| .jayderyu said: Ahh so the moral, legal debates on pirating has begun. Always seem to crop up in these discussions. It's unfortunate.
On one side you have the anti pirating that claim the following. Developers and publishers (music, software...) lose out on money. It is illegal and probably more. Given oppertunity everyone will pirate. On the other side you also have a variety. Fight the man, poor people can play when other wise they can't.
I only have three points to comment on. One, the PC is the biggest, most open and highly easiest cracked/hacked VG machine out there. Oddly developers still find it profitable. Two, there is a portion of people who pirated wouldn't have bought the game anyway. This percentage is an unknown factor. Finally we can extrapolate pirating sales patterns through actuall evidence while we would need actuall studies to prove how many of those who pirated would have bought the game if they couldn't pirate. publishers(any industry) will NEVER pay for this study, they have had over 10 years to do so.
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There are several reasons why PC gaming continues in spite of being so easy to pirate games ...
Most of the gamers who are the most dedicated to online gaming play their games on the PC. It has been this way for a very long time, and it has been difficult for a long time to steal a PC game and still play it online on official servers.
PC games have been far better at generating alternative revenue streams. The MMO subscription has become the largest single stream of income, but expansion packs and mods have been providing developers with additional money for quite a long time (and several of the largest PC developers also licence their engines or tools to other developers which increases their revenues).
There is far less overhead for PC developers ... For quite a while (small to large) PC developers have been able to sell their games as direct downloads on their websites (or through inexpensive services) which drastically cuts overhead; if you don't have to pay for a physical copy to be manufactured, there is only a small (or no) retailer cut, and there are no platform licencing fees a publisher/developer can take home 90% or more of the sale price of a game.
A lot of PC games (like the Civilization games or the Sid Myers games) have stayed fairly close to their roots and they have not seen the massive rise in development costs that plague certain genres.
In my opinion, one of the most important reason piracy hasn't killed the PC market is that most (big budget) PC games are ported to a console which (dramatically) increases their game sales.
To put out an example of how this all works together lets look at Valve ... Valve creates the Source Engine and Steam which are heavily used by other developers and create massive revenues after the fact, they see very low overhead from selling their games and mods through steam and are still able to sell these games for the same price as retail, they create and sell a variety of expansions and mods for their most popular series Half-Life and they have ported this game to many consoles for excellent sales. At the same time Steam helps limit piracy from "uneducated" consumers, and also prevents people from stealing a game if they want to play it online ...
