Actually, wrong on both accounts. I know it seems logical, but the fact of the matter is, the people who pirate games would not buy those games if they couldn't get a pirated version, or if they would, their budget would allow for only a few purchased titles - they certainly would not purchase ALL of those titles they downloaded for free. So in effect they are invisible. Game piracy does not directly cause money damages in any way, and since only a small portion of pirated titles would get purchased in the case of unavailability of a pirated copy, the indirect money damages are also negligible.
Piracy, in effect, is just one big fat convenient scapegoat for inert game studios to blame because their games do not net them as much profit as they would like. Or, in some cases, greedy corporates who think that if it were not for pirates they would be making an extra mountain of cash.

As for popularity, I sort of don't get it. How exactly does pirating decrease popularity of a game studio? If anything it brings the title to a wider spectrum of potential fans. You have people who wouldn't buy a game, but would play it for free, and if the game is good, why would the popularity of the studio which made it drop?

Idiots always fail to realize that advertising sells to other idiots, even when it's crap being sold.

Everything from Napster to cassette tapes have been hailed as the doom of the music industry because the rampant piracy they were going to cause would destroy them. Everything from Napster to cassette tapes has made the studios more money than they could imagine even after they were making it.

When they shut down that EVIL Napster, the bane of copyright law, sales dropped.

The evils of Napster were, according to the RIAA themselves, that only one in four users bought more than a fourth of the music they downloaded. Do one in four people buy a fourth of the music they hear on the radio? What they failed to realize is that minimum 20 million dollars in revenue they overlooked. The 300 million wishful thinking dollars that Napster stole from them never existed to start with.

Sales took a 10% dive the following year, blamed on the economy, while DVD sales had more than doubled.

Piracy, and even possible piracy, has been used to hammer on various technologies for decades. The cassette tape was an evil invention that would destroy the music industry, the VCR tape one that would destroy the movie industry. The RIAA actually claimed that blank CD sales were a measure of the piracy affecting their industry, and that measures needed to be taken to curtail them. They aren't a very bright bunch.

You have to do something really stupid to actually lose sales from piracy, Like those asstards using Fade, or truly horrific games that flat shouldn't have been released, ever. Every indication is that, were piracy to cease, the industries where it is rampant would shrink catastrophically. The PC game industry was built on shareware, the music industry became big with radio, the movie industry became a giant with the VCR. Radio and the VCR were fought tooth and nail by established industries that were stupid and feared them, the gamers started with no power, no recognition, no draw, there wasn't even a customer base to work from.

Video games were a new medium when they entered the technology age, they gave away products to create customers and still they fear piracy. There are still businesses being run, successfully, off the shareware model, download managers, desktop customizers, irc clients, torrent clients. There are virtual gadgets all over the web that are free to download and hinge on the good will of the user to pay them for it if they decide to keep it, and the good ones are making serious money.

ManShooter: "Game piracy does not directly cause money damages in any way"
psychoak: "You have to do something really stupid to actually lose sales from piracy"

Now, to both of those I really have to tell something obvious: A commercial item taken from a legal company for free IS a lost sale itself, and it causes some money to not be made, even when a copy is taken from the corporation.

Let's say that the hypotethical price for a product is 600 units of money, when producing it costs 500.
There are 200 people, who took it, 150 of these paid for it.
Their production cost 100 000 units of money, and the price was 120 000. The company should have earned 20 000 units of money for this, but since 50 people didn't pay for it, the earned sum of money is 90 000 and the balance: -10 000.
In this hypotethical situation, the corporation was to get 20 000 units of money, but instead they lost 10 000, because of piracy.
And, not to forget, even companies consist of people, and these sums of money don't seem very large, so the company must have been quite small... let's say 300 people. This would mean that either the head of the corporation paid 10 000 units of money of their own, or each of the company's members paid 33,33.
Well, 33 euros, dollars or whatever isn't very much, but certainly doesn't give any incentive to go on in making good products for people to steal, don't you think?

