93-95% PC piracy

[Rattlehead]

Originally Posted by Madfish

There is no piracy. You can't steal bytes, you copy them. No one is missing them. And the sales, in 95% of the cases, wouldn't have happened if they had to buy it.

It is a missed sale. What's missing is the revenue generated from legitimate purchases. Game development costs money; a whole lot of money. Programmers, level designers, 3D animators, writers, marketers, distributors etc. need to get paid for the work they've done on the product. They're doing a job, just like you and I.
Essentially, piracy is screwing these guys over, since a missed sale is a lost opportunity to make money on that sale.

John Carmack stated more than once how he felt slapped in the face by the PC community for Doom 3. It was a title that cost a fortune to make, and a hell of a lot of time to develop. The pathetic sales of Doom 3 ensured that id Software migrated to the consoles where piracy is a lot less rife. Now we have to put up with ports like RAGE.
That he's a millionaire is not the point.

I'd also like to know how you can state that 95% of sales would not have happened if people had to buy a game legally. Where is your source? You cannot accuse Guillemot of pulling stats out of his arse and then do the same thing.
Call of Duty 4 had 400,000 legitimate purchases on the PC platform, but had 4.1 million illegal downloads. Are you seriously suggesting that 4 million people would not have bought the game if they could not score it for free?

Originally Posted by Madfish

There are also examples where pirace actually helped games. A games success is NOT just about money.

True, piracy in a sense can help a small indie title get exposure, but I've yet to see a case where piracy helps a widely marketed, heavily promoted AAA title in any way.
And frankly, a game's success is heavily dependent on the revenue it generates. If Clod had sold ten times the figure it did, it would justify a larger development team, a bigger budget for marketing and promotion and it would result an altogether slicker, more polished package.

Conversely, poor sales leads to the publisher getting skittish about funding the developer, or worried about putting that game on a platform like the PC again.


Guys, you can try and justify piracy in any way you like, but at the end of the day, people pirate stuff because they're getting something for nothing. It's about greed and a false sense of entitlement.

Piracy is hurting PC gaming and it's causing us to have to put up with bullshit DRM, which would not exist if piracy didn't exist. DRM exists only because of piracy.
The hilarity of it all is that pirates justify piracy because of DRM, when it's because them that DRM exists in the first place.