Piracy and sales

So by that reasoning it's justified to steal anything if you think the quality of products on the market is not up to your standard?

For comparison:
I think most food in the supermarket or in restaurants is not up to my high taste standard and is overpriced and undersized. Am I ok to steal all food? They're simply using me as a tester for their terrible recipes right? :p

I imagine Witcher 3 didn't fair any better than other games when it comes to piracy.
 
Jarrastafari said:
So by that reasoning it's justified to steal anything if you think the quality of products on the market is not up to your standard?

For comparison:
I think most food in the supermarket or in restaurants is not up to my high taste standard and is overpriced and undersized. Am I ok to steal all food? They're simply using me as a tester for their terrible recipes right? :p

I imagine Witcher 3 didn't fair any better than other games when it comes to piracy.
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I didn't say it was justified.

I said until games developers get their act together there's little incentive to stop pirating games. I do not pirate games for the record.
 
Jarrastafari said:
For comparison:
I think most food in the supermarket or in restaurants is not up to my high taste standard and is overpriced and undersized. Am I ok to steal all food? They're simply using me as a tester for their terrible recipes right?
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Generally they lose my custom and that of about as many people as I can warn away from the place.
 
Nexus18 said:
Until we stop getting broken and/or un-optimised games on release day, piracy is a necessary evil.
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Can we all just use the default colour please :p It's so much more readable.

You aren't a ** don't use that term ** - no need to stand out from the crowd at the cost of being illegible :p

As for this specific point - there is absolutely no logic in the argument that if a game isn't bug free on day 1 you're entitled to pirate it.

You could always wait. Not only does this mean you don't have to encounter the day 1 bugs, most likely you also get the game a bit cheaper by waiting.

Nobody has to buy on day 1. But then nobody these days has any patience at all, it seems.
 
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Gimpymoo said:
In the current age, I think grey market sales are more a problem than piracy.
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(there is an old discussion on the "grey market" on this forum already)
software companies locate to different countries for tax breaks ect,but the consumer is in some way ripping off these very same companies by buying games cheaper in other parts of the word ??? :)
 
Jarrastafari said:

Nowhere else in life is it seen as ok to steal something to see if it's to your taste. Nowhere else in life do thieves go back and pay for the thing they just stole because they find out they like what the stole.
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Jarrastafari said:

You're not stealing from the rich to provide for the poor. You're just stealing from people
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I find the term 'stealing' really reaching in these kind of topics. You're just clicking a link and copying a file, not shoplifting at Morrison's.

Jarrastafari said:

I imagine Witcher 3 didn't fair any better than other games when it comes to piracy.
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The lost sales to piracy thing is laughable and the Witcher 3 sold millions and doesn't even have Denuvo.

Who's to say all those that pirated it would have bought it anyway? You could argue that some only went on to buy it because they pirated it in the first place, and others only bought it because they heard the pirate telling them about it. So piracy actually aided in a sale in this instance, how's that for irony?

No one factors in how piracy is free advertisement. It's just 'omg millions of pirates stealing our monies kill them with Denuvo!'
 
I honestly don't get the whole piracy = stealing argument. Its like walking into Tesco and magically copying a loaf of bread and it appears in your hand leaving the original laying where it was. Nothing was touched, damaged or stolen.....

The whole key selling trend seems to be much more dangerous as it can literally bankrupt studios due to credit card fraud but these places are being spoken about openly everywhere (and this forum) as if they are fine......they are true "thiefs", not the pirates.

I obviously don't think piracy is ideal but the fact is its going to happen no matter what DRM is created. I bet a lot of studios would happily accept the pirates and their free advertising/word of mouth about their game over criminal companies stealing thousands of keys putting the company into debt.....
 
If you don't want the product, don't buy it. If you're going to the hassle of finding a safe copy and downloading it then clearly the product has value to you, you are a thief, no matter how you justify it.

No demos anymore? These days you have extensive alpha and beta phases so not only do you get to try before you buy, you get to provide feedback before the game is finished.

Fed up with games not being what you thought they were going to be? Don't pre-order. Wait and see a review from someone whose opinion you respect.

It's hard to quantify, but Denuvo and the likes that cut out piracy in the critical first month of sale are no doubt having a positive effect on revenues.
 
kmetek said:
mid gen: i'm wondering where are the demos available? not every game has one.....most of them don't.
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Public betas are pretty common these days. Better than a demo as you can provide feedback! You can also see any number of streamers playing the game from the second it's released, AND you have a 2-hour refund window if you buy on Steam.

The argument that there's no way to see what a game is like before you buy is daft.
 
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I use it to try games I'm not sure about purchasing, saved me from No Man's Sky but I did buy Euro Truck Simulator after pirating it. I've also pirated rugby 08 after buying it off EA's download service but a year later after a hard drive format it was nowhere to be found on the service.
 
Jarrastafari said:
I imagine Witcher 3 didn't fair any better than other games when it comes to piracy.
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Interesting you bring up The Witcher 3 because CDPR had imo the best approach of all to the topic of piracy:

http://www.technobuffalo.com/2016/0...alks-piracy-says-it-was-an-irrelevant-factor/

Some relevant quotes from that article:
We released [The Witcher 3] without any copy protection. So, on day one, you could download the game from GOG, and give it to a friend (enemy as well)…and still we sold near to 10 million units across all 3 platforms. But the piracy factor was irrelevant, because we cannot force people to buy things. We can only convince them to do it. We totally believe in the carrot, not in the stick…I’ve seen many times, comments [that say] ‘Hey, I couldn’t afford the game when it was full price, but these guys are so fair, and they were never against us. They were always trying to do good, add a lot of value, give free DLC, give free content, that I bought the game from them when it was mid-price.’

…[In] lower income countries, people just cannot afford a 50 dollar game. So maybe our price-point offering in a certain country wasn’t right. For example, we have lower prices in Russia. And there is many cases like that.

We don’t like when people steal our product, but we are not going to chase them and put them in prison. But we’ll think hard what to make to convince them. And uh, convince them in a very positive way, so that they’ll buy the product next time, they’ll be happy with our game, and they’ll tell their friends not to pirate it.
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Acknowledgement that they can't stop it is a given, and addressing the price/value issue - which is at the heart of the matter, both show this is a PC developer to the core. In my case, I bought the GOTY of the game on Steam recently as I felt the price was justified. I simply would not have spent the full price at launch. We all know the newest DRM is just the next challenge for some hacker groups out there - the true challenge is to determine perceived value of content, and the market eventually always dictates this. Not everyone can or will pay the full RRP for new releases. If you recall, most major movie studios cry buckets for the piracy issue, and yet have been raking in the highest profits ever in the last few years. Its a difficult topic to be sure, but I don't think the situation can be improved much more at present, either way. And do bear in mind, our transition to the digital era is expected to bring prices down generally - something that has not happened across the board for obvious reasons.
 
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Random Guy said:
Acknowledgement that they can't stop it is a given
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You can't stop people ever pirating your game, but what you can do with Denuvo is stop them pirating it in the first 30 days or so which is when you make most of your full-price sales. You can come up with a lot of cases where someone wouldn't have bought it, but the fact remains that there are a lot of people that will buy a Denuvo protected game at full price that they wouldn't have bought if they could pirate it.

As long as the economics of that (cost of Denuvo vs estimated sales lost to piracy) makes sense, developers are going to do it.
 
You'd probably know more than me on this but are there different levels of service offered by Denuvo?

Seems it's been bypassed on some games but not older ones. Just wondering if it's different protection levels/poor coding or just more interest in cracking certain games :confused:.
 
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