Can piracy be a good thing?

[Final-Fan]

nitekrawler1285 said:

Kantor said:

nitekrawler1285 said:
I'm just curious to how places like Gamefly and Blockbuster can charge you and give away someone's intellectual property but doing so for free is bad. If pirating is bad renting is worse. Developers still "lose" tons of money to no one buying games at least pirates aren't trying to call what they do a legitimate business.

If retail games were no more than $5 to $10 a pop people wouldn't feel the need to pirate(as much). Just like the digital song download prices are good at about .99 to 1.99 per song. If game makers keep overshooting consumer demands with such high end prices for what often amount to low end products then i can't say i blame people for pirating.

If games were $5 to $10 a pop, there would be no gaming industry because everybody in the industry would be BANKRUPT.

Developers put a lot of time and money into games. Quite often, they are good games. But even if they aren't, that means you can take them for free? You can take somebody else's hard work and give it out free of charge? How could anybody consider that ethical?

In that way, say a few lawnmowers are bad. Does that give you the right to go into Wal-mart, steal a whole bunch of lawn mowers are give them out free? No.

Renting is entirely different. That would be paying for the lawnmowers and letting people borrow them for a little money.

Besides, they'll be able to pirate the PS3 eventually, but by then the PS5 will be out so nobody will care anymore.

Maybe if they want to survive as an industry they will pull a nintendo and drastically reduce the barriers to consumption of thier product(namely price now that the big N has fixed accessibility and education requirements for consumers).

I didn't say it was ethical, that's your issue.  Abortions are murder(I'm pro-choice btw) and murder is not ethical but that doesn't stop people from doing it now does it. Different people have different standards of ethics.

No but if i bought one lawn mower and let the everybody rent it that would "hurt" the future sales of the creator of the lawn mower. Why pay full price for something when you can just rent it as needed.  Or say i decided to let everyone use it for free still the same issue for the creators of the lawn mower.

Oh man.  I disagree with twesterm on many things when it comes to anti-piracy measures and the amount of cracking down on piracy that is justified ... but the amount of stupid and ridiculously wrong things being said in this thread makes me a lot more sympathetic to him if he has to deal with this often. 

1.  "If pirating is bad renting is worse."  No.  No no no no no no no.  First off, rental places BUY THE GAME so that's still more copies sold than are sold to pirates.  Secondly, with some exceptions for very short games (hi, Heavenly Sword), most people rent and then buy the game if they really like it.  Well, at least that's how it USED to go; rentals are a lot more expensive than they used to be where I am.  As for Gamefly, again, every copy at someone's house was BOUGHT, by Gamefly if not the customer. 

2.  "If they would just lower the prices then people wouldn't pirate as much."  Well, actually, I don't think that lowered prices are the answer here, at least in most countries.  In some places prices are truly ridiculous, but here in the USA that is not the case.  Anyone who has pirated a game and played it over a period of more than a week should go out and buy it or STFU about pirating just so he doesn't get ripped off for a bad game. 

3.  So you agree that abortion is murder, and yet you are in favor of mass murder in the form of abortion?!  You are a wretched human being indeed.  I can understand why you do put no value on human PROPERTY if you put no value on human LIFE.