Re: Empire using Steam; Gamespot interview/preview
I'm perfectly willing to admit it's on a large scale.Originally Posted by Monk
I'm unwilling to admit it's on a proportionnally largeR scale than before.
You're mixing the ethical point of view ("is copying a theft ?") with the practical one ("did the publisher lost a sale ?").Bob wants to buy a game, Bob decides from what he reads online the game sounds bad, but he decides to get it anyway. He doesn't buy it so he pirates it. Goods are acquired without the exchange of anything at all, under any other method the definition is stealing. You can go ones tep further anda ssume that Bob will continue to pirate games now that he's done it already.
The first point is for another thread. The second is clear : in your example, Bob wouldn't have bought the game anyway. So there is no loss for the publisher. You can think "it's bad, it's stealing", but it's not a sale lost anyway.
But you can be sure that the guys in the industry will count it among the pirated games, and say "we lost fifty bucks here !". Which is an outright lie.
You can only "lose a sale" if it was about being made in the first place. You can't lose a sale from someone who would have not bought the game if he couldn't pirate it.
Now you can be quite pissed off to see someone playing your game without having paid for it, but that's another matter.
I perfectly know how easy it is to get a pirated game.You'd be surprised with how little "know-how" is required to actually pirate a game. It's not like it's a rubix cube and only a select few know where to go and what to do to get what they want. Google can find you pretty much anything, and a stumbling search with terms that don't completely apply would get you to a site that will let you do a lot.
But I can also tell you how many casual users won't touch it, easy as it may be, because it's still feel like some technical/illegal/nerd stuff.
Actually, I did point in my first message that it was the only real danger of piracy : driving publisher from PC to console. That's my main worry.I've read a few articles in the past year (and one in 07 that was predicting it) that state PC game sales are actually slowing. I can't sit here and tell you piracy is cause number one concretely, but its my opinion that it has a big part in it.
Of course, that's not the only thing. Console games are harder to pirate, but also have only ONE hardware configuration, which make developping games infinitely more streamlined. They also have a much more easily-pleased public, with much more basic requirements.
And as there is close to no piracy, you can also see that funnily, prices for the exact same games are 20 to 30 bucks higher, while market logics would tend to make the prices LOWER, right ?
(perhaps a hint that piracy isn't only killing business, but also acting as a safeguard against ripping consumers off ?)
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