Xelloss said:
Yes, outside of making someone who worked on something rightfully angry that his work is being stolen - Piracy from those who would assuredly not have bought the product has no effect on sales, and no bearing in business decisions. Irritating customers, and paying exhorbitant sums to defeat something that doesnt cost you money is bad business.
Yes, clearly the majority of piracy is not an actual lost sale - but many are. Think of the people you know who have pirated games. Do they pay for some games that are harder to pirate, like WoW? Do they buy console games? While granted, most pirates games wouldn't have been purchased anyway, if piracy were eliminated, it would result in higher sales. Even if it isn't most of them, there are still SOME that would buy.
Many , especially the purveyors of anti-piracy tech like to put forth every illegal download as a lost sale. Now, when talking about people in the USA Western Europe, especially people in demographics that do have a degree of disposable income, this has some weight. Amongst some groups, there is certainly a high percentage of folk who may in fact have bought the game had they not been able to pirate it so easily.... however the numbers of these people are far far lower than, say, the number of Africans eastern Eurasians etc who live in areas where their currency has so little purchasing power in terms of USD$ that the major publishers do not even make serious attempts to serve the market.
Agreed - clearly not every pirated game is a lost sale. But when you take a came like Assassins Creed, where 17x the pirated copies were DLed than the real game - it seems to have a very real impact on sales sometimes.
At the very least, when trying to make a comparison between number of people who pirate and number of people who buy in either an ethical or a business argument, the numbers used should only include ones relative to the debate. Blaming the "PC community" , as in - the US and maybe Western European PC community for overwhelming piracy is silly if the overwhelming majority of actual pirates are in Russia, or China etc. Ethically, its different groups of people - and businesswise you are assured beyond reasonable debate that the folk overseas were a lost sale from the get go, and no amount of anti-piracy invesment is likely to glean money from them.
Bear in mind, this is only true during the short-term. If piracy were squashed, these countries would eventually take steps to obtain the software legally, be it by reduced prices and alternate methods of acquiring it. In many countries it is so easy/penalty free to pirate, that no effort is made even if the economy could support valid sales. And to a large extent, this includes our own country - plenty of piracy goes on in our borders. Heck, chances are th elisted statistics don't even include a lot of these other countries. How many people in lands with valueless currency and poor economies do a large number of people have access to connection speeds that allow them to just download several GB files?
This is actually the reason that Microsoft tuned down the anti-piracy lawsuits and rhetoric a good bit a few years back (at least in regards to targeting the individual home consumer). They came to find that this scenario was the case, and their efforts turned to international enforcement of copyright, shuttering true bootleg schemes ( Genuine Windows campaing) etc, and efforts of that nature. Because after the numbers were crunched and the data analyzed, the vast majority of people in the USA were using, or intending to use legit software. The small minority of hobbyists who reinstalled all the time and had many home machines , and the smaller minority of dedicated pirates who never paid for anything were an eyesore, but no threat to their business model.
Well yes, in the case of an OS, the overwhelming majority of people in the US use valid copies - however MS isn't a good example. MS's licensing requires that major PC manufacterers buy a license of their OS for every PC they sell - whether it ships with Windows or not. Since a handful of major brands comprise nearly all the PC sales in the US, Microsoft is, at most, worried about piracy from custom built PCs. A market, sure.. but nothing compared to the likes of Sony+Compaq+Hp+Dell+Toshiba+Acer(and on and on).
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