Video Game Piracy costs the industry as much as it makes!

[DivinePaladin]

setsunatenshi said:
what about those millions of people who use a pirated copy of a game as a 'demo' that may or may not entice them to purchase the game?

how about everyone that played x game for free that they would never think about buying, then becoming fans of that franchise and buying every single game of that series from then on?

what about the word of mouth advertising gained by maximizing exposure to game x that gets several other people to purchase it as well? as in (dude, i tried yesterday game X and it's fuckin awesome, see if you like it so we'll buy it and play together with johnny)

let's discount all that

We're already talking about an extremely hypothetical number here. Asking for more hypothetical factors is asinine. At that point why don't we go into whether pirates post videos on YouTube, and whether those pirates are popular enough to influence sales enough to outweigh the pira. It's stupid  . 

 

I'll be the first to admit that obtaining a game outside of buying it new has helped me become a fan of many franchises. (That refers to either piracy or used game sales, since both arguments for the benefits of either use the "it helps franchise sales overall" claim.) But that doesn't mean that pirating doesn't necessarily hurt the developer/publisher. It still does. Whether the benefits outweigh the costs, we'll never know. The entire discussion in this thread has boiled down to hypothetical vs hypothetical, and it's pointless to try and make a point either way. All you can definitively say is that piracy has helped lead to a developer crumbling in the past, and piracy has helped skyrocket games to the stars.