Sorry, this is untrue. You want an example? ok I pirate Microsoft Office 07. Will i ever buy it? no. This is what society fails to realize along with the large companies that like to cry and whine about piracy. If you make a good enough product people will buy it. And people will pirate it. A pirated copy holds no value in a hypothetical sale because it's basically a demo, if a pirate likes the program enough or game, he might even buy it.

This is where the scapegoat of piracy tends to breakdown. Most companies just use it as an excuse to treat everyone like a pirate, which is stupid because that in turn loses sales in the long run for a company. And all their counter measures don't mean dick to pirate group who cracks their game/program in less than 24hours.

So I'm just trying to clear up the misunderstanding of a pirated copy = a lost sale. This fact is false and unprovable the reality is all that may happen is someone doesn't like their shitty product and goes with some other program/game. This isn't the fault of the pirate its the companies fault for not releasing a quality product that even a pirate will shell out the cash for. And believe me most pirates actually buy shit. We aren't all cheap bastards.

Alright, alright. Maybe I'm just stupid, slow to learn, can't view the big picture or whatever... Still, I fail to see anything good in piracy. Besides, even if you are a pirate, paying for stuff is buying, not piracy. I mean, when you buy an item, you are not being a pirate at the moment. (sorry about the bad text, couldn't make up anything better)
Buying stuff = not piracy
Taking them from other, illegal places (or legal, if you are using an illegal source or something like that), whatever your reasons are = piracy
This, I already said in a reply I posted yesterday.

And piracy, as a word, means that you get an item in an illegal way, though not as straightforward as robbery. It's still stealing! Most of the people in this thread are defending illegal activities. If you want everything to be free, why don't you just simply write a persuasive letter to your country's government. Though I doubt many people would bother to do anything when there's nothing to be gained.

Man, this is really making me sick... Any hope I had about that there still was people with principles, or a small group of non-corrupted humans is nearly being flushed down the toilet. Okay, I admit; the last comment might have been a little exaggerated.

Rationality means doing what's in your best interest. I figured you didn't know.

Supporting free-loaders, by the way, is not in a man's best interests. Conversely, paying for a game that free-loaders are already stealing makes little sense.

This isn't about piracy being good or bad. It NEVER HAS BEEN.


Piracy is bad, sure whatever. I agree. Does this mean that piracy will stop? No.


The problem with people who refuse to acknowledge the obvious truth of a situation is that IT LEADS TO NOTHING.

Pirates don't care about your nice little ideal society where they don't exist. They DO. End of discussion. Nothing, and I mean ABSOLUTELY NOTHING you can do will stop that.


So that's the rub. You can either continue to smash your head against a wall trying to figure out how to fight against them or you can figure out ways to use them to your advantage (speaking from a company's point of view i.e. distribution) or work AROUND them.

The problem isn't piracy, it's bloody fools who think that the only world that should exist is their ideal and blindly keep trying to push it into existence despite its impossibility.

UTOPIA DOES NOT EXIST. Get used to it and figure out how to deal with it.

Give me ONE, just one, practical, now i'm gonna repeat this so you don't make a fool of yourself, PRACTICAL way of eliminating piracy and protecting copyright laws 100%


You just repeatedly fail to grasp the concept of this and it's infuriating. Nobody is saying that copyright laws should not be defended. Nobody is saying that piracy is good. Piracy is not good. You can't stop it though. It's just not possible. There is nothing practical you could possibly do to stop it. Nothing. Not a damn thing.

You can sit there and spout your idealised view on the way things should be as long as you want, the world you come back to will remain the same.

Utopia does not exist nor shall it ever. Does this mean we shouldn't aim for a better society? Not at all, but come on folks... let's not be stupid about it.

edit: America is a pathetic whelp of a country when compared to the civilisations of the past, let's not refer to other's as "Barbarians" shall we? Damn troll.

The US has one of the worst internet infrastructures of the developed world, if you look at the percentage of the population with better-than-dialup connections.

