I am a strong anti-piracy person. Piracy is theft, it is wrong, and there is never a good reason for it. There are no real benefits to it, because every pro argument you might have is countered by 4 anti arguments. I'll takes yours one at a time.
Quote:It doesn't hurt big companies as much as you think.
I've recently read a report (by Arxan Technologies, I think they were called?) that the Video Game industry has an total revenue of about $84 billion and loses $74 billion a year to piracy, as of 2014. That's almost equal to their revenue. It does hurt and it hurts smaller companies and indie companies a lot harder.
It hurts the industry as a whole, too. Imagine how much better games could be if they had an extra $74 billion to spend on making better games and hiring new people!
Even if we assume those people wouldn't have bought the game, even if they didn't pirate it. That's fine, just don't play the game. That's how money works...you want something, you get money, you buy the thing. If you don't want it enough to get the money, you don't get the thing. Welcome to economics.
Quote: Pirating stuff can be good. You could tell others and they could buy the product. Free advertisement really.
It is not
free advertisement. If you pirated a $12 game then it was a $12 advertisement. Also most pirates don't tell their friends about the game and then their friend goes out and buys it, most pirates just hand another pirated copy over to their friends.
Let's assume you have 10 close friends...even if 50% of your friends went out and bought it and the other 50% pirated it themselves...if the game cost $60 then you just made the company $300, but you also caused them to lose $360.
Quote: Companies pirate stuff as well. It's not just us.
Hate to sound cliché but, if a company jumped off a bridge, would you jump after them? Serials killers kill people, too; does that mean its okay to kill people?
The companies that pirate stuff should be charged and punished just like any individual who pirates. And look at...was it Silicon Knights? They pirated an engine and now they are gone. The composer for DBZ Budokai lost his job because he ripped off other peoples' music.
Quote: Companies bring this on themselves. You can't get some content in some countries, you have no other option.
There are numerous things wrong with this ideology. First of all, the reason some content doesn't make it to some countries is because of business politics and finance. The company isn't licensed in Malaysia, so they can't sell the game in Malaysia, or the company expects only $4 million in sales in France, so spending $10 million to translate it into French would be a poor business decision.
Quote: Piracy can also make YOU buy stuff.
Generally it doesn't. Anecdotally speaking my wife has a friend who is a big pro-pirating games guy. I told him about how I had recently picked up Mount & Blade for $6. This game was made by a small Indie Game company comprised of two people: A man and his wife. He pirated the $6 game and told us that like he was proud of it.
Did he then go out and buy a copy once he figured out he liked it? No.
Did he complain when the company took over three years to produce the game's sequel? Yes.
Maybe they could have lowered their production time, if people had purchased their games and they could afford to hire more staffers.
Quote: Poor people need this, or if the rates are very high (Australians have to pay like 90-110 dollarydoos for games)
Poor people don't need video games. They want video games. Not getting what you want is a big part of being poor; trust me, I grew up
very poor. Did I pirate games? No, I struggled to get the $6 it cost to buy a game and I purchased it, normally a used copy, and I played the hell out of those games.
Would you use the same excuse if the poor person walked into your home and stole your games? It's the same thing, just piracy happens to someone else and not to you.
Quote: Anti Piracy can hurt consumers a lot more. DRM can be more hassle than it's worth and can hurt paying customers more than pirates.
This is true. But the reason that DRM exists is because of pirates. If people stopped pirating so much, we wouldn't need DRM.
This excuse like complaining that the local grocery store closes so early. Yeah it closes at 8 pm because it got robbed at 9pm everyday for a month, so they closed earlier. If thieves would stop robbing stores they could stay open later.
Quote: If the company behind the product is gone, the true developers are gone, you're just giving money to some faceless company.
Some faceless company that spent a lot of money to produce the game. Remember the 'true developer' gets a small portion of the proceeds because they fronted the least amount of money.
A developer might spend $2 million on a game and you may hate EA, but EA gave them $1.8 million of that money. So if the developer closes down and EA is still distributing the game, that's still EA's money that they spent and now are not getting back.
The reason the developer closed down is usually because there weren't enough of their games that sold. If their game is the #1 rated game in the world and it only sold 20,000 copies because 60,000 people pirated it...that company goes out of business, because they expected to sell 80,000 copies and spent more than they made to produce it.
Also even when a developer goes out of business, people within the development company may still be getting royalty revenue in some cases.
