Pirating has become a big issue as of late due to the proposed SOPA bill. Sure pirating things that other people make is a bad thing but who is really to blame in this debacle? The pirates or the industry?

Let’s take a look at music for a second. My take is that you should purchase music and not pirate it. Why? It’s fairly priced, plain and simple (when you buy within your own country that is). In that regards pirating serves no purpose. It’s not as if the music industry is charging an exorbitant amount for music. With iTunes you can even download the songs that you want, without having to purchase the whole album.

Now let’s talk about video games. Video games are $60 dollars a pop generally and a lot of them don’t seem to be worth that amount (to me at least anyways). There are a few that a more than worth their sixty dollars, like Skyrim for instance, but in all seriousness $60 seems a lot for most games. Especially when some of them are mostly cutscenes instead of game play.

The video game industry complains about pirating but they’re the ones digging themselves into a hole. They charge an exorbitant amount of money for a game that you’re probably only going to play a few times in your life time. Sure, some of the games you may play more than others, and those most likely are worth what you payed for them. However, this is why piracy thrives. We are bombarded with new titles constantly, why in November there was the release of Modern Warfare 3, Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, Skyrim, and much more. You’re looking at $120 just for two games, $180 if you bought all three. Unless that is you want to wait awhile before the games go on sale or used ones start coming in.

In the end, if the gaming industry wants to reduce the amount of pirating significantly they need to re-think how they price games. We too, as gamers, should not sit idly by and be content with $60 dollar games. Next gen consoles are only a few years away, how much will video games be then? $70? $80? Let’s not wait to find out.

Every Monday Ember crawls from his cave to come and deliver his opinion to you the readers. His grumpy Monday attitude fuels the fire that burns onto the screen to form the weekly article: Burning Embers.