The only real way to control piracy is for the game companies themselves (with plausible deniability, of course) to release "pirated" versions of their game that have horrible, ruinous effects on the system they are installed on (I'm thinking reformat the hard drive after a random period of time). What level of risk would the casual pirate be willing to stand to get that "free demo"? How certain are you of the source of that torrent you're downloading?

Of course, this would be unethical, immoral, illegal, and possibly even fattening, but it would target ONLY pirates and be highly effective.

I don't need a utopia. But seeing that our weak society will not resort to draconian means of enforcement (a crying shame)....

My point was this: if you can't stop piracy, certainly don't support pirates by buying games yourself. Either steal them yourself or don't play at all. Becoming a pirate is the only rational decision to make in this situation.

Elite, you grasp the concept of advertising, yes? Companies pay billions for it every year.

When Napster was getting hammered, guys like Lars Ulrich were really going after it. There were artists that didn't like their copyrights being infringed upon. There were more artists that did. To most of them, the under advertised and lesser known, Napster was a gold mine. They were getting massive sales boosts from it. The statistics were all there. The vast majority of the users were samplers or already owned what they were downloading. Once upon a time they went into music stores and listened to the demo tapes that were available. To them, Napster was an easier method of getting a legitimate, if technically illegal task done. It was also legal before 1997, court rulings are so wonderful.

You can claim that every download is a lost sale, and by such an idiotic standard, they lost fortunes. Unfortunately, for such a standard to be true, they would have needed to actually lose sales when Napster rose in popularity, and then gain them when it was removed. The reverse was true. CD sales were huge when sharing was huge, and flopped substantially when Napster was shut down.

Piracy is advertising, and it appears to be the cheapest form they can buy. All it costs is one sale for every ten thousand or so customers reached. Do the math.

Well, this time I don't see the "support criminals or die" being totally smacked to my face here, but I wasn't thinking about advertising when I wrote what I did.

And, as SlyDrivel responded to Rhelamos, "I don't need a utopia", neither do I. But we are allowed to try to make people see things our way, as long as it doesn't cause any actual harm.

The second last thing I'm going to say for now is reply to: "Piracy is advertising, and it appears to be the cheapest form they can buy. All it costs is one sale for every ten thousand or so customers reached. Do the math."
Companies don't 'buy' piracy, unless it's about some sort of conspiracy. Pirates do it without any orders. The cheapest of that would just simply be someone willingly telling other people about this corporation, that makes all the good stuff.
If more people started "advertising" through piracy, that would be more sales lost from that ten thousand. Small things, such as someone downloading something without legal permissions, can send echoes that get stronger, until they are able to cause real harm.

Try to lead a company yourselves, without all the "evil" copyrights that give you your legal rights for something you have made, and see for yourselves how frustrating and bad-for-business piracy can really be.
Either your company will prosper, or it will fall. Depends on how many people actually buy what you have to sell.

Again this all comes back to the product of which they sell, piracy of their product can not be considered a loss until said pirate purchases some other product of equal value. Like downloading Open office because Microsoft office isn't worth paying $100 for extra features and slicker interface.

You also don't understand that this also helps keep companies in check. If they try to charge people an arm and a leg for crap, people who pirate find out first and spread the word. It is again the company at fault. Just take Stardock/Ironclade for instance. Sins of a Solar Empire was available to pirate day one of its release. I had never head of it until i was searching the top downloaded games on a torrent site.

I downloaded it and found it to be awesome. I loved it so much I bought it. Piracy was in no way a lost sale... because it gained my sale through what amounts to a full game demo. Also I gave them props for the no DRM which made me want to buy it more.

Like I continue to say piracy isn't a social problem, it is just another offshoot of advertising. except you can actually see what you will get if you fork over the cash. this is why companies that make shitty games with BIG NAMES get mad over piracy people play it for longer than what a demo would show, and see it for what it is. Shovelware

I use to know a "pirate" a couple years ago (and I broke off the friendship finally "because" he would pirate). He did steal games he would not have bought, but more often, he saw a great game I was playing he liked, and would steal it.

