You're going to need to explain that one a bit, because on the surface, that makes no sense, whatsoever.

Theoretically, yes. I'm not going to say piracy has absolutely zero impact on sales. In fact, I have yet to say that. I simply argue that we can't quantify the impact in any meaningful way, and trying to argue situations where demand would act differently is fairly pointless overall as there is no definitive way to contradict the reality we experience.

How do you know?  How do you know it wouldn't be like things were before the internet was publicly available?  That's the problem, nobody can attach any kind of number to this theory, because it's impossible to verify.

Btw, I'm not saying you or Zhuge are ultimately wrong, I'm simply saying proof is required to support the assertion.  And to date, nobody has done so effectively. 

Hey, I guess PC gaming really is getting more popular.

Another exaggerated report paid for by gaming industry as they work on their DRM agenda. It is much easier to justify such policies by making up numbers and wanti g us to believe that there are actually $160 billion ready to be spent on the product.

i wonder how many pirats buy the game when the DRMbs infested servers run okayish

To a degree yea but I think its a little bit of both. Like for example, I love game of thrones but in order for me to watch it the "standard" method, I have to pay $60 to get the standard cable and then an additional $25 for HBO which is crazy cause that is only for TV and just to watch one show that I care about, I have to pay that much per month! Like there is no "Only HBO" option at all.

And another case is like how stuff from Netflix US isn't avaliable in say Netflix Canada so I have to either use a proxy or vpn if I want to watch the superior version of netflix so I do think that it is a little bit of both cause when you are going up again "piracy" which is essentially free, you have to battle it with convinence + low pricing imo.

Gaming has a similar issue, at least on the PC front cause I really don't like dealing with Origin and specially Uplay so more often than not, I try to avoid buying games that have those types of DRM. But at the sametime, most of the games are still on steam so I think then it comes a pricing + value issue for a lot of people since games are pretty expensive for many although I personally think its fine. Many people also just don't care regardless so there is that too. But yea who knows for games but for movies/tv shows, service is certainly a big part of the issue.

Hmm, I'd argue your previous post:

would suggest otherwise.

I agree we can't really come up with solid numbers. Be that as it may, I can't just sneak into a movie theater to watch a movie and claim "well I wasn't going to buy a ticket anyways" when the theater staff ask me to leave.

Thanks for the really great analogy for pirating (sneaking into a movie theater)! I'm deffinitely gonna use that in future discussions.

Ok, I'll give you the statistical impossibility, however, taken in context with the thread title, and the body of the threads message, I'm calling extreme and utter bullshit.  It's a HUGE stretch to go from 'statistical impossibility that none of those pirates games would have been legit sales' to Piracy costs the industry as much as it makes!!!!!  Make sense?

Also, what's the statistical probability that every single instance of piracy, is from someone who doesn't own the game? :)  Yep, it was downloaded, but it was also paid for.  There are obvious reasons to do this, and probably some that aren't obvious.  But, you can't say that number is 0, either.