EU Commission Says Piracy Increases Legitimate Game Sales

[Teeqoz]

vivster said:

Cobretti2 said:

Yer but the issue for me is they fight for rights. So you need a few packages and you also need to be on the internet. I am old school i buy my movies and tv shows. I would gladly switch to digital if I could add it to my server and play it how I want it.

It is liek the BluRays you buy that have a digital movie code. I added a few to the service that was offered. Then that service closed down and wanted ot me transfer to another service. For someoen who is busy and travels for work I need it to be storable and work with whatever i have on me at the time.

Spotify I have no issue with as music is generlaly small files, so you can sync them in offline mod your fav tunes. HD movies is a little different with mobile phone space lol.

Yeah, but that puts you in a minority, so it doesn't matter.

Teeqoz said:

Does this mean that the pirated games themselves gain from the act, or that the gaming industry in general gains from the act? That is an important distinction.

Both I guess? It's hard to gauge an impact on a game by game basis. It most likely is a net loss for bad games, because people try it, hate it and will probably be less likely to buy any future games from the same developer. It's basically the same issues as with demos. Depends on the game and how it's monetized if it has a negative, positive or no effect at all.

It's certainly more beneficial for online games with single player components than for singleplayer games or online games without singleplayer. So it only really makes sense to measure it for the whole industry.

What I mean is, are the pirated games the ones that benefit? Is it just that pirating recruits more gamers, which later buy other games legitimately, or is it that people pirate a game, try it out and buy that game later, if you understand what I mean.

And I'm not asking this to question the legitimacy of the research, I'm just curious as to how the beneficial effect works.