Yes like most things the media does this is a sensationalist article. But you guys are also both wrong. 

Yes, every pirated game does not equal a sale but you also cannot generalize and say does pirating would never have paid for the game. I feel its obvious. The industry stands to make at least 10% more yearly than they are right now without piracy. 

But it'a not a good report because all it does is assume imaginary numbers. And overblows pirated numbers for their own purposes. 

That's why I didn't speak in absolutes.  There's no proof either way.  Conclusions cannot be drawn, because we simply lack the data to make them.

I actually say that in the article but I guess no one bothered to actually read it fully haha.

What's your proof for that? Because it aligns with other independant report. Plus the company that estimated the revenue figure is very much respected for their prior reports. 

You can't just say they're making it up without actually looking into it more. 

But yeh, they are of course sensationalised a bit for the sake of the report. As other research firms estimate that as little as 5% of that revenue would actually go to the video game companies. So only 5% is the actual theoretical loss out of that total amount. $74b is just how much the overall cost is based on how much is pirated. 

Their lucky that the cost of all the games pirated is not more than the revenue made by the whole video game industry. Pirating games is so easy a baby could do it.

Although the acts are certainly related, walking into a movie for free is not equivalent to piracy. In the case of the movie theater, what I'm taking is essentially a service for a single use rather than the digital form of a paid product for unlimited use at my personal convenience. The benefits of the movie theater are entirely temporary (assuming you don't film the theater screen), whereas actually pirating the movie is permanent.

So what you're saying is piracy is even more harmful?

Is that a real question? You're asking if permanently taking something is more harmful than temporarily taking part in it? Even then, you can't say exactly how harmful one is compared to the other. Once again, no proof of any kind. This is largely a case of semantics at this point.

I'd buy pirated ps4 games if I could to be honest. I've always bought the pirate versions of my console games and I did it with no guilt. When you have a choice between 2 dollars or 70 for each game there really is no brainer (I'd probably have 2-3 games if there was no pirate option). Not to mention that everyone here buy pirated things from manga, books, movies to any kind of software and when I say everyone I mean it.

Anyway I guess that prices for new games here can't be any cheaper because of freight, taxes and whatnot but even now I only buy games when I or some of my family/friends are in USA.