this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2024
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If you say something nice about the game to 2 friends where 1 friend pirates and the other buys, the company makes net 0 from the sales, and they tell 2 friends and so on. Then after buying company in bankruptcy, use remote exploit to delete all copies and send shares skyrocketing even more than OP.
except most pirates would never have bought the product in the first place... so is it really a loss for the company?
Not true. I pirate games to see if they are good. Return policies on shit games are bad. If I like the game I’ll pay even though I have it. Perfect example is Valheim. Bought it 3 times on different platforms because I loved it so much.
What's not true? That you represent most pirates? I don't think you do, and I don't think a sample size of 1 is indicative of anything.
I would also argue that pirating games to see if they are good, just further proves that you "would never have bought the product in the first place."
Obviously there is some grey area here though, because one of us seems to be accounting for people that have ever played the game before, and the other is not. Buying sight-unseen vs pirating and THEN buying if it's good, is of course two different things, the latter of which I was not accounting for in my definition of "pirate".
How do you know they never would have brought it if they made the choice to pirate it?
There are games I don't want to buy and I've never pirated those. The only games I pirate are ones I want to play.
I ask them. And I feel the same way myself
OP, like my, math is flawed in that deleting the game does not actually enrich the company, in case "woosh" was necessary.
Piracy, when the alternative was no purchase, still helps the company if it has a good product. Recommendations to others, and "popularity" benefits companies. Free to play games with "pay to win" features benefit from the same general model as "popularity through piracy", where the F2P only player base justifies more fame for paying to win.
I agree, I think Adobe/MS have even said in the past that they would prefer people steal their software if the alternative means they would use a competitor instead.