FloppY_ wrote:
Like I said earlier... this isn't a problem developers can run away from, if they move to consoles, so will pirates...
From the article:
Your noble justifications are not fucking cutting it anymore. In my last rant about piracy, one person said they pirated "out of necessity" and seemed to get some people agreeing with him. Really? Necessity? It is necessary that you play a videogame? Since when was a luxury item like a videogame a necessity, to the point where you get to steal it? A fucking bit of bread for a dirt-poor family is a necessity, son. Not your stupid videogame.
This assumes that people who pirate games would have otherwise bought them if they weren't available
to pirate. I'm not going to say that piracy has never costed game developers sales, since that would be ignorant, but I'm not really going out on a limb when I say that it's not nearly as much as some people would have you believe.
I freely admit to downloading free copies of games, but this was when I was a kid and before I actually had the kind of cash I needed to buy the games I wanted to play. Under these circumstances, I wasn't robbing anybody because the chances of selling me physical copies of games I downloaded were otherwise 0%.
In the end, what happened was that I was exposed to a wider world of video games from series, developers and genres that I would have otherwise never touched. It was these games that I played voraciously and talked about with my online buddies, many of whom bought them before I had a steady income of my own to flush out all the copied games in my library with legit physical or Steam copies.
Granted, recovery like that requires a bit of personal integrity, but in my case piracy did the industry an infinitesimal favor. Stacked on top of similar stories, I don't think it's nearly as bad as analysts would have us think. On the other hand, and at the risk of completely invalidating my Your thoughts, insights, and musings on this matter intrigue me, I'm willing to guess that with average consumer honesty, it actually
does more harm than good.