I’ve just encountered a disheartening example of corporate personhood. The argument against piracy is primarily that the creators of a given work should continue to receive recompense for that work. Pirates deprive them of that profit. Do you know what else deprives them of the same profit? Publishers who come into ownership of their IP. While I think it’s terrible that anyone should pirate a game and short the creators, I don’t have much empathy for the large corporate entities that buy up game rights, profiting from them strictly as commodities.

Why am I even bringing this up? Machine Studios has just laid out a list of PC games for which the creators are no longer receiving any compensation. The list includes a lot of my favorites: The Thief series, Dungeon Keeper, the Icewind Dale series, Arcanum, Fallout 2, and Mechwarrior 4. Luckily, I still have my CD copies of all of these games hanging out in a box in my attic. But whereas I might have been tempted to add an extra copy of one of these to my Steam account simply for convenience, this revelation has ensured that I’ll be going back to the copies I’ve got on CD. I don’t have copies of the Deus Ex series or Planescape: Torment, which are also on that list, but I can do without those. I didn’t enjoy either nearly as much as everyone else seems to have. And if I’m ever feeling particularly macochistic and want to replay Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, I’m going to EBay.