EU Commission Says Piracy Increases Legitimate Game Sales

[vivster]

Teeqoz said:

vivster said:

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

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.

The calculation is obviously based on the whole industry. As I said, piracy benefits some games and others not. I'd think that most of the time it benefits other games rather than the exact one pirated.