I love stuff like this.  Calling that extensive, serious research cracks me up.  No studies showing sale trends in regards to piracy activity have ever shown significant rates of purchasing.  A few indie developers have actually bothered to look into it, and the numbers come out in the 10,000 to 1 range.  So yeah, a million plus people pirated Crysis, but odds are half of them just wanted to see if it would run, and maybe a thousand of them were actually going to buy the game if they couldn't get it for free.

PC developers have failed to understand their market.  Utterly.  They compare the glory days of PC gaming to the modern releases and get confused when the absurdly over stated market doesn't deliver on their generic crap game.  In the late 80's and early 90's, if you were a PC gamer, you were a PC enthusiast that had spent a fortune on this strange device most people couldn't see a point in having.  You had to actually learn shit to configure your system so it would run them.  The market was tiny as hell.

These days, grandpa has a "gaming" video card when he buys his $500 Dell.  My dad has three laptops that he carts around, they all have "gaming" video cards in them.  He's a programmer, and he couldn't care less about video games.  He has them because they're fast, and the faster they are, the smoother his environment runs.  The supposed market is huge, but most of it is fictitious.  A failure to understand their changing world.

The PC market has been shrunk down to zip because people are tired of buying a game and having to monkey with shit to get it running only to find a low quality, subpar product with zero innovation in it.  It's why I myself buy damn near nothing new these days.  I've been burned way too many times to get much before it hits bargain prices.  All the morons that can't use their routers are a lost market, they ditched it for the consoles.  The people that spend a week waiting for a patch to fix critical errors that prevent them from playing are a lost market too.  Why bother?

Piracy is a minor blip on the route to collapse, a non-issue.  The music industry is flourishing and has vastly higher piracy rates than PC games do.  The difference is the music industry didn't spend the last decade making you buy two thousand dollar machines so you could update your drivers fifty times a year and spend a few hours trying to figure out WTF is wrong with this or that installation all so you could play through it and discover a replay value of zero.  Running the cutting edge of graphics gave them lots of pretty pictures, and lots of pissed off customers.

Eventually, they'll get the picture, the casual game market is stomping the shit out of them in the profit area.  Marketing to enthusiasts just gets you an enthusiast market.  It's no surprise that console games do better when they have advertisements and ease of use that appeals more to the general market than the minor, freakishly devoted group of people that do crazy things like buy gaming magazines.

OK...assuming those baseless 'maybe's....that's STILL 1000 multiplied by whatever the game price was/is.

If that's trivial and irrelevant...what say YOU pay it....just to TOTALLY negate the lost sales through piracy?

Easy peasy.....

Oh, you won't?

Then why the fuck should the Game Owner/distributor?

An interesting set of stats just in:

"According to the web traffic measurement company, Alexa, MegaUpload.com received 10 percent of its user traffic from Internet users in France and 8.8 percent of traffic from Brazil, while only 7.3 percent of traffic came from the United States and 7.2 percent of traffic came from Spain. The majority of users were male, ages 18 to 34. Google Insights for Search and Google Trends also revealed that MegaUpload.com received a high concentration of search traffic from Europe and Latin America: the top 5 countries were Spain, France, Italy, Chile and Tunisia, with searches highly concentrated in the metro areas of Spain and France; the top five languages searches were conducted in Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and Polish." - http://dailycaller.com/2012/01/21/majority-of-megaupload-traffic-came-from-france-not-us/#ixzz1k9HMhGnC

Making up my mind is something I'll do when people like you actually bother to find out whether it hurts you or not.  To this day, I've never seen a consumer questionnaire that included piracy in the list of why I bought something, and I've never been able to find statistics from someone having done one I wasn't privy to.

I expect one was done at some point, and the results were problematic.  I am paranoid however, and cognizant of my issues, so I do recognize that publishers may just be unbelievably stupid and can't think to add it into their surveys.(Edit: Thinking everyone to be stupid is likely another one of my issues, just thought I should add this just in case the population really isn't.)  To that effect, I've suggested it when the opportunity arose.  I'll do so again here and now.  Put one out with the next game Stardock sells, and show me that nice big zero in the piracy column.

There are numerous studies that have shown the pirate crowd on average to be well above the norm in expenditures.  You conveniently ignore their implications, I do not.  I know for a fact that they do contribute, if only the sales I myself have given after being talked into wasting the time required to look beyond this or that absurdly boring demo.

What I don't know, and what you presume to be inconsequential when you blast piracy for robbing you of sales in your combative, one sided diatribes against anyone that dares to contradict your view that piracy is the bane of mankind, is how much it contributes.  Suppressed studies and historical trends imply that they far outweigh the losses.

