frekk
Scourge of St. Lawrence
Modiga-Disabled:
Here is an article with some of the numbers. Its a long read but informative.
http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_1.html
There are some premises in there that simply don't hold up. For example:
The argument is straightforward and both intuitively and logically sound: for every pirated copy of a product, there is some potential loss of income to the producer of that product. This is not the same as saying that every pirated copy is a lost sale. What it actually means is that firstly some proportion of the people who are pirating a game would have bought it in the absence of piracy. Equally as important however is the fact that even those who would never have paid the full purchase price for one reason or another may still have paid some lower amount to purchase and play the game which they pirated. This is because by the very act of obtaining and playing a game, they've clearly demonstrated that they place some value on that game. After all, if something is truly 'worthless', consumers won't bother to obtain or use it in the first place, regardless of whether it's free or not. Even if a game only gives the pirate a few hours of enjoyment, that's still worth something. In the absence of piracy they may have purchased the game at a discount several months after its release, or bought it second-hand for example. So the existence of piracy results in some loss of income to PC game developers, publishers, retailers and even other consumers.
What's missed here is that people who pirate these games may not have even heard of them were it not for piracy. It fails to recognize that piracy generates "buzz" which, in and of itself, generates increased sales. As the author admits (but fails to recognize the implications), piracy also attaches value to the products - value that might not exist absent piracy. This impacts demand for the game. Companies themselves actually DO know this; that's why they release demos.
And no, not every copy pirated represents a loss of income because not every person who pirates a copy is necessarily going to buy it (even second-hand) absent piracy. Only the proportion who would have bought, absent piracy, is a loss of income.