| Nuvendil said: Hmmm. Funny thing I forgot to mention last time I stuck my head in this: while some won't buy until they pirate and some won't buy if they can pirate, I think there's a very significant group who "pirate" *because* they bought, as a means of being able to play a game without interfacing with Uplay, Origin, or Steam or so they don't need the disc. I know I did that with Oblivion,downloaded a cracked .exe so I could play without the disc. And I know a lot of people who not only do it but have been doing it for a long, long time. Just another subset of sales Piracy has no impact on. |
I know I pirated a couple of games I own because I moved from Windows to Mac for work-related reasons and didn't want to run Boot-camp. The games I downloaded had a mini windows emulator wrapped around them so you can run them like any other app. Most pirating I've ever done was stuff like that, unoffical localizations of games that stayed in Japan, games that didn't have a mac port, stuff that would be otherwise inaccessible to me. What I can buy, I do buy, and once I've bought something I feel sort of free to pirate it for convenience sake.
(Only semi-related to the topic, but region-locked DvDs are the shittiest thing ever. I own several complete shows on Region 1 Dvds that I just can't play. I bought these. Yes I'm going to use a stream if you won't let me watch them otherwise)
I don't think they'll really see any effect on sales though. Not neccissarily because there are NO lost sales due to piracy (although I don't think the number is anywhere near as substantial as companys think it is) but because another group will step up in their place.
