Ubisoft claims 95% of their PC games played are pirated copies

[Berkut]

I repeat what I said. You are a goddamn cretin.

Take it elsewhere.

[Josquius]

It always makes me cringe when people try to hand wave their criminal acts as benign

Where the fuck did I say that?
If you would learn to actually read you'd see I was speaking about how companies exagerate their losses due to piracy, nothing at all on the rights and wrongs of it.

It sounded like a justification.  Okay, what evidence do you have of this?

Nothing really, but I'm not a multi-billion pound industry making a claim of correlation.
It just makes sense. Downloading a game for free is a lot easier done and a hell of a lot cheaper than having to buy a game, it stands to reason that people who pirate will download a lot more games than they would if they had to think carefully and pay for each one.
I don't think its too controversial to say pirate games=you buy less games, but no way is it a 1:1 relation of games pirated:games not bought.

[Razgovory]

I don't think anyone was making the 1:1 claim.  However, it could be said each pirated game represents a fraction of a lost sale.  What fraction, nobody can tell, but does represent some loss for the seller.

[garbon]

and since most reviewers are sucking at the industry's teat, previews and reviews are not really a good way to decide if a game is going to be crappy or not.

This claim is ridiculous given that with the internet, we can now get reviews from all sorts of people - many of whom are not even professional reviewers.  It is certainly easy enough to find reviews of games that are honest.

[Josquius]

I don't think anyone was making the 1:1 claim.  However, it could be said each pirated game represents a fraction of a lost sale.  What fraction, nobody can tell, but does represent some loss for the seller.

I'm more familiar with the music industry's problems than the gaming industry's tbh and here I am speaking generally about all piracy.  The film and music industry tend to be the most gung-ho about fighting piracy and...I have indeed seen many 1:1 claims of something pirated:something lost from them. I havent looked too into it with gaming but I wouldnt be surprised if the same claim was made.

Overall I think its fair to say piracy reduces sales but I wouldnt go far as every game pirated being a percentage of lost sales. Depends on the person. Some people will only pirate games, poor students and the like. Without piracy they may buy one or two games a year but with it they play dozens and buy now.
Other people meanwhile might only pirate one or two games when they cant wait for the release or want to test if it is good before buying it or what have you. In extreme cases here the games pirated:games sold can actually be higher than 1:1 in the more piracy means more sales direction- minecraft for instance did very well on the back of piracy.

[Razgovory]

Minecraft?  I thought that was free for years.  Not the same as piracy.  If you don't consider it a fraction of a lost sale then how would you consider it?  For every game pirated it could count as 1/N of a sale.  1 in N people would who pirated it would have bought it.  We of course don't know what "N" is.  It could be 10.  It could be 100.  I think looking at the console market is good to get a rough idea.  Pirating a console game is much harder, and higher chance of getting caught and still penalty.  It still happens, but probably not nearly the scale.

I honestly don't care how it "depends on the person".  Sure everyone's reason for committing a crime is different, but that really doesn't matter, does it?

[Josquius]

Minecraft isn't free no. There was a free version, purely creative mode, but it was rather terrible IMO, leftm e with no interest in buying the full game.
Myself and lots of people however pirated it to get a look at the proper game, survival mode, found it was actually rather good and then bought it.
The creators of Minecraft themselves have recognised that piracy greatly helped them. If there was no piracy then its sales would have been a lot less.
In this case of 1 in N, N is lses than 1.

This doesn't appy for every game of course. Far from it. Where games really suffer from piracy is in complete single player games with no online content. There is no harm to the player in playing a pirated version of those, you get the same experience as if you had bought it.....so why bother buying it? This has the unfortunate effect of pushing development away from such games and towards games with heavy online links. Which is sad as I prefer single player games.

[Razgovory]

Ah, so if there was no piracy you and few friends wouldn't have bought it.  It seems to have helped them so much that they request that people who run sites giving out the pirated game cease to do so

http://www.webpronews.com/minecraft-creator-notch-challenged-to-quake-3-by-a-pirate-2012-04

But something like 1 in N isn't for each individual person, and I seriously doubt that piracy made the game sell better.  The Free version was out there for years before the pay version, that was probably the biggest thing.

[Josquius]

Not me and my friends no. It was a well reported phenomena. Just google minecraft piracy, there's lots of stuff out there on it.
First result is the creator telling people to pirate the game and then if they like it to buy it. He's known for being pretty outspoken in having a rational approach to piracy. He has said himself that piracy helped a lot in promoting the game in the early days.

Before anyone leaps to a strawman this isn't to say piracy helps every game, but for games following the minecraft model of a small indie studio steadily developing a multiplayer heavy game and releasing new versions all the time it works very well.

[DontSayBanana]

Because it is. They had something, they no longer have it, someone else does.
Pirating software is still illegal but analogising it directly to physical theft doesn't work.

That's a good point.  Honestly, as far as the effect on supply and demand, I consider it closer to counterfeiting: the merchant is no less able to provide the item, but their control over the intellectual property is weakened with each illegitimate transaction, and recipients of the "counterfeit" settle for a lesser good (dangerous patches, lack of network connectivity, potential loss of all official customer support for that item, etc).

[garbon]

Not me and my friends no. It was a well reported phenomena. Just google minecraft piracy, there's lots of stuff out there on it.
First result is the creator telling people to pirate the game and then if they like it to buy it. He's known for being pretty outspoken in having a rational approach to piracy. He has said himself that piracy helped a lot in promoting the game in the early days.

Before anyone leaps to a strawman this isn't to say piracy helps every game, but for games following the minecraft model of a small indie studio steadily developing a multiplayer heavy game and releasing new versions all the time it works very well.

Actually based on a search of a few minutes, I can't really find any articles talking demonstrating how piracy actually helps games (though I can find many comments about how it has driven indie developers into the ground) - but mainly just conjecture on how it could.  Almost everything just seems to be the creator's spiel about how piracy is a great marketing tool.

I liked this article:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/221362/gdc_minecraft_designer_says_piracy_isnt_theft.html

I endorse information anarchy in principle. Who doesn't? But content like video games isn't self-perpetuating, appearing like apples or pears and dropping cyclically from trees. It certainly doesn't manifest spontaneously, or cost nothing to create, package, distribute, and maintain. There's no "net zero" about the content generation and acquisition process.

...

But it's verging on irresponsible to implicitly green-light the "whatever I want is mine" entitlement mentality. Where's something--anything--in Persson's comments about encouraging a cultural reevaluation of the entitlement complex itself?

[DGuller]

I think sometimes piracy does result in accidental freemium successes, especially when a pirated game is not fully functional.