Pirating old games

[SvennoJ]

Ganoncrotch said:

SvennoJ said:

It's still an excuse. You can keep looking for a better deal or wait for a rerelease which happens when there is enough interest like high prices on Ebay. Piracy doesn't show intent to buy, used game sales do.

I don't really have a problem with occasional piracy for personal use. Just when people start listing reasons why piracy is better or even somehow defensible moralistically. By convincing other people that piracy is ok, people will take sales away from the industry.

"Piracy doesn't show intent to buy, but used sales do" To a publisher both equal zero money going into their bank account though, in fact a user might play a pirated copy and at a point because of the quality of the product go and buy a copy of the game later on (I've done this for several of the psp games I pirated, when I seen them pop up on the Vita's PSN store I bought them knowing they were good games) but if you buy a pre owned copy you are most likely not going to go and buy another new copy of the game later on because you have paid someone in gamestop or Ebay for the bits on the disc, having paid money for it means that you no longer have a moral issue with playing the game... even though that money is going no where near the original code developer or publisher, it's a strange one.

I have tons of used games in my collection btw... I'm just being the devils advocate for "why is one fine, but the other not" when neither give the cash to where it should be ending up anyway.

True, that's a good point and I've done it myself that way too. For example Solaris (1972) watched it on you tube first then bought it when the blu-ray became available in Canada. The couple second hand movies I've bought never made the publisher any exta money. However that's the right of first sale, the second hand object still has value. By pirating you diminish the value of that item. You diminish the value of that pre-owned game, which means the person that sold that game to gamestop gets less in return and thus has less to spend on new games, from which the profits do go to the publisher.

Piracy is the same as printing money, doesn't hurt anyone directly and at small enough scale it won't make a difference. Yet if everyone would pirate there would be no more games industry.

I would argue piracy has had an effect on PC games. To compete, games on PC hit very low prices. Stark contrast to Nintendo games that keep their value for a long time. As a result I'm not buying any PC games new anymore, just wait for a sale. Can't resell physical PC copies. I have taken bigger chances on new console games, resold some of them to buy more games, and bought some second hand games as well. That's still supporting the industry. My guess is that the occasional pirated game leading to a sale is contributing much less than the second hand market is fueling new sales.