@Lovernerdboy;
Sry, I just forgot your name ;D
Well, it wasn’t a justification but more some kind of fact, actually.
The difference to your example is that the variable costs are still there if something of material, something “real” gets stolen. If I have a shop and someone steals a bike it is me, the shopkeeper, who has to pay for the stolen bike somehow.
If I run a gaming shop and someone steals a game it is the same. But if someone makes a copy of a game and then bring it and claim it doesn’t work or downloads the game from the internet, the original material is still in my shop and I don’t have to pay for “stealing”.
Now I want to clarify a bit more what I wanted to say before.
If this somebody never intended to buy the game, the consequences for me as the shopkeeper (or also as developer/distributor/publisher) are the same: It doesn’t make a difference to me if somebody pirates a game or just doesn’t buy it - I still get no income from that guy.
However, as mentioned before, it is different of course if this person would buy a game he can’t “pirate” I make a profit, this is true, I can’t say something against that. But if he doesn’t then there is hardly a chance that I have lost money to him. I won’t have earned anything from him anyways.
I think some parts of the “pirates” WILL buy the game if they can’t get it for free, but I cannot say how many. There aren’t just black and white colors in the world, I think very often both sides of this “piracy conflict” are over-reacting. It is not that nobody buys a game if he can’t pirate it nor that ALL pirates aren’t willing to buy the game at all. But I am simple sure some parts WILL buy it, and those parts might be enough for publishers to integrate DRM in order to drive some parts of the pirates to buyers.
This however does of course not reflect my opinion about that DRM should be used.
I also believe that some people might buy a games because it is too hard and stressful for them to go around the DRM/CP and they don’t want to hassle with it. Not that they aren’t able to do so, but they simple aren’t in the mood fixing a lot of troubles and so on - So they go again the easier way and purchase the software. This again might be even known to the industry and this is another reason why they use DRM.
About “greedy pirates”: That’s a bit too much generalism, IMHO. I think there are a lot of different pirates out there, some might be even extremly friendly. Some might even gift other persons stuff regulary or are very helpful to other users. I mean - Take a look at the scene, why should a pirate upload a game? He definitivly doesn’t has any profit of it (ok, mostly at least) and do it for the community they are living in. At least I suspect so.
I don’t think being a pirate makes somebody an extremly bad person.
Dunno if you know about kino.to, it was a movie streaming website which was closed a few weeks ago. The owners made millions of Euros with it, selling premium accounts at their “partner sites” of kino.to. Of course most of them might now go to jail for that. This is totally different from the “pirates” mentioned above.
However, there was study, not published but most likely leaked through an employee, that has researched cinema visitors. Guess what? kino.to watchers did even go more often to the cinema than “no kino.to-users”. Mostly might have even just seen the beginning of a movie there and wanted to see the rest in the cinema.
I am coming to the point now: Of course, the industry didn’t want to publish that study and you hardly even hear about it anywhere since it doesn’t reflect what the industry is telling us.
In this case, “piracy” didn’t harm the industry at all or at such a large impact they are telling us it does. It might have even a positive influence in the kino.to / cinema case.