As a VERY sad side-note: I still know people he knows, and they told me he did finally BUY Bioshock rather than go through all the pains he was having getting the pirated version to work/update. I really hate the way copy protection is going lately, but, it does seem to be a deterent (and annoying as heck, just like car alarms are for us people who don't steal cars).

I completely agree with PurplePaladin. I knew a guy who had copied more than two hundred games, many of them were very good in his opinion, but would he buy them? No! So that you bought Sins of a Solar Empire after all doesn't mean that all, or even most, pirates are good. (I didn't like the way he did most things. Now I'm not his friend anymore.) I don't know if he's ever paid for anything after going down that road.
I know another guy like him, and we never got used to each other, though we would have had time for that for three years.

Also, every human being that I've known, who did even just slightly criminal actions, ended up being rotten to the core. (With a few exeptions, say five of dozens.( Don't ask their names... Some might be already working for any possible local crime syndicate, I'm not sure. What I do know is that a some years back they would have been happy to see me buried. First all they did was just piracy. They were about 13 years old or so. Then the authorities found out and they were often telling stories to schoolteachers. Stories about how the cops and some random people tried to beat them (Translation = they were trying to make them answer for their crimes. Should they have been allowed to actually beat them, they would have liked to kill them for sure.
First piracy, after a year or two, a long list of crimes, such as setting a forest on fire. Gasoline to a lake in the middle of a forest + a light in there = forest-fire. These days I choose my friends carefully. They told many of those stories to our scool's teachers, I always wondered why the teachers did nothing to that. Maybe there was nothing more they could, or were allowed to do. The bad-guys had their occasional therapy-hours, but they just laughed at it.

My past might just bear the reason I try to resist crime, low or severe, as long as I can. Of course I can't come to where-ever you live and try to punch you in the nose. Besides, that'd be quite stupid.

Well, that's all for now. Have a good day.

Everything you have just said is not only erroneous but absolutely ridiculous. Even if a portion of what you say is true it has absolutely no bearing on the topic of discussion in any way shape or form.

Telling stories, false or true is not evidence to prove anyone who pirates doesn't buy anything nor does it prove that people who "slightly break" the law are "rotten to the core".

Okay, maybe I am a little weird or stupid, when I don't see crime as a good thing and when I think that rules exist for a reason.

I admit, I don't think I'd believe my "story" if I were you, but it's true. (What a shock... Criminals usually are criminals! :SURPRISED: ). Of course my whole life hasn't been like that, I only told you the parts I've lived seeing crime happening near the place I live. And of course there have been good people in my life, those were simply the worst I've met so far.

Anyway, you can't make me support pirates like yourself by naming me erraneous and absolutely ridiculous in my face. Pirates = criminals, my "story" was about: pirates and crime. Period.

The guys I told you about were always drinking and smoking (which by the way affects underaged people even worse than it does adults) and that particular guy, who was telling the forest-fire-thing... I don't think he's completely sane, and the "rotten to the core" was a bit of an exaggeration, but still those free-loaders were of little-to-no-good to anyone.

I almost saw a little point in your claims, but that last reply brought me back to the real world. I should actually thank you, tommyth3cat.

lol i don't even know what to make of your ignorance/arrogance about reality, sweeping generalizations are what people call stereotyping. As im sure you never break the speed limit or download a song without paying for it.

to be perfectly honest you sound as if you are younger than 16 and you have little to no experience living in the real world where if you do pay your rent you live on the street and if you want nice things too that's too bad because you aren't payed enough.

Your attitude is that of a sheltered 12 year old.

I never once said pirating isn't illegal. but welcome to the real world where everyone gets ahead by shady acts of illegality. (except for the perfect world you apparently live in)

Elite, I know plenty of people that don't believe in copyright. Not everyone is sensible as you so excellently display, along with a number of other grossly ignorant individuals convinced that piracy will doom the PC market.

