Calling me stupid doesn't make you correct, didn't we already talk about that? The question is unprovable, anyway, because piracy is going to stay. And, yes, this is offtopic, but the whole arguing is offtopic, and since you did brought it up, here's my opinion on the subject:Quote fromSo you're saying that stealing games from the owners and manufacturers of it doesn't mean less sales? Then why are people so pissed about things like Limewire? That's stupid. As well as off-topic.
there are a lot of different categories of gamers, for one thing. There is always that sincere group that doesn't pirate games at all. There is also the group that doesn't have a lot of money. Or the group that plays multiplayer all along. Today, most games have considerable lost their quality. There is a lot of really bad games out there. There is also a lot of complicated games as well. You don't really know what you are buying. You come to a store and see all those games, but you know that if you buy a game, it's done, you can't bring it back. It's a whole $50, too. So certain people pretty much don't buy games at all, except really rarelly.
Casual gamers don't care. They buy whatever is most popular and be happy with it. Casual gamers are usually low-informed and are not very keen to torrent since they have no idea what torrent is anyway. Of course there is a number of them that do pirate games. That is pretty much the main money-damaging group out there.
Now, considering we have piracy. The gamers that don't have money and don't buy games start to pirate games. Doesn't make too much difference since they wouldn't be buying those games in the first place. What they do do, though, is raise the statistics, raise the game's popularity, go on forums and discuss it, make mods for it, etc... they add to the popularity in general. It's like Windows. 80% have Windows. But how many of them have a legal one?
And all those casual people that do buy games begin to hear about the games from the pirating people as well.
Moreover, the group that plays multiplayer takes another approach. You can't play a game multiplayer if you pirate it. While it doesn't really makes sense to buy a game if you pirated it first for single player, it makes perfect sense to buy it later to get into multiplayer, and that is what a lot of people do.
Again, this is just my "opinion". I don't have any statistics with me nor do I think they are even possible considering how the quality of games changed...
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I have introduced this topic into the previous link, please go there to continue.