Really good opinion piece on PC piracy

[Chemical]

Developers will ALWAYS have an excuse for bad sales. 3rd party games cant sell on the Wii, Nintendo's games are too hard to compete with, LAIR needs a review guide to properly play it, PSP cant sell software, PC market is dying etc. etc. etc. Piracy is just a very good scapegoat but once you start thinking logically and not using "morals" you will realize that piracy doesnt have much of an effect on gaming industry.

If anything developers should bag on Gamestop with its sell used games policy which results in huge profits for gamestop and zero revenue for developers. But we are talking about PC market so I am going to stay on topic. Have any of you tried to buy a one or two year old game that was not that popular in store? Due to Gamestop allocating literally a shelf and a half to PC games, all PC games get removed very quickly. I am currently downloading several games and all of them are at least 4 years old simply because I cant find these games in any gamestop store and buying them from somebody else on ebay doesnt help developers at all.

So far every argument I have seen against piracy was based on "ethics" and "morals" while every logical study that has been accomplished showed that piracy has a minor effect on the industry. I am currently trying to find a chart that showed just how many billions of dollars were spent on used games and almost every used game sale is a lost sale for a developers. Due to used games Gamestop stops holding new versions of the games quite quickly and whenever you try to buy a game the salesperson will always tell you to buy the used version.

In conclusion, I could care less about bad developers not getting sales due to piracy, I could care less about morals I only care about legal consequences which will not happen unless you are the one hosting pirate websites but even they are not affected and developers should really think about dealing with Gamestop, and the easiest way is to move to Steam or something like that.