I'm sure it has been said before, but most pirates only pirate things that they did not intend to pay for in the first place. This represents no lost sales for the company and instead bolsters their popularity. The Microsoft CEO (whose name escapes my mind right now) once said something along the lines of "If they are going to pirate something, I would rather they pirate ours". He has a point; if windows piracy was impossible, people would simply switch to free alternatives like Ubuntu Linux or, worse yet, a cheaper, paid alternative from a different company.

Software bundles like Audodesk _____, Visual Studio, etc. cost a shitload and most people other than the ones specializing in those areas would never pay for them. Pirates for these kinds of programs are going to be independent users who want to try out the software for noncommercial purposes; without piracy, people would, again, switch to free alternatives like Dev C++, blender, etc. This represents absolutely no gain in sales from the company's perspective, and a loss in popularity due to a smaller userbase, legitimate or not. For games, this represents a much smaller community size, and we all know by now that a large active gaming community is a huge factor in deciding whether or not someone buys the game. No SCBW piracy would most likely mean significantly lowered interest in mapmaking. How many of us SENers actually paid the full retail price for SCBW when it first came out?

tl;dr: Piracy doesn't hurt. It's not stealing, it's copying. No one loses anything from piracy, because the pirates wouldn't have bought the game anyway, and pirates will actually contribute to the game company in a positive manner because they help expand the community.

Also, this:



'nuff said.

EDIT>
I consider it a crime to listen to that 128kbps shit. I highly suspect youtube audio quality is capped as an anti-piracy measure.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jul 25 2011, 2:58 pm by Aristocrat.

Considering I was about 7 at the time, had no idea what pirating was, and my parents bought games for me on Christmas/birthdays, I'm not sure how to answer this. I didn't personally pay for it, but my parents didn't pirate it; they bought the game at the store. A better question would be how many SEN members were pirating games in 1998.

Also, your whole argument has been discussed dry in two full cycles now. Unless you want to go back and quote the concluding arguments and build against that, I don't think we need to repeat everything a third time. Maybe it's just time to close the topic.