I don't consider every instance of piracy a lost sale. I wouldn't count the guy who bought a copy after designing his own piracy demo plan as a sale that should have happened had he wound up not making the purchase in the end. All I'm saying is there are people who would purchase games but do not because they are available through piracy. This is separate from trying it out first or sticking it to publishers or any of that stuff. These are sales that would have happened had the game not been cracked at distributed. Call them lost sales if you like, but while not every instance of piracy is a lost sale, there are sales that get lost in the mix. Without even doing anything like calculating lost sales, developers are harmed because their final sales numbers are not as high as they would have been and they rely on those numbers. You're right that we can't put a number to them. I'm not saying devs should find some way to account for them on top of actual sales figures, but we have to admit that this happens simply based on our consuming like locusts nature as gamers.phoenix352 said:when i say calculations i mean the sales figures.SecondPrize said:Are you kidding? I don't have calculations. I'm talking about sales figures. Your pirate who goes on to buy the game adds 1 to the total sales figure. He is accounted for. I'm not sure where you came up with the idea that my 'calculations' would not account for this. My pirate who would have purchased the game if not for piracy does not add 1 to the sales figure. We agreed that developers use these sales figures in their relations with publishers. Therefore, the person who pirates the game when he would have purchased it instead is doing harm to the developer in not adding to the sales figure. He would have purchased it. He did not because piracy exists. The developer has a weaker position in their next negotiation because of this person.phoenix352 said:i made my argument about that in my original post~SecondPrize said:You would have to make a case for it to be closed.phoenix352 said:SecondPrize said:You don't think devs use sales figures when negotiating contracts with publishers? You don't think in-house devs get more resources based on sales figures? You don't think there's one person who would have bought a game they pirated if they couldn't pirate it?phoenix352 said:now the most used argument against piracy is "it hurts the developer" this is just false information.
piracy whole heartily helps the dev by making the game and the dev a household name.
the fact that people play it use the product for free is just a bit of a downside emotionally not financially since non of those were lost sales or lost value, NON OF THEM.
Do i think they use sales figures? yes i do.
they use the actual game sales aka people who bought retail\ digital.
do i think they include theoretical sales? hell no.
pirated copy's are not lost sales, case closed.
you cant make business decisions from vague estimates and theoretical sales.
do i personally think out of those people who pirate some one would have bought a copy if he didn't have the option?
of curse some would , just like out of the people who pirate there are those who still buy copies afterwards.
those are just maybes and they work both ways.
you should not be making contracts using estimated numbers based on maybes.
if that's how the industry does business then they have only themselves to blame for it , piracy is still not a cause.
You yourself admitted that some pirates would have purchased a copy if piracy was unavailable. THERE'S YOUR LOST SALE RIGHT THERE. Not theoretical, an actual 1 to add to the list of sales.
yeah i admitted that i THINK there would be some who would pay for that game.
but you cant count sales based on THOUGHT , the only way for you to count that as a lost sale would be if you had the knowledge that some of those people would 100% buy that game if the piracy option was not available but you cant know that and that's the whole point. there's no way to get accurate numbers on any of this meaning you count lost sales on theoretical information.
on that note what do you then say to a pirate that bought that same game he pirated later ?
based on your calculations that's still a "lost sale" in the sales figures even if the pirate got it legit.
the publisher only sees that a new copy was sold but doesn't see less pirated copy's.
and then just claims like the rest that even tho sales were high piracy " crippled" half of it or some other nonsense like that.
its inherently a flawed system and should not be used.
my pirate as i stated is indeed counted as a sales figure BUT he also pirated the game beforehand meaning he is also a "lost sale" based on your rules.
so how can 1 person then be both a sale figure and a lost sale figure?
that's the pickle with that one.
i agree that the person who would have bought a copy if the option of piracy wasn't available would do harm to the dev but again you don't know that he would have.
there is no way to determine that information.
saying that he harms the dev is hypothetical because you need to assume that he otherwise would of bought it.
meaning anyone that pirates is completely irrelevant to any sales figures period.
if a developer chooses to calculate lost sales from piracy along side the actual sales figures he ends up basing it on estimates and nothing else so there can be no argument made that piracy affected his negotiations.
because in our current reality you cant prove that a pirate would buy that game if piracy wasn't a thing.
so the end figures are just lies.
that's the whole overarching point its simply a fact that piracy does no harm.
Now we could argue that piracy does no net harm because you can eliminate the people who were never going to buy a game and compare sales gained because of word of mouth or do-it-yourself demoing resulting in a sale and those lost by people who would have purchased if they couldn't pirate, but we don't really have those numbers so it'll be speculation. Again, I'm just saying if there is one person who would have purchased a title and doesn't, the absence of his presence in sales figures does do a bit of damage.
The funny thing is, while I won't call for it in these forums, I won't be upset when a crack of the 'real' game dev tycoon comes out because this stinks of a PR stunt which, while brilliant, is more than a little hypocritical to me because as far as I can tell these two guys are straight ripping off kairosoft and their Game Dev Story.