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Slimebeast on 21 December 2013
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Zkuq said:
ishiki said:

You don't actually own the physical copies either, it's just a license. However, revoking your license for a physical copy is much more difficult and never going to happen, whereas banning your steam account is possible.

Correct, but for all intents and purposes, unless a physical copy has DRM besides disc-check, you own it.

ishiki said:

If you stole a physical copy of a game you're probably stealing 1 dollars in paper. If you "pirate" you're not stealing that 1 dollar in paper. 

If you think about it... it's probably better for the game company if you steal the physical copy, as opposed to pirating a digital copy. Because they'll still get paid shipped to retail.

Either way, software piracy is not the same thing as stealing. As for stealing, maybe theft isn't as bad for the publisher but it certainly is for the retailer. Someone ends up losing. And as for piracy, there's studies that show the effect piracy has on sales isn't as big as you'd think - and for things like music, piracy can actually benefit the publisher. I believe the existence of the study that showed that music pirates spend more money on music is common knowledge. My point is that there's very few signs that piracy is as serious a problem as publishers say it is, and there's even signs that it could beneficial (brand awareness, for sure, and positive impressions certainly can push people to buy what they pirate).

ishiki said:

You won't get caught for every game, my brother got caught for Arkham Origins. I got caught back in the day for GTA3. Nothing happened ofcourse as a result, and even if you get the 6 strikes it probably wouldn't hold up in court. 

http://gawker.com/5986813/welcome-to-the-us-copyright-alert-system-where-companies-can-slow-your-internet-if-you-download-illegally

Yeah, not a very real threat then. I'd still like to heard some more about the frequency of getting caught by this as I've never heard about this in the US before. I know there was (is?) a somewhat-similar system in France and maybe somewhere else but that's it. As far as I know, the system wasn't very successful in France, and the system there was way stricter than the one in the US. It was basically three strikes and it's over for your internet, I believe.

Anyway, to get back to the topic, I don't think Steam has any effect on pirated games. I'm pretty sure it used to but cracks have gotten smarter and last time I pirated a Steam game, I had absolutely no trouble with it. As for the benefits of Steam, you'll get multiplayer and Steam achievements, as well as Steam cloud, and that's probably it. There's some more too but that should be the biggest benefits. I'm ignoring the fact that you can, at least in some cases, play multiplayer even with pirated copies, but it's not at all convenient and cheaters are probably a problem.

What about the friends lists? Can your friends see that you own pirated copies? Back in 2010 it seemed like my pirated copies didn't get recognized by Steam and thus didn't show up on my list of owned games, so my friends though I only played Mount & Blade Warband and Bad Company 2 while in reality I had dozens of pirated games installed on my PC. (this is maybe a minor issue, but still)