Also called “publishing.”
In pretty much any area of life, if enough people start living by the ethic, “It’s ok to take it unless someone stops me,” things are going to fall apart. If things made publicly available are treated like “gold in the street,” most people will stop making things publicly available. And we all lose.
Economies run 90% on trust and 10% on enforcement. If people violate the trust, the economy starts getting smaller; there are fewer exchanges, as people invest more in protecting or recovering their assets from theft and less on actual creation of value.
Meanwhile, if customers begin to feel like suckers for following a norm like “Don’t steal, even when the cops aren’t looking,” or “Pay for your entertainment,” the base on which everyone actually depends just gets smaller and smaller.
(Anyone here play Settlers of Catan? If you have, and you’ve gone through a long run of rolling 7s/playing knights, you’ve experienced a simplified model of what I’m talking about. The economy becomes more and more theft-based…but with less and less that’s worth stealing.)
Sbenny, as we can see from their plea that Jason quoted above, is threatened by the breakdown of norms in this area no less than we are. We’re all dependent on the pool of customers who follow the norm of paying for games, even when they know cracked versions are a Google search away. The difference is that Sbenny’s business model is itself norm-killing (not the distribution of mods/cheats, which I have no problem with, but the distribution of free games on which they claim ad revenue).
tl;dr This is why we can’t have nice things.