Let's put this to rest

Are pirated copies lost sales or not?

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no

No because they weren't gonna buy the games beforehand. If anything piracy promotes games and gets more people to play them because the people who pirate the game may like the game and tell others to play it, and those people might buy it rather than pirate it. If I were a game developer I'd encourage people to pirate my game.

>No because they weren't gonna buy the games beforehand
So let's say pirating was impossible, how big would you game library be compared to now?

No, I'm not buying your shit anyway until I get to see by myself if it's a good product.

I've purchased more games after finishing a pirated copy than I have played dogshit games and decided not to.
All the 0 hour games in my Steam library are that.

Scenario 1: Person cannot afford it anyway, so they pirate. They would not buy the game to begin with if they don't have the money to purchase.
Scenario 2: Person hates the product. They pirate to see everything they hate about it. They would not have bought the game to begin with.
Scenario 3: Person doesn't want to waste money. There is no demo. Person pirates the game to see it. If the person actually likes it, and does not pay for it afterward, is a potentially lost sale. If they do not, it's not a lost sale.
Scenario 4-8: Bad refund policies. Steam 2 hour limit, epic game store (lol), gog, gamestop refund depreciation, etc. Due to some publishers essentially trying to sell polished turds, some people will not buy and instead fall into scenario 3, but with a different motivation.
Scenario 9: Said game isn't sold any longer with the original condition of the game. Ex Baldur's Gate 2 the original edition. Game might've already been paid for then, why pay for it again? They haven't stole, rather reclaiming what they've already bought. Not a lost sale.
Scenario 10: Game is not for sale, not sold in your area. Not a lost sale.

There's a very narrow window for where piracy is a lost sale.

I only buy games and my game library is tiny, I don't even remember the last game I bought, it was so long ago.

Pirates are too small a minority of people to be a serious threat to company bottom lines. The kind of person who pirates is the kind of person that gives personal thought to where there money goes. If they chose to pirate then they probably weren't going to purchase it/get it secondhand at a very reduced price.

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no

>a game that is 1/1 reproduction at 0 manufacturing cost
>a game that the pirate wouldn't buy or wouldn't buy before a thorough play
>corporations like EA and Activision still getting astronomical profits even when they cry about muh piracy
>said corporations even though flush with cash, still manage to release garbage every year

yeah..

No, they are functionally the same as Demos, except you can play the whole game and not worry that the dev cherry picked the best level to demo it.

Sometimes, yes.

I buy all my games nowadays, but even recently there are definitely movies and books which I've pirated and would have bought if piracy wasn't possible. Same for games when I was a teenager.
As an adult, it's less about money and more about the pirate version being superior. I get an mkv which I can do whatever I want with and keep forever, vs having to use an annoying buggy custom streaming UI and running the risk of my accessing being pulled for license reasons.
The end result for the copyright holder is the same though.

There've been a few cases where I've pirated something and later bought it, but only one of those (Spelunky) was due to a sense of moral obligation. The others were just "hey, I pirated this years ago but it's really cheap now, might as well have it in my library".

I would support drastic reforms of copyright law. The term would be far shorter (maybe 20 years before entering the public domain) and would be conditional on the copyright holder making the work available for purchase on reasonable grounds. In exchange, I would be OK with much more aggressive enforcement and harsher penalties.

Is train surfing a lost ticket sale or not?

>Person doesn't want to waste money
I want to add on to this. Some people think it's the consumers responsibility to allocate funds appropriately. Paying bad producers for bad products only encourages and enables them to make more bad products in the future.
At hat point it's not about if the buyer wasted their money, it's the fact someone got paid to make a bad product and will do it again. They shouldn't be rewarded for this.

Only if you would ever buy it in the first place. So no.

Are you pirating a game because you never intend to buy it? Then no, you have not deprived the company of any money because you would have never given them the money in the first place.
Are you pirating something that you would normally pay for if pirating wasn't an option? Yes, you have deprived the company of money because if pirating wasn't available you would have payed for it. This isn't some sort of difficult to answer philosophical debate.

Yes, just not with a 1:1 ratio.

I'll throw a holy hand grenade towards anyone thinking pirating a game causes lost sales

don't know but i pirated every single game i bought (with a few exceptions that were piss cheap during a sale and i got because why not)

Well it's not impossible, so who cares.

thread's over already?

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that isn't even the core issue. people steal things because they don't want to work hard enough to get it, which means they're also likely to take these kinds of shortcuts in all other aspects of life. these are the people who would steal your WiFi if it didn't have a password, these are the people who would pretend to be selling candy for charity but actually keep all of the profit. they don't deserve to be rewarded with the pleasure of a video game.