I have a fairly extensive knowledge on the history of it and plainly see the flaws, but the logic is very simple and true. Copyrights and patents are government sanctioned monopolies. This ignores the concept of competing products of course, such as one book writer competing with another, but it is true. You create a product, and are given a monopoly on it.

Currently, that monopoly exists far beyond the reasonable use of the products. Over a century for software, think about it. It's a rare program that's in production even five years after release. They are necessary evils, designed to allow market saturation before being released to the public domain. They were not intended to prevent anyone else from ever utilizing a creation, as software being copyrighted beyond it's use by degrees has done.

It's also hard for me to fault the view considering copyright is a continually increasing compass. Even just ten years ago, copyright law was completely different.

The RIAA and MPAA in particular are buying politicians left and right in an attempt to get the taxpayer to pick up their bill. If you go by what the DMCA says, I don't believe in copyright either, and am also a pirate. I have tried out games and bought them. I don't follow any EULA that goes beyond reason. I've downloaded keygens when it was too much effort to find a misplaced case. I apply no CD cracks to games I play regularly, I will circumvent any protection system that causes me problems. I do not pay to be pissed on by some asshole assuming I'm a thief. Since enforcing a post sale contract is a clear violation of existing law, I chalk it up to asshole legislation not being thrown out yet, but if a higher court ever rules in their favor I'm officially a pirate.

I have 46 desktop items that are currently installed, legally owned games. I have twice as many that aren't installed. I have zero desktop items for games I don't own, no copies of either, but the law says I'm a pirate and there are at least four publishers that could try to sue me for not terminating my use of their products after I violated the EULA's. Anyone marginally rational would instead call me a customer.

Now, the advertising. I think I can explain it more clearly, I shall attempt.

The only numbers I've ever seen regarding sales versus disabled pirate copies are here.

First, the raw percentage, 92%. The consensus is that any tard was capable of getting past their DRM system, that it really sucked. The piracy rates are, naturally, higher than normal. Industry claims are around 75-80% most of the time, industry sponsored studies show a third of that. I have no idea what the actual numbers are as a result, the joys of dishonesty. I truly do not believe that the US has a piracy rate on software in general of only 23% as the industry studies say, but it gives me significant pause in trusting even the lower claims they make without studies backing them up.

Some people seem to think that 92% piracy means that if they could eliminate piracy, they would have sold 12 times as many copies. Richochet, a cheap, casual, accessible game that runs on pretty much anything, instead saw 1/1000 for actual results. Now, Ricochet retails for 20 bucks. Lets transport ourselves to magical fairy land where they have no margin and that was all profit. Their real profit per copy is probably closer to a tenth that. For 20 bucks, they advertised to a thousand people. Television advertising on the other hand would cost them about four times that for the same audience numbers going after local cable spots, national gets very pricey.

What if they never played the game in the first place? How many of those sales would have been sales without having gotten hooked on the game in the first place? How many people pirated, and then bought without being thwarted before he ever went digging?

Do you see the problem with screaming at piracy? It's not that it should be legal for people to steal PC games, it's that they don't even know if they are actually acting in their own best interests while they screw us customers left and right. The indications at face value are that piracy gains them vastly more sales than they lose from it, and they have to date, never published a single study that says otherwise. The indications on DRM are that the more drastic ones cost them a hefty chunk of their sales, and still dont work any better at stopping pirates.

The only assumptions I've come up with are that they have done the studies, and they say exactly what I think they say, or they haven't done them and are just shooting blind without rationale. An industry being killed by piracy or just stupidity for the sake of stupidity?

Higher courts have already ruled on it, so you are officially a pirate. Google the bnetd decision, both the circuit and appeal rulings. Clickwrap EULAs are legal, and enforcable. For that matter, follow the case discussed here, although it will be years before we get an actual decision on it. Hell it's been two years already.

As for the advertisement vlaue of piracy - how effective it is is pretty much irrelevant. If a company decides giving away free usage is good advertising, that's their right (look up the Baen Free Library as an example). If they choose to cripple themselves by not doing so, that too is their right. It is NOT the consumer's right to take that decision from them. An industry killing itself overreacting to piracy is still an industry being killed by piracy.

