Good point. Not arguing this one. I believe the same and most piracy is parasitic in nature.
Secondly, I don't agree with Shamus' estimate of 0.9% increase in sales by stopping piracy. While there will be people who pirate for the sake of pirating or can't afford games or whatever and will never translate into sales, I've got to believe that some pirates like games and could buy them, but don't like spending money. Now, even for those people each download won't become a sale because they used to be able to download a practically infinite amount of games, whereas now their game intake is limited by their income. Even so, if you put the pirates in an environment where it's impossible to pirate and their only source of games is from buying them, I suspect a substantial number of them like games enough that they'll pay. But even if it was 0.9%, I would rather that the developers get that extra bit of money than however many multitude of pirates get to play games for free, because that's a little bit more money that encourages the production of games, whereas the pirates encourage nothing and produce nothing except maybe a culture of entitlement.
I agree somewhat but feel that this forgets older/nostalgic gamers. For certain systems, it's downright impossible to find games for such as the Neo Geo, SNES, or Atari (reason: Gamestop stops taking these and there's only a few game places that are third party to carry these.) Granted, there have been remakes of games but it's still a crap shoot of looking in garage sales to find treasured gems.
That said, I'm not taking everything that Shamus Young's article as a gospel truth. I mainly bring this up to say that game developers are accounting for this and continue to make money to be successful within the gaming industry. I mean honestly, when you're looking at statistics, who's more likely to play games? Who has the income? An engineer who's just had an 18 hour day is more likely to play a more complex game (WoW) versus a 15 year old who only has so much time to get better at a game (Modern Warfare or a JRPG). Of the two, I'd say the 15 yr old is more likely to pirate in some forms since he wants to try a few games. He wouldn't be a consumer otherwise, but he might be a consumer later on when his income increases. I can't say for certain that every pirate learns their lesson. But eventually, some do, [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_189/5757-Pirates-Anonymous] me included. There was a time that I liked playing pirated games. Arcade games I grew up on. Lost games that I couldn't find such as Bloody Wolf. Even a few XBox games because it was there. But nowadays, I don't play as many games, but I can relate to both sides of the argument.
Thirdly, I never said
pirates are the only ones killing the industry
What I said was
they're [...] doing damage to the PC gaming market
Which I don't see how you can argue against. Like I said above, no piracy would translate to more sales, which would help to grow the industry at least a little bit. Also, pirates are the root cause of DRM; no pirates would mean no DRM, which would mean that I and everyone like me would be able to buy more PC games, which would mean happier customers and more money for the industry.
My apologies. I got the quote wrong.
I will have to note that though the root cause of DRM is because of piracy, I doubt that the PC gaming industry would be this happy fun place. There would still be shovelware, freeware, mods, and various diverse effects to alter the PC industry. I think of it this way: with a console, what you see is what you get. With a PC, you can make something entirely brand new from one aspect of a game. Examples: slapping Morrigan in Dragon Age is pretty big [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWgX04MjZz4] or visiting Black Mesa [http://www.blackmesasource.com/] which aren't possible on the console market because of patent laws, trademark laws or whatever. Mainly, this is to show that piracy isn't the only reason that PC gaming seems to have dwindled in comparison to console gaming, nothing more.
My point is that even if pirates only have a small direct negative impact on gaming, that's still worse than no direct negative impact. DRM probably does as much direct damage, if not more, than piracy but that's really not a reason to accept piracy; plus, since pirates are also indirectly responsible for all the damage of DRM that means...well that means I dislike pirates and they should all stop pirating.
IIRC, the main reason Marth was added to SSBB was the fact that he had fans that were quite vocal about Fire Emblem. You can't play Mother 3 unless you get it off of the internet. There's been projects to make SSBB a fairly balanced game with less chain combos for King Dedede, and better moves for Ganon. The going thing about the 90s was the fact that piracy prevented major companies from expanding games into other territories. It wasn't a fact. People are STILL waiting for Mother 3 to come to the US except for the copyright issues of a game that took a lot of music from various areas. And believe me, even though I have the game in a sense, I would go out and buy that + a DS in a heartbeat because I am that much of an Earthbound fanboy.
Anyway, back to the DRM. My main argument is the fact that DRM doesn't do anything but prohibit people future enjoyment of a game. Ubi's tactic of taking away a person's ability to save except on their server, their ability to shut down a game not even factoring in latency, even their decision to market this as one of their better ideas... It all rings as too much stick and not enough carrot. If they had an MMO that they were working on for Assassin's Creed, I may understand some of the DRM they have in store for the public. Sadly, right now, this is too intrusive for what they need, which is a clue as to why people won't want this in large numbers.
I'm not trying to convince you that pirates are good or bad in no way shape or form. I merely believe that piracy is constantly used as a scapegoat for poor executive decisions. 90% piracy isn't really hurting the industry from growing. Rather, it's being used to tell us what we can do with the choices we make in how we spend our money.
