1. Freedom to the consumer

Piracy gives players the possibility to try out a game without restriction, before purchasing it. Everyone can remember games they bought and turned out to be bad. Often the game got overhyped/advertised or you had put your trust in a biased review.

Or sometimes you just think you like a game but it turns out you do not. Without piracy I may have bought a game and be very unhappy with my purchase and restricting me to buy other games (I would have liked), because my budget is limited (assuming a world without piracy). It could even result in buying less games, because this can make you very sceptical about future purchases.

And demos are not a replacement of piracy in this case either. Demo’s are what the publisher wants you to see, another marketing tool. The rest of the game may as well be very bad. Just like trailers are not a good representation of a film.

This may not influence the total revenue of the industry, but it sure will improve quality and punish bad business practises.

It is now up to the gaming industry to find a business model that includes this benefit. F2P games do this to a certain extend, but it is often by restricting content and frustrating players with time sinks.

If it was for me we would move to a donation after consumption system (basically what sensible pirates do already). The problem with that is that other parts of our economy do not work that way and that makes it tempting to spend your money elsewhere. Ideal would be if the majority of the economy would work that way, or at least the entertainment industry as a whole.

2. Possible benefits for developers

What I miss most in this article is that piracy can be very beneficial to game developers and content creators in general. It is free advertising. It happens often enough that I tried out a game I would otherwise not have bought and halfway the game I am so hooked to it that I decide to purchase the game and support the developer.

It is also very well possible that people who usually don’t buy games, get introduced to them by piracy and then become (new) customers.

The question of course is if this compensates for the possible loss of purchases, because of players decreasing there gaming budget to buy other products.

3. Partial piracy protection does hurt the industry

What happens a lot now is that some part of the industry protects better against piracy. Always online DRM partially protects against piracy. Consoles are a lot harder to pirate. Multiplayer games and MMO’s require servers.

What happens now is that people are not free to do what I described in my first point. But rather that they are forced to pay for the games that are harder or even impossible to pirate and pirate the rest of the games.

Big companies as EA and Activision-Blizzard who have a bad reputation, because of bad business practises, but still produce (some) quality games. They are the companies who do the most anti piracy measures which are also very anti consumer.

This means that it is harder for people to support the games they like, with the risk that quality games and developers disappear for the benefit of the games, who may also be good, but are better ‘protected’ against piracy.

This again is not effecting the total revenue of the industry, but it does possibly negatively influence the quality. And overall quality of games will attract more customers to gaming branch.

BUT!!! what about consoles , if you think is even worse.You will buy a game with 50 bucks , you will play until you get bored of it , and trade it in to a game store, and guess what you will trade it for another “already paid” game and the producer will get absolutely nothing from that transaction ,so in the end you just play legally a game and the producer get nothing.About this no one says nothing , they just blame piracy so they can move slowly from pc to consoles where they can control every thing.Now with ps4 is bs, and i will bet new xbox will be the same >what they intend to do is to sell you the game trough psn/live and not the physical disc, that means no resell , you bought it , you wash on your head with it.SO you pay from the start s..t loads of money extra for a game , console version 50 pc version 40 and you dont have a chance to recover some money ,not to mention that on pc there will always be a time than you will get the same game for pennies , and guess what , piracy will rise on console the same as the pc.
BE AWARE PRODUCER AND PUBLISHER ! when you try to abuse , you will get abused , as for single way you find to get some extra money from the client there will be someone who will find a way to take all from you and give you nothing
ps:i am not a console boy, the only games that are indeed great to play on consoles are fighting , racing and soccer games, but only with friends on spilt screen not online
pss:CONSOLE GAMING WILL NEVER GET TO SAME QUALITY AS PC GAMING(except maybe for the couple of months after console launch, witch will hapen once in ages) CONSOLES GET OUTDATED ON THE 2ND DAY OF THEIR LAUNCH

p.s. i’m sorry for my english but it’s not my primary language

2. I actually think that abandonware, low-income people should very well pirate stuff they cannot afford (and I don’t mean the chap who drinks beer every night and says “I cannot afford games”), but the people who really don’t cannot afford to pay. For them… I don’t mind them pirating games. It’s in my hopes that at some point they start to show support, or pay what they can.

I don’t have any scientific data whether “possibility of getting game free aka pirating it” causes people to drop their gaming budget from what it would have been. It might be quite interesting subject to study.

But like pointed out, the act of copying a game irrelevant. What is relevant is “whether money comes in the system or not”.

I don’t like government funding… I think gov should stick to focus on healthcare, povery, and whatnot stuff. I dislike the idea of gov supporting art (games included). I like the idea that individual people have the possibility to vote using their wallet to say which sort of games they want.

But if you still buy games without lowering your budget, then piracy is irrelevant factor. Only relevant factor is how much money comes in. Taking the chap in your example – if he chooses to spend $100 on games, $0 on ice cream then it’s irrelevant whether he is pirating every other game in the planet or not.

If he pirates, end result is he has spent $100. If he doesn’t pirate, well, then too he has spent $100.

“But if you couldn’t steal games, you most probably would change your spending habits and increase your budget for games.”
This we do not know. I’m not saying you are wrong, I think this might be true. One counter argument though is: it’s possible for you and me to pirate games – yet we buy them. I have friends who buy some games and pirate others. Why is this? Why don’t they pirate all games?

1. I care more about piracy insofar as it affects the industry negatively

2. Piracy is still wrong, should be as illegal as robbing a bookstore. Doesn’t matter if I’m going to read the book or not. Doesn’t matter if my taking the book appreciably decreases the availability (most likely, it does not). It’s still categorically wrong.

Example: let’s assume we have $100 spending limit. We use $50 to buy games and $50 to buy ice-creams. If you want more games, you need to spend less on ice-creams, and vice versa. Because you can’t pirate ice-creams, you might think “well, I’ll spend less on games and steal those that I can’t buy”.

Then… you can also say my spending budget for games is $0. You could argue that because you don’t plan to spend any money on games, game industry isn’t hurt by piracy. But if you couldn’t steal games, you most probably would change your spending habits and increase your budget for games.