME stores in the UK and Ireland, won't take back games under their returns policy due to the amount of copying that goes on. In other words, if you shell out an extortionist's amount of money for a crappy game, that's your problem. No way! What do you think?