| mirgro said: Yes yes it was a free download (I didn't have the good internet connection I had back then to get it and didn't wanna shell out 30 more bucks fr prophecy gold. However my main point is that EA put them out of business, not piracy, as you seem to be blaming it a lot. You're asking me to prove piracy's effect with statistics, but make claims like this unfounded? They put out quality games, and died - if their publisher ruined them, it wasn't because they stopped putting out good games. You're just assuming that piracy can't have effected sales enough to kill them, but it doesn't take a lot when your margins are slim. I also don't think companies know what consumers want since they keep adding DRM or features which no one wants, especially on the PC, I mea come on, no dedicated servers? Also keep in mind Valve and Blizzard were small too one day, as was id (though their games have declined a lot recently, I think). Then the people who dont get a game catering to them wait another year or two for another amazing game instead of settling for subpar games. They can play the one that came out previously. Notice how many successful PC franchises have installments that are years apart from each other. You know what keeps them afloat? Community content. The fact that the community comes in and makes maps, mods, whatever for the game all the way until the next intallment is released, free of charge. Yes, and other than a few, companies that wait years and years between releases end up in financial trouble, and shut down. As for the MW2 bullshit, face it they are NOT pirates. If anything MW2 is hacker and pirate HEAVEN. It has been very well known since forever you can crack Steam games easily so the whole IWNet thing was never meant to stop pirates to begin with. Also notice how pirates lpay on the official IWNET servers now too. They are complaning because it's a subpar PC game product. As I stated above, please stop using piracy as a scapegoat, because it's just that, a scapegoat. My bad. Why on earth would I consider pirates a threat when clearly they are... um.. easily cracking games at will. Whoops, that shouldn't effect anything, then. Piracy on consoles is a lot less common because console hardware is a lot less common than PC hardware out there. Also Sweden isn't made ut of money, I mean it is but they have huge tax rates, reducing the person's personal expenditures by a whole lot (they do get a lot back though so it's cool). lso believe it or not in plaaces liek Eastern Europe you CAN build a PC that plays Crysis cheaply, and if it can do that then it can play the latest and greatest easily. My cousins have just a PC which their father made for work. They pirate every single game, and if there's no torrent for it they just don't play the game since they do't ave the money to buy it. Ultimately there are a lot more people out there who have a PC for work and they do not have the money for entertainment, so whether they pirate or not, would have absolutely no effect on the gaming world. It depends on what people consider having money for games. Growing up, I didn't have much money, so a new game was rare. maybe one every year or more. But since I didn't get anything illegally, I saved until I could buy one. it wasn't easy, but it was out of necessity. Once people are used to pirating, they usually won't bother trying to buy games. So maybe a lot of people can't afford many games, but a lot could afford a few, and pay for none, ever. And when everyone else gets everything for free, why not you too? So people in those areas who could afford it, don't bother. If you want to prove to me piracy is a huge problem, bring out some piracy statistics about country regions, piracy expanding over the years (it has been around since FOREVER and the industry has only grown, how does that work if piracy is destroying it?), as well as jus overall piracy vs actual sales figures. Also don't use mediocre games statistics, give me the stats for starcraft, warcraft, or half-life (you can do TF2, diablo, or UT/Quake as well if you want to). Once you bring me concrete statistics from unbiased sources (a developer saying they get pirated, as I aleady stated, is just a scapegoat excuse as to why their sucky game isn't selling). Piracy statistics are largely anecdotal. The idea of piracy is doing something illegal, there's not going to be a good way to track it accurately. There's also so many different ways to get illegal games, to tally them would be nearly impossible. And why shouldn't mediocre games count? Does stealing become less illegal for lower quality items? Stealing a KIA should be legal but not a BMW? There's no such thing as an unbiased source on this topic, but guess what? Companies swinging at phantoms drain their time and resources and only hurt them. developers have no benefit of attacking someone who doesn't financially harm them. Most developers can list estimated piracy stats that damage their bottom line. The issue is, you've decided that the industry analysts and developers are all lying, and they some magic proof needs to be produced out of thin air. No, we don't have 24/7 surveillace of every PC user in the world to see who's downloading games illegally. But you need to open your eyes. Log onto any alternate server available for ANY games. Wait until the game's latest patch comes out. And then watch as the server is fragmented into 2 groups - a small group that patches early because they have a real copy... and the masses that need to wait for the patch to get cracked too. I think it's funny how everyone who actually has any stake, knowledge, or role in the industry fully accepts the effects of piracy, and yet those in a community of PC gamers that they KNOW pirate games can still try to make a defense that it's not having a financial impact.
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