Comment by Aurornis
7 hours ago
> The question is, how many of the people who pirate a game would instead buy it if pirating is not an option?
I don’t think this is as much of a question outside of social media attempts to justify piracy. If only 10% of the pirates would buy the game, that’s still lost sales.
The social media justifications for piracy always assume that the only reason anyone pirates a game or video is because they either couldn’t afford it or wouldn’t buy it anyway. The same arguments were made when Netflix clamped down on account sharing: Everywhere you would find predictions that Netflix would suffer as a result, people would start cancelling their accounts, and they’d regret the decision. Yet the opposite happened and they had more users sign up.
> There is a lot of misunderstanding here about who and why downloads pirated games.
I agree with this statement, but in the opposite direction. The misunderstanding is the mental gymnastics that go into painting all pirates as all poor individuals who have no money and therefore no choice but to pirate games. The reality is that piracy is just a choice of convenience and taking something for free because they can. People from all tax brackets do it.
I do not care about the moral judgements. If somebody cannot afford the game or doesn't want to pay, then they will most probably not buy it, whether they pirate or not. Sure, there is always money to squeeze, but 10% sounds overestimation, esp when the squeezing comes essentially to the expense and inconvenience of the people who actually buy the thing. Which is solely what I care about here. In any case, DRMs never stopped games from being pirated.
Pirating is far from a "choice of convenience" nowadays. Getting a pirated copy is much more complicated than getting it in gog, you do not get updates (I assume you have to search and install it again), and involves serious risk installing malware. Especially with how bug-ridden new games tend to be nowadays, I cannot imagine getting a newly released game without some form of auto-updater.
A lot of successful DRM-free games exist, and games that have DRM are still pirated just fine. Pirating existed in games since ever. It is not for the lack of DRM that a game may fail to sell.
> Sure, there is always money to squeeze, but 10% sounds overestimation,
10% was an example of a low-ball number. I estimate the number is much higher.
> I do not care about the moral judgements.
If you don’t care about moral judgments, why have this conversation at all? Nothing matters, do what you want, pirate everything you can get away with.
The discussion started about DRM/gog. As I said, what I care about is DRM in games. If I buy a game, I want to own it, not rent it. Same as with any software. This is not just moral, it is firstmost practical. If running a game is bound to have steam running, then not getting steam to run means I cannot run the game. This has actually been a real situation where I could install and play games from gog because I could download an offline installer, but not from steam.
I don't care about the morals of pirating in the abstract, because I don't think such an abstract morality makes sense and hence I am not gonna lecture people what they should do (they can decide themselves based on their situation). The argument that without some sort of abstract moral code one will just pirate everything makes no sense. I buy now the games I play because I am fortunate that I have the money to buy them, and because I want to support studios that I consider decent (so that they keep making decent games). Same with any other kind of art.