Ly, I don't get what you are trying to say. Bad quality should not be condoned but to have to worry about someone pirating your work as well isn't fair.
Again, piracy isn't black and white. As I said, it could save your work by reaching a market it otherwise wouldn't have, it could also destroy your work if it is, as you say, of uncondonably (yes, I just invented a word) bad quality.
Surely evidence speaks for itself: good games sell despite piracy whereas bad games with bad sales fail regardless and good games with bad marketing still sell in spite of (read: possibly because of) piracy.
Let's look at Gothic 4, a game that had something like 5,000,000 Euro in resources budged to it. Last I heard
JoWood was filing for bankruptcy. Related? Who knows. Risen, made by little-known developer, Piranha Bytes, on the other hand, went on to be a bit of a success, even announcing Risen 2 in 2010.
A game developed with 5,000,000 Euro allocated to it failed magnificently whereas a small developer, working on what I can only assume were significantly fewer resources made a masterpiece.
Bad games
do not sell (well). Good games, even when pirated, are guaranteed to sell well.
I'm sorry, you can't turn piracy into a senseless savage beast when it is anything and everything but. Piracy isn't the savage beast you imagine it to be because it's not black and white.
Let's try analyse this in parts.
What is Piracy?
Piracy is tenacious, it exists in so many forms because anything considered "copyright infringement" is piracy. Copyright infringement can be something as simple as lending a game to a friend without the permission of the publisher, or it can be something as ethically antagonising as making counterfeit copies of games and selling them.
Does piracy harm sales?
Simply put, it depends on the type of piracy:
Counterfeiting software with the intent to sell it does harm legitimate sales. Many intentional buyers of counterfeit software feel they have rightly paid for it. Many unintentional buyers feel conned and outraged. Sales of counterfeit software have been linked to anything from supporting the drug trade all the way through to terrorism. Think about this next time you buy counterfeit goods. This is money developers and publishers never see and many who have paid for counterfeit goods will never buy the legitimate thing for the above-mentioned reason (they feel they have already paid for it) so yes, it harms sales.
Common piracy in the form of downloading off something like PirateBay or a friend giving you a copy of his latest game (either because he's currently playing it as well or doesn't want his disc out of his sight). Perhaps you'll pass the copy on to someone, perhaps someone else will download it off PirateBay out of curiosity. Who knows? In the end it is neither a lost sale nor does it support the illegitimate trade of intellectual property. Some people who pirate will buy after doing so, others will not so it doesn't harm sales, nor does it necessarily amplify sales.
Lending games to your friends is very similar to common piracy, except it's on a significantly smaller scale and no copies of the original media is made. It still copyright infringement because you don't have the permission of the publisher (the licence holder) to lend the game to anyone. Because it still remains up to the person who borrowed the game whether or not they will buy it, it doesn't harm sales, nor does it necessarily amplify sales.
Buying second hand games is actually rather interesting. Many people wait for second-hand copies (depending on DRM, of course) because they are cheaper and usually still in good quality. As far as the buyer of second-hand goods is concerned, it's exactly the same. The key difference between buying second-hand and pirating is that you have bought from a kind of "proxy-buyer" if you will, someone who held onto and played the game before you came along and took it off his hands. Assuming the publisher ships and sells 50,000 legitimate copies, 20,000 of which are resold, the publisher will still only see the income of 50,000, not the 70,000 they could've seen. Buying second-hand also remains copyright infringement as you are not entitled to resell the game without the publisher's permission. Does buying second-hand hurt sales? Yes. Shocking revelation? Allow me to explain: Let's assume there were 5,000,000 illegal downloads. According to
some article I read somewhere the pirate-to-buyer ratio is 4:1, that means 1,250,000 copies arguably stand to be bought for every 3,750,000 pirated (let's just assume that these figures are related to one game instead of many
). Resale implies that there are a fixed, limited number of copies which can be sold and resold, the publisher/developer only ever seeing income from the initial purchase. Common piracy, even taking into account the 3,750,000 downloads that will likely never buy, ups the number of initial purchases to 1,250,000. So yes, resale harms sales.
Bearing in mind that I'm doing a helluvalot of thumb-sucking here but the fact of the matter remains: if your product is bad, it will not sell, if your product is good, it will sell. Piracy could help or hinder you.
The smallest and what would be considered the most heavily-hit games (Minecraft, World of Goo) are some of the best-selling games out there because there is a market that
loves them.
Also, I feel that Minecraft, especially, thrived
because of piracy. Many people want to know what it's about and see what the attraction and the big fuss is. If I remember correctly, the developer even went around to Minecraft torrents, chatted up the locals, answered questions and urged many to buy.
So, really... The black-and-white argument either 100% FOR or 100% AGAINST piracy isn't working with me. It's a logical fallacy steeped in wilful ignorance and mired in self-righteous indignation.
Anything I've said so far could be wrong and perhaps my stance is, but from where I'm standing, my stance holds its own and I look forward to engagements which could help me strengthen it or rework it or alter it. Unfortunately discussions revolve heavily around some emotional guilt-trip while conveniently ignoring how piracy also assists the industry.
I agree, heavily, with Shamrock's #2:
2. However, its chief rival is the RIAA: An even larger and more vicious collection of thieves.
The biggest "thieves" are the RIAA, DRM companies and the like who exploit this perceived vulnerability that is "piracy." It's a phobia, an irrational fear, a paranoia of this big savage beast that's actually more of a friendly giant than anything else. It all just depends on how you view it and how you use it.
But it'll definitely be rewarding <3
)
) but to me there is quite a clear line between outright piracy, feeling that you don't need to support developers at all and supporting them in some way or another by buying some of the titles that deserve all the praise it gets.
