Piracy tracking;..

[Mr Khan]

mchaza said:

Galaki said:

I don't think it's a can or worms you want to open. Even if you can stop 100 illegals but damage 1 legit consumer. That's a no-no.

Piracy is not the reason you game fail.  You game failed because it's not appealing.

Those that download illegally are not going to buy your game anyways.

Instead of trying to fight the invisible, why not try to make your product more appealing giving people more reasons to buy?

The damage done by piracy is largely way overblown.

company a need x sales to break even, you dont make x sales because customer group y mostly priated the game when they could of bought it. company a goes under, the games sucessor or future content is finished and company a former employees become another statitic to the unemployment list. 

An the gaming industry has no other alternative root like the software industry for other souces of income. Sales is the only way they can get money and while sales are increasing, so is priacy and that doesn't run well with the even faster growth in the cost of games. So Priacy is bad. 

You need to separate the good pirates from the bad. The "Good" pirates are the ones that pirate things that they wouldn't pay for if piracy wasn't an option (that is to say, they are complete non-customers and wouldn't buy your product as it is if they couldn't get it free). The "bad" pirates are the ones that are customers, that would pay for things if they couldn't steal them. They create lost revenue (though to chalk it up to theft as the entertainment industry does is grossly misleading)

The theory is that the good pirates outnumber the bad by a significant margin, and thus what you mostly have are just non-customers not giving you money just like they wouldn't anyway, though you do have a chunk of customers who aren't giving you money that they otherwise would have