How much does piracy actually cost them? The Witcher 3 sold 50 million copies, and it is DRM-free on GOG. Its lack of DRM doesn’t seem to have hurt sales at all.
DRM does cause problems, and the discussion shouldn’t be about mitigating those problems, but whether it actually solves a real problem.
It hurts sales if you take the number of unique ip addresses on a torrent and count them all as lost sales, nvm all the people who have dynamic ip address, never finish downloading it, never installed it, uninstalled it after 2 mins, never got it running, never would of bought it anyway etc… There is no scientific or factual basis for any of their claim because they are impossible to make with the anti intellectual discourse they use. Some study in Europe found that pirates actually buy more media, funny that.
And I think people pirate when they’re unwilling to buy anyway (i.e. not a lost sale), and then they provide free advertising to those who might be willing to buy. At least that’s my experience.
That said, if it’s easier to get something by piracy than by legal means, perhaps they’ll lose sales. So it behooves content producers to improve access, not restrict it.
Piracy, as always, is a service issue. Give people what they want and don’t make it difficult to obtain, and don’t add unnecessary shit to it, and piracy all of a sudden goes down.
Exactly. Valve’s Gabe Newell explained that succinctly, and Netflix proved it with digital distribution. Piracy takes more effort than buying a game on Steam, playing one with Game Pass, or watching a Netflix show. Give me the content I want at a reasonable price and make it easy for me to get it, and piracy rates will go down.
DRM raises the barrier to getting a game. Plenty legitimate buyers have issues legally getting games, and if the DRM server goes down (e.g. game gets abandoned), people who bought it are screwed. If you remove DRM, make a good game, and make it available on a variety of stores, it’ll sell well. It’s not complicated.
For me, a lot of times it is just like a demo of the olfen days. I play a bit and then decide if I want to buy it. And if not then I have had some fun at least.
How much does piracy actually cost them? The Witcher 3 sold 50 million copies, and it is DRM-free on GOG. Its lack of DRM doesn’t seem to have hurt sales at all.
DRM does cause problems, and the discussion shouldn’t be about mitigating those problems, but whether it actually solves a real problem.
It hurts sales if you take the number of unique ip addresses on a torrent and count them all as lost sales, nvm all the people who have dynamic ip address, never finish downloading it, never installed it, uninstalled it after 2 mins, never got it running, never would of bought it anyway etc… There is no scientific or factual basis for any of their claim because they are impossible to make with the anti intellectual discourse they use. Some study in Europe found that pirates actually buy more media, funny that.
And I think people pirate when they’re unwilling to buy anyway (i.e. not a lost sale), and then they provide free advertising to those who might be willing to buy. At least that’s my experience.
That said, if it’s easier to get something by piracy than by legal means, perhaps they’ll lose sales. So it behooves content producers to improve access, not restrict it.
Piracy, as always, is a service issue. Give people what they want and don’t make it difficult to obtain, and don’t add unnecessary shit to it, and piracy all of a sudden goes down.
Exactly. Valve’s Gabe Newell explained that succinctly, and Netflix proved it with digital distribution. Piracy takes more effort than buying a game on Steam, playing one with Game Pass, or watching a Netflix show. Give me the content I want at a reasonable price and make it easy for me to get it, and piracy rates will go down.
DRM raises the barrier to getting a game. Plenty legitimate buyers have issues legally getting games, and if the DRM server goes down (e.g. game gets abandoned), people who bought it are screwed. If you remove DRM, make a good game, and make it available on a variety of stores, it’ll sell well. It’s not complicated.
For me, a lot of times it is just like a demo of the olfen days. I play a bit and then decide if I want to buy it. And if not then I have had some fun at least.
The lack of DRM only hurts sales of games that are bad by themselves. For good games, piracy is practically just free advertising.