Playstation 1&2 piracy literally built market for current gen consoles in Eastern Europe. In Poland majority of PS2 had modded laser. Now those people have grown up , got work and still play on Playstation but this time they are buying their games :)

How do you know? Thats seems subjective to me unless there was a study on every single game pirated.

I say a study on every single pirated game because each game game is a different case. People who bought Gran turismo pirated would of got it because they really wanted and would be more likely to buy it if they couldnt get it pirated than somebody who got, lets say, actua golf pirated because they are more likey to have got it pirated because they was curious or just got it because it was cheap.

My point is you can't say its say "The number of copies pirated that would of restulted in actual sales is generally very small and those piracy numbers are actually extremly small compared to other media."  without you actually providing the right facts and why provide a link to pirated movies but not top pirated game. So how can we compare?

Somebody made a good point on here though. Piracy in some cases can build up some franchises because when people get older they tend to start to buy the games. From my experience I got Metal Gear Solid and Gran Turismo pirated. I love them and bought MGS2, MGS3, MGS4, MGS1 (PSN), Gran Turismo 2, GT3, GT4, GT5P, GT5 at retail. Not a bad return from losing a few quid on 2 pirated game

If it's worth buying, people will buy it legitimately. You can't think of pirates as potential customers, all you can really focus on is trying to make a good game with real market appeal, and the rest will sort itself out.

well thats just how things work so live with it or just don't make things so that you don't have to complain

While its not as big as in other formats, its still fairly big.

You have to remember too that a new CD or DVD doesnt cost as much as a new videogame.

Googling 'Crash Bandicoot torrent' turns up 1.5 million hits. With various emulators for the PC and torrents for the PSP. Just a quick search of two torrent sites shows the game as being downloaded nearly 50k times, with some of the download links only being posted a few weeks ago.

It may well have lost them millions, the game could well have been pirated for over the past 10 years now.

No idea of the rough math, but what would it need? 300k pirated copies over 10 years at an average selling price of $10 to make a loss of $3m in revenue? Doesn't seem outside the realms of possibility to me at all. That's covering all 4 Crash games which were big sellers. (They're also still selling, I think I've bought the game 3 times now.) Then there's also the 4 Jax games.

That's a logical fallacy for sure to argue that each game is a unique situation.  If that's a case 90% of science would be usless.

Also uh... he posted a link to top pirated games.  So i responded with a link of the movies, it was about 10 times difference.

Though yeah, piracy does have a lot of positive effects too, I in general didn't want to get into it, because when you mention the positive effects people tend to get a bit pissy because it doesn't fit with their world view.

Wouldn't be that surprised considering the difference in laws. 

Chipping in general is pretty illegal in most places where the games would of actually been bought.

The download links being posted a few weeks ago works AGAINST your point you realize right?

Also, where are the PS1 crash games selling that ND gets a piece of the cut from?

300K a year, over 10 years, where people would pay 10 bucks a copy seems really outside the realm of probability... I mean, look again at the numbers posted on the more popular sites, it's miniscule .

50K?  You'd be lucky if you got 500 sales outta 50K downloads.

There is no way to claim a dollar lost to piracy. All of those figures are based on an assumption that "If someone didn't buy/download a pirated version, they would have bought the full priced version" which is provably not true.

I would wager that a very small portion of the people who pirate games would ever actually shell out the money for a commercial copy