Flac00 said:
Your skirting around the issue there though. Its not an issue of quality or anything like that. Pirating is stealing, no matter how shit the product is or how overpriced it is, it should still not be pirated. Stealing is wrong, both morally and legally, there fore you should not steal.
Think about it this way: Twinkies taste like shit, and probably cost too much money in my opinion. However, if I want a twinkie, I buy it, I don't shoplift. Its a simple as that. Sure, developers do make money selling games on the PC, but many are less willing to do so when they see people walking off with their product for free. They don't always do this for financial reasons, but also for moral reasons (at least in their own minds).
I'd almost agree..if not that recently companies started to using the piracy as excuse for poor sales. They pretty much count every pirated copy as a copy that otherwise would be bought which is not really the case, or at least there is no proof behind that statement.
I dare to say in quite many cases those two, unrelated events.
The fact i don't buy any given game is not because I don't want to buy games or i want to pirate them I don't buy them because I do not consider them worth the money. I may buy them later, when They are discounted or may completely ignore them (like every sports game and majority of shooters). It doesn't mean I pirate them.
Same time there is group of people that just wouldn't buy the game anyway. They pirate, play it for 20 minutes, delete it because They don't like it. They want to play as many games as humanly possible without really giving a damn about them. Back in the days we had proper demo/shareware versions for it, now it's often not the case. Those people probably wouldn't spend 50$ for 20 minutes of gameplay.
Next is a group of people that pirate a game and actually buy it later if They like it. They still count in "game downloaded illegally" table and are counted twice in the statistics. Yes. They pirate at first which is bad, but in the end They aren't reason for low sales either.
Finally is the group that does pirate because They don't want to pay for games. Those are the bad guys that do hurt industry and if piracy wasn't so easy They probably would buy games. Not all of the games They do pirate, but some at least.
Problem with statistic is that They are easy to manipulate. Whole first year of Sociology on my Uni was about that. When You take a number say - 15 million of copies downloaded from torrents You can't really determine in any way how many of those people bought the game afterwards, how many never bought it, how many of them re-downloaded it 2 or more times, how many did it but never really played the game, how many of those were back-ups or people who downloaded the pirated version despite having original one due to technical reasons.
Yes, majority will be pirating for sake of not paying, but it's still not accurate enough to really calculate effect on market.
The scary truth is some people might not have bought the game at all if They wouldn't try it before illegally, some indie studios even release a "bugged" versions of Their games on torrent sites to gain recognition.
The bottom line is : sometimes low sales just means that the game was deemed not worthy the expense and not because everyone pirated it.