Can piracy be a good thing?

[Bitmap Frogs]

nine0nine said:

piracy isnt the big issue that the industry makes it out to be, it can definetly be a problem though.

Alot of developers have made statements inthe past that they dont worry about piracy and they themselves grew up pirating games, at the end o the day even with massive amounts of Wii and Ds piracy happening, they are still making nintendo and 3rd partys ALOT of money, the same for the PS1/2 inthe past, and so on.

There is a train of thought that shops selling second hand games is actually worse for the industry than piracy.
Someone who wants to buy a game will go into a shop and buy the s/h copy to save a few $, this isnt an additional sale and the only person that profits is the retailer. The average person downloading a game and playing it for a few hours before getting bored would have never entered the shop in the first place.

 

The hell it isn't. The first industry that got hit was music and while the big recording labels that everyone likes to mention when justifying piracy took a hit but still keep chugging along, independent labels who took their time and risked money producing albums for promising yet relatively unknown artists have died by the dozens.

Niche genres that were barely holding have been killed by piracy. Token example: opera - labels used to assemble orchestras and singers in studios to record operas, that fed instrument players, it fed the singers, it fed the studio workers, etc. This was barely profitable but it was profitable and there was a market for it. Then piracy came and *poof* that economic activity is now gone. Mind you, the ph4t EMI execs are still raking in massive wages managing their back catalogue but all those small guys who made a living can not anymore.

But don't worry and keep pretending piracy is fair and it doesn't hurt anyone. We all know those kind of statements exist only because piracy benefits you so arguing it's validity validates your behaviour.

To be honest, piracy would not be a problem if people used it just to expand their consumption of cultural products. In other words, if you used to spend 100$ in albums before and now on top of downloading dozens of cd's you still bought 100$ worth of music per year it wouldn't be a problem. The real issue is that people at large have reduced their spending to 0 (or close to) and pirate everything.