Excecs like to baaw about "potential sales", except when a PC game breaks sales records, and then there's the fact PC gaming profits have RISEN over the past 2 years, but then when a game doesn't sell as well as they think it should because it's a bad game, the DRM is intrusive, Digital distribution software requirements (ORIGIN), and generally treating paying customers like thieves, they're back to "PIRACY KILLING US OOOHHH THE POOR SHAREHOLDERS ARE SAD AND BOBBY KOTICK CANT GET HIS GOLD ENEMA THIS WEEK".
For all the hot air about piracy and used games, people in the industry are remarkably prone to telling people to "fuck off if you don't like it", as though the industry doesn't mind losing a customer anywhere near as much as they mind not being able to force people to give them money.
We're supposed to have sympathy for them too, even though by their own arguments they deserve to die off. Piracy and used games are killing the market, but the response to any legitimate complaint is to stop buying games if we don't like it. If people act rationally and refuse to throw the baby out with the bathwater and download a game or buy used, they're killing them. What would they rather have gamers do? "Talk with our wallets" and not play the games at all, and certainly don't buy them. Which would also kill the industry, but that's somehow the more moral solution. Either way the industry is basically daring gamers to kill it.
Most people are talking with their wallets, which is why the market is shrinking. And what message does the industry take from that? That they should do something different? Nope. The message is that they should simply move to consoles due to a shrinking market they surely can't be responsible for (consles also have rampant piracy problems as well). So even when gamers do follow the "moral" way, nothing changes. So the decision is between "No Games, Dead Industry" and "Used/Pirated Games, Dead Industry".
In other words, if the industry isn't going to get the message no matter what we do and is going to die either way, why should we care? Should gamers feel sorry for Ken Levine not getting paid for a good game? Nope. The industry doesn't care about screwomg us over in the name of unproven piracy damages and losses to a used market, so I don't see why we should care if a few decent developers get crushed in the name of taking down an industry that could not possibly care less about doing proper business with us.
In the end, I don?t think piracy magically exists on its own as a manifestation of mankind's nature or any such tripe. I think it's largely created by a failure to adequately meet demand. If anything, piracy indicates a continued interest in games. That's the real problem to tackle, but again people seem more interested in using copy protection or DRM to try and force the markets to do things their way, even though everyone will admit that it?s only a matter of time before any DRM or CP is cracked and useless. You can ***** all you want about used games, or cracked games to remove online leashes (cry me a river, by the way), or you can shut up and actually deal with the market situations. It's called business. Did no one go over this in those University of Phoenix Online classes from which the industry?s CEOs got their degrees?
