Logic:

People assume piracy is some huge detriment to the entertainment industry as a whole. They picture millions of dollars being lost to those pesky pirates who chose to duplicate the product freely rather than pay for the original legitimately. They say that pirates are stealing and are taking sales away from developers. Of course, all of this ignores some pretty basic concepts.

1) Piracy is not theft. Theft is taking the original so that nobody else can use it any longer. Piracy is duplicating a product, maintaining the original, and taking a copy. Nothing is ultimately lost because nothing is actually taken except copied code. With that in mind, we're at the first level of why piracy is not lost sales.

2) People tend to assume that every pirated copy means one lost sale. What this doesn't acknowledge is that somebody who commonly pirates likely had no intention of buying the product to begin with. It isn't a lost sale if there was never intent to purchase. That's logic used to justify harsh DRM policies that people seem to think deter pirates. Having been a part of a couple of game system piracy scenes, I can safely say that a dedicated pirate will wait months for any anti-piracy efforts to be broken just so that they won't have to spend the money if they need to. In the end, all DRM really hurts is the people who legitimately purchase a game, being forced into an always online state or otherwise.

3) Piracy accounts for an exceptionally small percent of people. Such a small amount that even if every person who pirated a game purchased a physical copy instead, it would hardly impact sales. It would be hard to argue that anybody would notice the boost. Piracy is an insiginifcant part of the game and software industry that people are just really desperate to act as if it's something bigger because there is a lot of legal money in treating it that way.

In the end, piracy is blown way out of proportion and is used to justify terrible DRM policies by those that don't understand that it is completely and utterly pointless.

I don't like piracy, but I do it, with video game soundtracks, because they are not something that is easily avaiable to me and the ones that I want are not even avaiable for purchase.

But when it is avaiable I buy it for support (Wonderful 101 for example). Also bought the My Little Pony soundtracks out of iTunes.

And why they have ever more invasive DRM schemes.

i bet most people complaining have something illegally obtained themselfs. Fan translation, roms for old console, porn etc. those are pirated stuff too.

Cause I have to sit through a bunch of unskippable FBI and Piracy warnings every time I want to start a movie, put up with annoying DRM on games, online accounts and other crap. All invented because of piracy.

It's my own fault. I pirated everything when I was young. First with a dual cassette deck or 2 vhs recorders, then copy parties, then bbs. I didn't buy my own movie/music/games until I was 18. Did I harm the industry, I don't know, I certainly didn't help them.

I learned the other side of the story when I started working in software development for a small company. At first it was sorta cool people liked our software so much that they wanted to copy it. But not so cool when the company was struggling and had to downsize. Since then it was a big annoyance, drm measures also made development and debugging harder. Can't simply swap devices to check what works on what.

Anyway I grew up and started seeing the pleasure in actually owning something you worked for, and building a collection of the best stuff. Or maybe I simply have more money than time nowadays, instead of having too much time to kill and no money to buy anything.

Maybe the industry has benefited from me after all. Tbh most of the follow ups of civilization I've bought day 1 part out of guilt next to the desire to play. The original (pirated) was one of my favorite games. Same with Doom and Wolfenstein. Pointless I know, won't be the same people anyway.

Anyway let us old people finance the hungry pirating habits of the next generation. That's how life works. Yet if you're still pirating in your late twenties, grow up!

You all realize a lot of games haven't come to PC before because PC development is more involved than console development, right? It is far, far more technical than it has ever been legal. A lot of developers are still learning PC development, now that it's clear that it's a platform viable for all types of games. We've had quite a few shaky PC ports this past decade from developers taking their first or second stab at PC development, as well as outsourcing to developers that haven't done PC porting before. Blaming piracy for developers not wanting to deal with PC development may be the silliest excuse I have ever heard.

Always online and other forms of DRM are ways of treating piracy as more detrimental than it ever has been or ever will be, and it is ultimately an afterthought during development.

Piracy is still wrong in the end, but honestly, considering that people still do it all the time, there's not much that can be done about it, it's just a thing at this point.

Your arguments not very good, not all musicians or movie makers are billionairs looking to cash in  a lot is little bands/movie makers trying to make it big and well piracy helps spread the word it still hinders the amount of money they would need to cover certain cost. Now don't get me wrong I pirate movies, never games and well youtube has every song you'll ever want, but most of the movies I pirate are usually huge blockbuster or movies I would never see to begin with and if I like it and theres a sequel I'll see it in theaters or buy it to support them.

What if you're still struggling financially at that age? 

Christ, you're a moron.

Hi there.  I'm one of those non-millionaires who works on movies, and I've absolutely lost work because projects were shut down due to lack of money stemming from, you guessed it, piracy.

You're a thief.  Own it.

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