I have a dilemma, and I'm not quite sure what to do about it. In the interest of this article let us say that I have a "friend" who, for some obscure reason, has just crawled out from whatever crevasse he's been sleeping in and discovered the vast world of internet piracy via torrents. I had a discussion with said friend, and it seems that he is emphatic with his new portal to the internets. Since then he claims to have doubled his music library and explored some video games which he never nutted up and bought with his hardly earned cash.

What games you ask? Well much to my surprise my friend actually can read and has actually loaded up some pretty recent independently developed stuff such as World of Goo and Crayon Physics.

Don't worry I'm getting to my point. Just a smidge more background/

With large conglomerates such as EA and Blizz-Acti-F*ck (or whatever their name is now) more or less running the show with their billion dollar budgeted games, there leaves very little room for what I call the 'garage band' style developers. Producing independently developed games these days seems nearly impossible now. With very limited budgets these garage coders are basically limited to spreading their product via word of mouth (or a free distribution method, but humor me), or pray that some megalo-corp. happens across their site and picks up their IP.

That is of course unless their game is somehow incorporated into the culture known as the internet and becomes available across torrents and all that fancy stuff. Now, in this way their IP is successfully spread and it gets their name out there. This in turn would make the publisher more likely to be picked up by one of the major distribution joints; however, this leaves an open wound in the side of the little guy. If they were picked up by the big guys and prospectively supposed to make at least some sort of profit off of their product it is still floating around on the internet waiting to be pillaged and pirated.

So I suppose my question is whether piracy actually helps these tiny independent guys, or if in the long run it hurts them.

-Alocide

(This thought occurred to me while coasting through some of 1up's forums and http://boards.1up.com/zd/board/message?board.id=games&thread.id=929039 that jumped out at me)