Oh, crap...that's the continued and predictable bleatings of the pirate attempting to justify his value to humanity.

The only benefit to society of 'theft' is the subsequent need for the security industry...[eg Locksmiths].

So...

Crime is a necessity otherwise poor little Locksmiths and Alarum manufacturers etc will be out of work.

Jolly good show...

Interesting how some people associate freedom with being allowed to steal.

It is not about "being allowed to steal" but more about explain why some of the "stealing" happen...

By the way, here, it is not illegal to download... but it is illegal to upload... so, at law level, i don't steal...

More, we pay tax on all blank media support ( tape, videotape, cd, dvd, etc )... money who go for the "author right" ( who in fact feed the big media business and not really the author )... these tax allow us to make a backup copy of media that we legally purchase... unfortunaly, in numerous case these right is denied due to copy protection...

If media/game/software business don't wish to know why some people are "stealing" their material, how in the hell they wish to correct/solve the problem...

Sure, hardcore pirate and people without money from so third African world will never buy the product pirated... because of lack of money or because of bad understanding of the word "free"... know the same problem in the open source world where plenty people think that "free" software mean "free of charge" when in fact it mean "freedom"...

Anyway, media/game/software business complain that they loose sales due to piracy... in the majority of the case, it is not true... these who think that "free" mean "free of charge" will continue to seek illegal version... these too much poor for pay ( plenty of people earn only 20$ month on these planet ) will not be able to pay for it... other like me, who was not able to buy the product will have buy it anyway when it will have become available and if pirated version have not existed, i have certainly choose a other product and never become a legit Stardock customer...

That Jafo use the "criminal do not tel the truth" for justify the lack of stat research about piracy is wrong... best to make comment based on multiple myth that seek a truth who will maybe not be the one truth that the media/game/software business claim to be the right one...

Hey, if tomorrow, people who pointy ear are not allowed to buy game anymore, don't you will feel that it hurt your freedom... if no legal alternative exist, will you not feel that business treat you like a second class citizen...

By the way, if you have take the time to read the 10 page article ( link in a JCRabbit post ), one of the solution proposed for fight piracy is :

Stop delaying releases by region. Releasing games earlier in some regions is probably the single biggest incentive for people to pirate a game and contribute to day-zero piracy... So release all games globally at approximately the same time, ... if you're serious about slowing down day-zero piracy.

I ask nothing more... when a product is released to have it available worldwide, so i can spend my hard earned money on the product in place of use a pirated copy during the waiting time... if media/game/software company can work together at the world level for hunt piracy, why they cannot work together for release their product everywhere ??? If some alien from Mars wish to buy your product, why make it difficult for them... what the hell, allow them to spend their space $$$ on your product in place to turn them to the illegal market called piracy...

Patience just doesn't seem to be an option when "instant gratification" is offered... so what's right or wrong, legal or illegal (and it is illegal to receive stolen goods) no longer matters because you can justify or rationalize the illegal act?

Thoumsin....if 'Region Restrictions' can be demonstrated as racial discrimination they would be overturned in an instant.

The reality is that they are not.

OT

Here in Illinois all that stuff is just politics as usual.

"Illinois-Where the Governors make the license plates"

I think everyone gets to involved in this whole.. stop pipa sofa stuff.  

I know it's risky to support big brother.  But it's really the right thing to do.  What incentive is there to create something when it will just be "pirated" stolen from you.  

More reward = more Intellectual property fostered and created.

I'm guilty of "sharing" copyrighted stuff in the past.  And if they started putting more people in jail for doing it.  I wouldn't do it.  I don't see it as a crime.  I see it as speeding... which is a crime.. but not really lol.

Guys.  The patriot act is already in effect.  If they wanted to all they have to do is claim megaupload and torrent sites threaten national security... and the people behind them would join the ranks of "the Vaporised"    

I know the wording of the bills is ambigious, but hey, maybe we should have that as our battle cry.. not this hacker revolution.. anti government.. anti the man, pinko commi, what's yours is mine crap, to each according to their need.   

I very well may write a screenplay or a book, or a short scifi story one day.    (when i have a midlife crisis and no longer wish to squander my godgiven talents.. till then, it's swtor and wow for me.)

And if God forbid i create something worthwhile and marketable, i don't want people reading a sample, saying.. hmm.. interesting, then hopping on a torrent site and downloading all my work for no money... just b/c some dill whole, took pictures of every page of the work of literature and uploaded it to a site like megaupload.