Yes, that was the point I've been trying to make from the start. Entertanment industry in general, and its gaming sector in this particular case, keep pushing the agenda that it is capable of achieving a much higher (double) revenue than it is doing now. And that pirates are actually saving $75 billion of money that exists instead of paying the industry.

But then maybe agricultural, automotive or construction industries can publish a report saying that software piracy is beneficial to their business - syphoning $75 billion away from gaming into housing, fast cars or seeing an increase in fruit and vegetable sales due to $60 saved for a game.

So, in the end, while pirates steal away bread from software developers, they are feeding numerous construction and factory workers, and even helping migrants picking fruit feed their starving families in Honduras. Piracy is, therefore, great!

So we should all go to rob a bank because that would increase the cash flow in the economy? Well, not that most banks and financial institutions generally speaking wouldn't deserve it!

????

It's theoretical revenue that the company has worked out via "copyright math". It's not an actual loss to anyone. 

It's more likely they spend that money on better internet, pc upgrades, storage media and electricity bills. Kinda ironic, PC pirates investing in better hardware, yet not paying the game industry to make games that use that better hardware.

They can spend that money too without pirating and save on all those extra costs, thus have even more to spend in other areas. And they'll have lot of time left over to do something useful ;)

Why not counterfeit money. Doesn't hurt anyone when only a few do it and you pump extra money in the economy. Nothing lost right?
Btw the money going to software developers will be spend on all those things you list as well. It's not lost, merely feeding extra mouths in between steps. Software developers don't burn money, they drive cars and eat food as well!

That's basically stating that without piracy, the industry would be making twice as much, which is simply false. Earlier studies on music showed that people who pirated a lot of music were also a lot more likely to buy music.
This whole "1 copy pirated would have been 1 sale" is nonsense and always has been.

PS: No, I don't pirate games, stopped doing that years ago since I no longer see the point.

Did you miss Miguel_Zorro's post on the previous page?

The peak in the chart below is 1999 - the year Napster launched.  It shows that music industry sales, adjusted for population and inflation in the US are down 64% since then.


It's much harder to determine the effect on the game industry. Games are still relatively new entertainment and are still enjoying growth, although it seems to have slowed down a bit the past few years. Plus games have been pirated massively from the start, there is no control to measure against. Piracy has made its victims along the way though, for example the dreamcast. Yet you could also argue piracy has increased the speed at which video gaming became popular.

Without piracy the game industry might be a big bigger nowadays, pc games might still be getting better attention with less console exclusives or delayed ports. We might have seen more games from different countries, especially from those where piracy is the norm and launching a game isn't a great investment. Always online checkins and other drm would not have been at the level it is now.

There is no easy way to tell how much harm piracy does. Yet it does do some harm. It devalues the content. Netflix can't ask too much and thus not offer new content as people will simply turn to piracy. Games hit bottom prices in less than a year on PC. CD Project Red practically begs not to pirate their game by removing all drm and launching at a reduced price, only on the non drm system ofcourse. Still they make by far the most revenue on consoles.
http://www.cinemablend.com/games/Witcher-3-Wouldn-t-Exist-Consoles-72064.html

I never stated tghat piracy doesn't harm the industry; my point is that we can't treat one pirated copy as one lost sale since this is way too simplified and no where near reality.

When I bought The Witcher 3, I did so on the GOG store, even though I prefer the Steam client and the price was the same, this is because I wanted the developer to get the whole sum and a show of support for someone who has tried to improve the industry rather than yell at consumer habbits and market developments.
Companies like EA and Ubisoft are only making things worse by offering DRM that cripples the experience, EA even going so far as to installing spy kits on your computer if you want to use their client, this is why I love CDProjekt so much, and Valve as well; being a gamer in the digital age should be easier and not harder (as is the case with Origin and Uplay).

PS: Seeing that music sales are down that much is no shocker, with music streaming having taken chunks out of the pie for years and CD's being more or less a fading memory, this has as much to do with the digital revolution as it does piracy, if not more. With streaming services, both record labels and artists/performers make considerably less per song/album, so inflation and population adjustments and most other factors wouldn't matter either way.

There is something that a lot of people here completely ignore: It is actually possible to pirate, AND pay.
A lot of people use pirated copies as demos and then buy them if they like them.

Even if 5%, as someone already stated, was lost copies, resulting in all of these "losses", well what if another 5% resulted in copies bought?

The numbers in the article are exaggerated beyond belief >_>

Or you could turn that reasoning upside down. Condemn those companies that try to prtect their investment, aka blame the victim, while applauding the company that admits defeat and says it's ok to pirate their game, yet at the same time turns to locked down consoles to still make a profit.
Btw Steam started the whole online drm stuff with Half-life 2...

As for the music industry, piracy has greatly devalued music. The price people are willing to pay for digital music is much less than it was for physical. Now you have services like Spotify that hardly pay the artists anything, yet they can't charge the customers more as people will only pay a little for the convenience of having everything in one place.
It has already transferred to video games. Game streaming isn't deemed worth more than a Netflix subscription by many, which is already ridiculously low. Which I actually don't mind, physical games will exist for a long time still, unless the game industry likes to go through the same devaluation as the music industry did.