If console piracy and PC piracy have reached equivalence, what reason do developers have for flocking to the consoles? All just an illusion? I have no numbers to back up my point, and I lack the familiarity with the Console Piracy environment that I have with the PC Piracy environment. All I have to go on in this case is a general understanding that console piracy is not nearly as widespread: yes, for the dedicated, they can do what they want (the homebrew channel looks kind of awesome, btw), but it has not reached the level of Joe Schmoe. Will it get there? Very well could. Just don't think it is right now.The_root_of_all_evil said:
I wouldn't call this a fallacy as much as a place where the two examples are not exactly parallel. It's worth clarification: when I steal a physical object from its rightful owner, I am causing at least one bad thing, and potentially two. The "at least" is the taking of something from someone else; if they are uninsured, they have just lost that car; if it is insured, I have taken from their insurance company, AND them, because their rates will go up. The "potentially" is the loss of an additional sale to the owner/maker of the car; but, only if I were someone who would've bought a car if it weren't for the theft.Asehujiko said:
Now, in the internet world, the first half of the analogy doesn't quite fit; I have not denied access to the original purchaser, though, like insurance, if my theft results in increased costs for the manufacturer (paying creeps like SecuROM for snakeoil), the legal purchaser suffers due to increased cost of purchase of future goods. The "potentially" part is that one that we should really care about: if I, the thief, would've made a purchase without easy access to the stolen variety, the manufacturer has lost a sale.
To bring this back round to the current argument, from the "companies are stupid" perspective, the end consumer SHOULD NOT have to pay for the increased cost of integrating things like SecuROM, because A. We know that they don't work, and B. We know that they actually worsen the experience for paying customers, the people the producer/manufacturer should actually care about (as opposed to appeasing their ignorant shareholders, which I know, is their job, but there is more than one way to pander to ignorance).
Finally, to the real point: as John Galt and ErinHoffman have been discussing, the thing that matters is the lost sales for the industry, and whatever impact that has. This is extremely difficult to quantify, and the Cevat position that "every copy made is a sale lost" is stupefyingly ignorant. On the other hand, the pro-piracy position that "the current environment doesn't cost the developers any sales at all" is similarly dumb. The real world exists somewhere in between, and that's the debate worth having.
I don't feel that I'm being ridiculous. I may be being somewhat hyperbolic, but when estimating (with no real numbers to go off of), it is difficult not to seem so. What you may be ignoring is just how many PCs there are in the world. [a href=http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSL2324525420080623?feedType=RSS&feedName=technologyNews]Gartner says >1 Billion.[/a] Given that, I think my 1% figure is actually overly generous. Crysis is still well known for NOT being optimized to run on lower end hardware (as opposed to the Source engine, which is known for being very good at scaling down), and that's fine. Crysis was designed to be the most awesomest thing at the time that it came out. Why would I pay 60 bucks at launch for a game that I know will only run at a 1/4 of its intended glory on my sad little X800 Pro? I did not pirate it. I simply didn't buy it. Because while I am a member of the PC FPS Consumer segment, I am outside the segment that Crytek chose to target. I'm not even a lost sale! They never wanted me!Unknower said:
