SvennoJ said:
Mummelmann said:
That's basically stating that without piracy, the industry would be making twice as much, which is simply false. Earlier studies on music showed that people who pirated a lot of music were also a lot more likely to buy music.
This whole "1 copy pirated would have been 1 sale" is nonsense and always has been.
PS: No, I don't pirate games, stopped doing that years ago since I no longer see the point. |
Did you miss Miguel_Zorro's post on the previous page?
The peak in the chart below is 1999 - the year Napster launched. It shows that music industry sales, adjusted for population and inflation in the US are down 64% since then.
It's much harder to determine the effect on the game industry. Games are still relatively new entertainment and are still enjoying growth, although it seems to have slowed down a bit the past few years. Plus games have been pirated massively from the start, there is no control to measure against. Piracy has made its victims along the way though, for example the dreamcast. Yet you could also argue piracy has increased the speed at which video gaming became popular.
Without piracy the game industry might be a big bigger nowadays, pc games might still be getting better attention with less console exclusives or delayed ports. We might have seen more games from different countries, especially from those where piracy is the norm and launching a game isn't a great investment. Always online checkins and other drm would not have been at the level it is now.
There is no easy way to tell how much harm piracy does. Yet it does do some harm. It devalues the content. Netflix can't ask too much and thus not offer new content as people will simply turn to piracy. Games hit bottom prices in less than a year on PC. CD Project Red practically begs not to pirate their game by removing all drm and launching at a reduced price, only on the non drm system ofcourse. Still they make by far the most revenue on consoles.
http://www.cinemablend.com/games/Witcher-3-Wouldn-t-Exist-Consoles-72064.html
|
I never stated tghat piracy doesn't harm the industry; my point is that we can't treat one pirated copy as one lost sale since this is way too simplified and no where near reality.
When I bought The Witcher 3, I did so on the GOG store, even though I prefer the Steam client and the price was the same, this is because I wanted the developer to get the whole sum and a show of support for someone who has tried to improve the industry rather than yell at consumer habbits and market developments.
Companies like EA and Ubisoft are only making things worse by offering DRM that cripples the experience, EA even going so far as to installing spy kits on your computer if you want to use their client, this is why I love CDProjekt so much, and Valve as well; being a gamer in the digital age should be easier and not harder (as is the case with Origin and Uplay).
PS: Seeing that music sales are down that much is no shocker, with music streaming having taken chunks out of the pie for years and CD's being more or less a fading memory, this has as much to do with the digital revolution as it does piracy, if not more. With streaming services, both record labels and artists/performers make considerably less per song/album, so inflation and population adjustments and most other factors wouldn't matter either way.
