Another Look At Piracy

[vlad321]

Jereel Hunter said:

vlad321 said:

Squilliam said:
Yup. The numbers of games bought vs downloaded is quite a difference. It does pay to be sensible and buy games you know you'll play more than once rather than buying 20-30 games a year and not finish many and $600 U.S pays for a hell of a lot of hardware upgrades.

I know many people who pirate that support this logic. They have 600+GB of pirated games they have never played. I know someone with over 200 burnt Xbox 360 games. How many games did publishers really lose out on? About 5 or 6.

The biggest weapon against piracy is a timely Steam sale. A lot of my pirate friends are very value concious. If they can get a game for $20 they will buy it and take advantage of the convenience of Steam rather than download it.

Basically this. I spent $80 for D2 LoD, and I spent hundreds of hours on it, many many hundreds. $70 for Starcraft and Warcraft 2 and 3 and I spent hundreds of hours out of them. UT2004 set me back only $50.Don't even get me started on the value of Civ 4.

FInally, while I have spent around $750 on WoW, I have 250 days of /played. That's 6,000 hours.

Why should I pay $60 for MW2 which is a re-tread of a game, and is utter shit when it comes to features? Same goes for jsut about any shooter that has come out since 2005, except for Metro 2033 which had some amazing new features, and Portal.

You shouldn't pay for it if you feel that way. But you also shouldn't play it. The logic doesn't belong in a piracy dicussion - you're either willing to pay the price for it or not, but if you have the money, and simply consider the product not worth it, you do without. You don't steal it and opt not to pay for it. You seem to be basing the value off of games on blizzard titles. Yes, blizzard titles are amazing, and you will get probably an hour of enjoyment per 15 cents spent. Virtually noone else makes games that hold up that well. Using them as an excuse to take the work of others is weak.

Not to mention that "1 per 1000" figure, that appeared to be a VERY sketchy test, hardly believable. The details of the test give little confidence. Infact the very same article you cited said, and I quote, "it seems clear that eliminating piracy through a stronger DRM can result in significantly increased sales."

First, I don't see where you got that DRM increases sales, when they clearly stated DRM increases piracy.

Second, they have no right to want the same amount of money as Blizzard, Valve, Firaxis, etc. for the same type of product when it is clearly inferior.