Kristin Kalning Games editor • E-mail

Getting free games is as easy as going on the Internet.

No, I don’t mean casual games and I don’t mean out-of-print stuff. I’m talking about triple-A games — new stuff and old favorites.

Internet “pirate” sites offer “cracked” versions of the shrink-wrapped, copyright-protected software you get at Best Buy. Most of the time, these pirated games are available free of charge. The people who cracked the game’s copy protection and posted it on a peer-to-peer transfer site didn’t do it to turn a profit. They did it just because they could.

Sounds like a gamer’s dream come true, right? Why pay for software when you don’t have to — particularly with retail prices edging up to $60 a pop?

“Because it’s stealing,” says Todd Hollenshead, CEO of id Software. “If you’re unwilling to shoplift in a store, you shouldn’t be downloading illegally pirated versions of games.”

Game piracy has been around since before there was an Internet. And indeed, some pirates are in the business to make money. Go to virtually any market in Southeast Asia and you’ll see rows and rows of commercial games, music and movies available for rock-bottom prices.

Early on, enterprising hackers also figured out how to modify consoles, disabling the copyright protection in the hardware and then reselling the machines with pre-loaded, pirated software. This process is called “modding.”

The Entertainment Software Association estimates that the video game industry loses about $3.5 billion every year due to this kind of hard-goods piracy. But these numbers don’t include the 500-pound gorilla: Internet piracy and peer-to-peer transfers.

“It’s hard to hang a number on losses attributable to Internet piracy,” says Ric Hirsch, the ESA’s senior vice-president for intellectual property enforcement.  “But there’s no question that online piracy has impacted commercial performance of PC games and console games.”

That impact has a direct effect on a company’s bottom line — and its ability to make games.

“If the audience of people not playing legitimately is growing faster than audience that is, that’s a bad thing for industry and it’s a bad thing for game fans as well,” says Hollenshead.

These days, a game with all the bells and whistles — cutting-edge tech, deep gameplay, photorealistic graphics — costs a bundle to make. Development periods are longer, teams can number 100 people or more. And the commercial window for the average game is very short, says Hirsch.  Not every game is part of a triple-A franchise. Not every company is Electronic Arts. And if your game is competing against a free copy of itself, it could spell real trouble for the people who made it.

That hadn’t occurred to Shane Pittman, a former high-ranking member of Razor 1911, an online game piracy ring.

“It didn’t seem like stealing,” he says. “Physically, I couldn’t see an attachment to anyone.”

In late 2001, Pittman was on the job, working as an IT administrator in Hickory, N.C., when he got the call from the FBI. They were outside the house he shared with his wife, two kids and a cat — and they had a warrant. 

The resulting raid on Pittman’s house, which was part of a larger federal sting called Operation Buccaneer, netted seven computers and boxes upon boxes of burned CDs. Pittman pled guilty to conspiracy to commit copyright infringement and served 18 months in a federal prison. 

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