I live in a perfect world? For God's sake I wish I did! You know, if I lived in such a place, I wouldn't have to complain about these things. For all we know you could be a hired killer, who murders people for money and uses the "This is not a perfect world." as an excuse for those actions. I think you're in this just to make piracy legal by shouting your ignorace here.

And, yes, if it matters to you, I'll be 16 at halfway of december. Your speech made you sound a bit of an agist in a couple of points by the way.

Also, if you're interested to know, my "perfect world" consists of good and normal people, but is half infested with scum who would never buy anything except if their lives depended on it. Besides, if it weren't for pirates, the "evil" corporations wouldn't have to rip us honest people off. I know some companies are corrupt, but are you really saying that pirates are the only ones who know the truth and that everybody who disagrees is a fool?

Again you fail to understand the concept of rationality. It can make perfect sense+be rational to pay for a game that others steal, and your inability to comprehend this simple fact shows your lack of comprehension on the subject. I'll give you a really quick example: It's safe to say every mainstream (priced) game at the moment will have been pirated with someone able to then play that game for free. By your reasoning anyone who buys such a game is therefore irrational or makes little sense - that is, pretty well every single person who pays money for a PC game is irrational :p. Again, it's conclusions/statements like this that demonstrate you do not understand what rationality means.

As to the more general issue, DRM is a ridiculous concept introduced by some companies who seem to think it is worthwhile for them to pay for something that will decrease their sales. It doesn't stop piracy, but it does piss off their legal customers, making pirated versions of their game more attractive (you get a better game then a legally bought one, and it's free!) - now, that is an example of a company acting irrationally, if they were aware of that information. Of course since it is fair to assume they would behave rationally+look to profit maximise it can therefore be presumed that they are basing their decisions on flawed information that suggests the reduced levels of piracy and resulting increase in sales from some of the pirate copy users buying the game will outweigh the decreased sales to people who don't like DRM coupled with the cost of the DRM. Given that the benefit is likely near non-existent, it is therefore safe to say that they are losing money by adopting DRM.

My granny was telling me a few years back how the same argument was used when tape recorders and VCR's were introduced.

I recently read a book about Tudor England where the same argument was used about written work on the introduction of the printing press.

I guess if your logic is correct in this day and age your find no one making a living as a writer or a musician etc...

This will be my last entry for a few days since I'm going to Germany to accompany my parents, who wish to see the weekend's Formula-race (Is its name that in English?).

So, the last thing that occurs to me is reminding you of the existence of and trial-versions of most things related to computers and games. (and some other stuff as well). When I was first introduced to RTS-genre games, it was a year back. The demo version of Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars for Xbox 360. I thought it was very good, but when I bought the full version, it was even better. (Just remembered; that friend of mine, who had stolen hundreds of games once made me play a copied game. I had the real version and the pirate one was somehow worse. Maybe damaged or sabotaged before this friend of mine got his hands on it. Besides, most criminals, including pirates, can't be trusted if you ask me.)

or perhaps he burned it too fast.(plenty of pirated GTAIV's looked terrible because of improper burning. as seen in leaked footage)

Oh and I am an "agist" as you call me. Mostly because you have no idea what its like to have to buy things with your own money and have no one care that what was sold to you was a pretty box wrapped around a crap product.

You also may very well have a job and that's the first step into the real world. But until you live on your own with roommates and you have to live paycheck to paycheck, eating roman for lunch and dinner. Then come talk to me about what the real world should be like. Plenty of hardcore pirates don't have good paying jobs and still want to experience the finer things in life. If you think they are scum for that then you need a serious reality check. I break the law, they break the law, everyone does. It's just easier to point your finger at other people whom you know nothing about and say how can he be such a jerk. I guarantee you when you start driving you will break the law daily and that makes you no better than a pirate. At least in your fictional reality of anyone that breaks the law is scum.