When you look at psp game sales, piracy really affects it so the whole "They wouldn't buy it anyway" doesn't work. I am on other forums and people have said "why buy it when you can download it? lol"

True it doesn't affect all consoles/handhelds but it does give its fair share of problems.

EDIT: Oh and if you aren't going to buy it anyway then just play the demo or rent it - make a gamefly account. You can play tons of games you don't intend to buy!

Regarding the PSP... how many PSP owners bought it because it's easy to pirate games on it? That's something which must be taken into account when stating the impact of PSP piracy.

People simplify the piracy debate too much. It's much more complicated than one would think at first.

Hey, my thread!

1. As others pointed out, 1 pirated copy=/= 1 lost sale
I'm poor, I'm 19, and I literally get $5 pocket money for a month. I managed to get a used gaming PC for christmas+birthday, and that's it. If there would be a failsafe anti-piracy protection, I would quit gaming, with no other option.

2. If you could COPY an expensive car, would you do it? That would hurt the manufacturers too, but this awesome ability to copy anything would naturally re-shape the economy anyways.

The informational revolution changes the rules of traditional copyright. Information is no longer the power of a few, to be witheld.
Publishers must find incomes from new sources, like advertisments, selling hardware, or other actual services with the bare software "information", and possibly making cheaper games.
Musicians can get money from concerts, movies from the cinemas, etc.

3. I'm not that amused by the current state of the industry, a crash would probably benefit it.
Even if I would have money, there would be only a very few games that I would consider worthy of buying. I game, because I'm bored and I don't have anything better to do, but I actually hate where gaming is going, and the current blockbuster trend. They are spending 10s of millions on mediocre games, and they are surprised when they go bankrupt.

^No idea, but I've been in apart of a PSP homebrew website for years and tons of people a week would ask how to downgrade and blah blah blah. Because they have had their psp for a long time and just found out about homebrew.

Nope, sorry, piracy is still theft, it's just a matter of who you're stealing from. Let's say that there are 10,000 copies of a game sold through to retailers. But, through piracy, there are 11,000 people who own the game. Retailers have sold all 10K, so they're happy, but the publisher doesn't see anything from those other 1000 units. Thus, you've stolen from the publisher. Now, in the case of what pirates like to call "theft" to try to justify their illegal actions, again, say those 10K copies were sold to retailers. However, retailers only sell 9000 of the copies, the other 1000 are stolen from the shelves. The publisher has been paid for all the copies, but now the retailer is out what they paid for those copies, meaning you've stolen from the retailer instead. Put both of these together to simulate a real world, and you have 11K copies out there, 1000 of which the developer was never paid for (stolen from developer) and another 1000 that was not sold through (stolen from retailer). It means less income for everyone across the board, and thus, higher prices for those of us who play by the rules.

Next, there's the used market. Yes, this can be seen as hurting the publisher, as they sell 10K again, but 12K people could wind up playing it. Unfortunately for them, though, this is not illegal, as per the right of first sale. If I buy something, I can choose to do what I want with the physical copy, including sell it off should I choose. In my case, the only times I buy used anymore are because the game is just not availiable new. Hell, just this past weekend, I got a couple of Atari 2600 games! Atari and Activision aren't going to sell me those new even if I asked them directly! (Although ironically, as of 10 years ago, Atari still did have a few 2600 games to sell new. They were all common ones that can be found used for sub-$1, though.) However, it is not stolen from the publisher; they've made 10K copies, 10K copies exist, and they've been paid for 10K copies. They just happen to be in some different hands now.

And lastly, I saw someone mention something about trying it. I don't have the numbers for video games, but I do have the numbers for anime. And the fact remains that the AAA titles don't suffer. It's the B titles that get slaughtered in sales, from people "trying" the item. The number of people who "try, then buy" is much smaller than the number of people who "try, play out, and never buy". On the AAA titles, there's enough people buying that it can still profit. But go below that, and those lost sales can be what makes or breaks a game. And enough breaks could put that company out of business.

Ok, so Piracy is wrong. But it's still not theft because your not actually stealing something. No one walks in to a store and says "Hey, our copy of this game has disappeared off the shelf!"

So lets invent a new word for it.

well alterego-x it seems your problem is you need a job...5 dollars... really!!!!

In the case of Anime it may be slightly different. The fansubbers actually do add value to the series and its actually through their work that a lot of anime became popular in the west. If the fansubbers weren't around there would be no market for a lot of these titles in say America.

How's about we don't. That no one walks into a store and says "Hey, our copy has disappeared off the shelf!" is irrelevant. Your "opinion" is simply invalid, with no basis in any sort of reality and thus unworthy of the slightest respect.

So let's not invent a new word for it. Let's just call it what it is: stealing.

I, uh

I thought the new word was piracy, in this context.