| Nuvendil said: First off, Pirates are almost never indicators of true lost sales as most that pirate and then never buy had absolutely no intention of buying either cause they were only slightly curious or just don't give a crap and don't want to pay for anything |
I keep seeing this and people treat it like a fact but it's nothing more than a guess. We really don't know just how many of those pirates would buy the game. Simple as that.
I used to pirate games when I was younger and couldn't undertstand how it was hurtiing the industry. I used to pirate all my ps1, ps2, and psp games (I would still pay money but for the pirated copies which sometimes cost around £3). Eventually I couldn't play a game on psp (Invisimals) and ended up not only buying a new psp to update the firmwire for the camera to work, but actually buying the game. Then I started buying all my psp games instead of downloading them for the patches to work.
I believe that many of those pirated copies would have been sales if the pirates didn't have another option. How many? Probably impossible to tell because even with surveys, it's hard to know whether someone is being honest or not.
