Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum… and you shall remember this day as the time when Bungie saw its 3 glorious years of hard work gone down the drain when hacked copies of its successful franchise are floating around countries like India, Pakistan, China, Brazil and the rest of the developing nations.
I speak’eth of the eternal love story, the story of man’s final hope, a war so devastating that made millions of teeny- boppers skip a day at the ol tick tock and be the first in line to receive copies of the game. Halo 3 is what they call this mammoth of a beast, and this beast got jacked on the sea and transported onto Davy Jones’ locker at the far end of the world. I talk about pirated copies of the disc freely floating around the so called grey markets in the developing countries.
If I lived in the States a legit version of Halo 3 would cost 60 quid right. Well if anyone lives in this nourishing part of the globe the cost boils down to roughly 5 quid, cheap aye! I got a bargain all right but what happens when me pop this disc into my faithful 360, me get an error message. I go over to this techie’s cove and pop it into his ’60 and voila like a clear azure sky on a bright summer’s day it works fine, without a hitch or a glitch.
I ask him about Xbox Live and he says Nay Nay Maan. They don’t have Xbox Live and are neither bothered bout it. They are happy to give the single player campaign a whirl through, Bungie did a mighty generous thing of sticking a 4 player co-op mode in the game. He can now have his party with a couple of beers doing the rounds, and cry when the chief supposedly rests in a cryogenic sleep tucked in some obscure part of the galaxy.
Check out the visual differences between both the versions of the game. The original game disc comes with a hard plastic case with a lovely picture of the chief holding his assault rifle whereas the other one comes in a packet of whose primary constituents are polyethylene and can be disposed off as a…as a… I don’t know use your imagination. It also has the word O3 written in bold with a blue chief on a warthog, the DVD has Game Box 360 inscribed on it and mates the copied version does not come with a manual explaining the depth of the entire trilogy.
So Bungie and Microsoft have raked in close to $300 million for 5 million copies sold. The dealer of the shop told me that he had already sold 5,000 copies of the game which would have raked in good $ 0.3 million revenue for Microsoft. The unofficial version does have a major drawback, Live is not enabled on the game which takes a majority of the woolop factor away.
But this issue of piracy affects a lot of companies who are setting shop in the India and they go on to develop for the west when finding a consumer base for such countries would open up new sources of revenue for them.
–Neelesh Mukherjee