How bad is piracy?

I'm a pirate AND I'm Proud of that! :D

I will again post this comic.

This comic explains a lot.

It doesn't, however, take into play DRM or people who buy the game after they have pirated it.

Meh for me. A lot of my friends all pretty much pirate any game. I really doubt they would buy them even if they couldn't pirate them. Now that pc games no longer need the CD in the drive and there is steam and other programs to manage my game keys and games I have been buying them. I used to also pirate PC games that didn't have demos to make sure they would run well on my machine so I didn't waste money. I hate when games don't have demos. I held off on buying Diablo 3 for 3 months because I couldn't get a starter edition code and wasn't sure it would run on my PC. I bought a new PC recently and bought the game about a month ago and installed it on my old one just to see and it ran just fine on it.
Now I only pirate a few games that are no longer sold new at stores or through digital like Warcraft 2 and that Diablo 1 expansion. 100% of what I pirate now is out of print and any money towards it would go towards resellers anyways.If they ever went on sale again then I would buy them and delete my pirated copy like I just did with my old FFVII pirated copy (which was better since all the mods that worked with it_ since it just came out through square.

I pirate a game for 3 reasons.

1. If it's a pricier game I'll pirate it to make sure I can run it, and make sure I like it if it's a series I've never played.
2. To get around annoying ass DRM, mostly GFWL games since I have endless amounts of problems with it.
3. The game is so old/obscure that finding even a digital copy of it for sale is a pain.

All non-piracy fags,

Tell me how about D2 was hurt by piracy

I used to be a hardcore pirater, I would pirate EVERYTHING I can possibly get. I would literally use my Steam account just to look up new games to pirate. Though as you grow older, things change a little I suppose.

Nonetheless, I only pirate now to try a game to make sure my crappy computer can actually run it or if it's a game that isn't available in America and costs like $100 (I'm looking at you Visual Novels D:). Honestly, I only feel bad for pirating indie games, games that I REALLY love, and from companies that I care about.

The people who pirate things aren't people on this forum, it's mostly people who just want free moves (I'm looking at the facebook addicts :|).

I don't just straight up go "OKAY IMMA PIRATE THIS GAME TO TRY OUT". I actually look at the game, read up about it a bit, and see gameplay videos to ensure that I actually might have a chance of purchasing it.

The biggest pro-pirating argument for me is drm. Right now i have games sitting in my steamaccount that i cant get to play, simply because theres a secondary drm in place that crapped out on me.
Next up is the lack of demos for many games. Would you buy a car you didnt testdrive?
Then ofcourse theres the region restrrictions - those are just stupid and pointless. Personally i havent had issues with this, but i still think that if theres a restriction in your region - pirating the game is pretty much fair game.
Last but not least - the price! Some games here cost in excess of 100$. Now combine that with the lack of a demo, and the drm-hell, and you will get piracy.

Piracy Origins= high game price, no methods to purchase (and that includes retail copies not available in many countries), economy(not everyone has a super NASA computer and extra cash to throw away for entertainment and have enough to cover basic needs)

It is 40 points bad.

Also, when the game is by UBIsoft, it's good because it's the only way to make the game work anyway.

I used to pirate pretty much all my games, up to the point when I got a debit card and a Paypal account. Buying games became much more convenient after that, so I stopped pirating them.

I don't pirate and I'm against piracy. I think it's okay to get a pirated version if you own the game, and it's borderline to use "piracy as demo" (it's questionable how far you can play and still consider it a demo). Other uses fall under "entitlement", i.e., people having a notion that they have a right to use something for free that others are paying for, and do so against the wishes of those who produce that product. This egocentric point of view is wrong.

piracy is not all that bad that companies try to tell you it is, for a start there have been research done within the area and it has been proven that is actually boosts sales. and secondly look at any chart over the last 2 years it shows the amount of piracy had gone up massive but the amount of sales have not really dropped.

piracy is just fine
i mean there are 2 cases

1 the guy who pirates becouse he is NEVER going to buy the product in first place so there is NO sale lost

2. the guy who pirates first, tries the game and if he likes it he buys it

end

not that bad actually

the only thing i pirate these days are japanese doujin games,i just cant afford to fly to comiket to buy it in person or pay $100 dollars to have a disk shipped to me in 2~3 months which may or may not be confiscated by customs for being dem "japanese pr0n games"

thanks to steam i buy all my PC games original =)

I personally think pirating software is wrong. But films are a different story because I go to the cinema and pay a ridiculous amount of money just to sit in front of a screen.

its not bad. and those who are against piracy should mind their own business.

I pay for games that deserve my money (3 examples): hl2, portal 2, bioshock
Pirate games that come the same every year just to play the campaign: cod, battlefield, nfs

I pay for games that deserve my money (3 examples): hl2, portal 2, bioshock
Pirate games that come the same every year just to play the campaign: cod, battlefield, nfs

The way I see it, the only time piracy is acceptable is when there is no longer any way to obtain the game legally in a way that would benefit the developer. For example, the first Diablo game, it is no longer supported on Blizzard's website.

If specific case = lost sale then yes else no.

the worst part is nobody wants to be honest about it. you have content owners calling it piracy and likening it to stealing (which is inaccurate and purposely misleading) and pretending that every illegal copy is a lost sale. then you have the the other side who also calls it piracy and often pretends that illegal copies turn into sales if the product is good enough or that those copies wouldn't have been sales anyway.

wouldn't it be great if we could just call it what it is instead of trying to link it with something that's more inherently bad, and also admit that some people obtain illegal copies just because they can (and why pay for it if you can get it for free and whoever you got it from still has it so it's not stealing)

I see the problem that developer have to be paid for their work.

But I'm not understand, why i have to pay 50 or more bucks for an AAA Title. So I download decentralized backups for testing and have fun. After a price drops to what a want (what the game have to cost for me) I buy it.

Make the math:
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is 59,99 euro in Bulgaria via Steam...
The minimum monthy payment here is about 200 euro a month...
Electricity, water and other important stuff are REALLY expensive and cost a total of about 100-150 euro(that may not be 100% correct since the currency here is levs)...
We still need money for food in the end...

So... how the hell are we supposed to buy that or any other overpriced game?

i occasionally pirate old games or games i have or disk but lost