No, that’s the EXCUSE for it. As has been pointed out in this thread, piracy seems to have little effect on sales. The point of ranting about piracy is that it allows one to claim that sales are bad due to piracy, and not due to people just not wanting to buy your game.
Just because people point it out doesn’t make it an accurate statement. Seems like a comparison of the same title on console vs pc, sales vs piracy stats could confirm or deny the accuracy of the statement.
I did some googling and found this article regarding piracy:
http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_4.html
After some analysis of sales vs piracy, here’s a quote:
“Piracy of the PC versions is orders of magnitude above that of the console versions in the cases we examined. For example Call of Duty 4 has five times as many downloads on the PC version as it does on the XBox 360 and PS3 versions combined. As we will see in the PC vs. Console section, this also appears to line up with its apparent sales ratio: five times as many sales on consoles than on PC. Similarly, Fallout 3 has almost ten times as many PC downloads as it does console downloads, supported by its general sales ratios”
This implies that piracy does indeed reduce sales.
Not really, unless they start adding DRM to console games that damages them or renders the game inferior.
It could also mean DRM reduces sales don’t you think?
IIRC, shareware also had an 1-in-10 rate, so the same 90 percent “piracy”. Of ten people who downloaded it, a couple tried it, forwarded it, and one out of ten took the trouble of paying the maker a fee.
Shareware was different - it was generally more equivelant of today’s demos. You typically got a portion of the game and had to pay for the rest - playing a shareware game without paying the owner wasn’t inherently piracy.
I’m sure it does both, it reduces it for some (myself included) and increases it for others, but the net effect appears to be an increase based on the data from that article.
When comparing 2 types of platforms, one where DRM was easily circumvented (PC) and one where DRM was not easily circumvented (console):
PC download to Console download ratio approx. 5 to 1
PC sales to Console sales ratio approx. 1 to 5
To me, that says that effective DRM increases sales.
It would if that was the one and only difference between PCs and consoles, but its not. Consoles are aimed towards a younger market who typically spend a lot more cash on things like videogames and music. Console games are less buggy than PC games, theres no expectation of constant patches so by and large the CD you get has to work as is or the game will fail, PC games usually release as bug riddled messes that should have stayed in development several more months and a launch day patch is pretty much a given just to get them to work. Console games require no lenghty installations, contain no DRM and have no requirements (meaning if you own an xbox 360 you can play every single xbox 360 game ever, owning a computer does not guarantee it can run every game you want). I’m sure the difficulty in pirating console games helps bump their sales a little but its most certainly not the main reason games sell better on consoles.
Can I use this post when I want to explain “rationalizing” to my little girl? 
Of course piracy decreases sales - theft is what piracy is all about.
I never claimed otherwise, i just don’t see any compelling evidence that a lot of people who pirate a game would have otherwise bought it.
There is no effective DRM on the PC, so your point is moot. Not that you’ve made your case, but anyway.
I was including copy protection in “DRM” which console games do have.
Theoretical question: If you couldn’t pirate a game due to some sort of technology, but that technology did not get in the way of fair use for things you purchased, do you think there would be more, fewer or the same number of sales of games?
I guess i should have been more specific, by no DRM i mean “no DRM that screws up your computer or gets in the way of using the game you own”.
That one is “1 to 5” and the other “5 to 1” is a meaningless coincidence. It would only make sense if there were the same number of downloads as there were sales. Since there aren’t, they simply produce different piracy percentages. The only thing it tells us is that console games have a lower piracy rate than PC games.
Or it could just mean that PC gamers pirate more than console gamers, perhaps because it’s part of the PC gaming culture.
DING! DING! DING!
PC gamers made their own bed with this DRM shit now they have a bunch of publishers who have jumped ship to the more stable, more profitable consoles and the ones that are left making games for PC load them up with obscene amounts of DRM in the hopes of fending off the warez kids.
You did it to your selves PC gamers. Now stop bitching so I can get back to my wide selection of killer games on my 360 in peace!
This was maybe true about 20 years ago, with the NES. Now nearly every XBox 360 and Playstation 3 is connected to the Internet, there’s constant patching going on, and there is an expectation that the game will be improved over its lifetime.
And launch day patches just to get a PC game to work? Man, you’re buying some shit games. This isn’t the norm at all.
Oh God, now you’ve done it. You’ve mentioned the “T” word.
I’m sorry but this is just not true, my brother owns a 360 and a ps3 and before that he owned a regular xbox and a ps2. Every single game hes ever bought hes been able to pop in the cd and start playing with no patching required.
Don’t know. I would speculate there would be more, but I have no data to back it up. As I said though, it’s moot. There is no such technology. Create one and you can earn loads of money I’m sure.
There are numerous reasons developers prefer consoles, most of which have nothing to do with piracy or PC gamers or anything like that.
And the companies who load up their games with DRM in an attempt to stop the “warez kids” (not sure why you think they’re kids) are simply morons. It doesn’t work, they all get cracked, it accomplishes nothing at all except pissing off some customers who bought your game.
PCs and consoles are converging rapidly anyway, indeed most consoles pretty much are just computers, so this problem is going nowhere. If all games go to consoles, that is where the “warez kids” as you call them, will turn their attention, and the problem will afflict that platform instead. Indeed, it’s already pretty easy to pirate console games, the only problem is you can’t play online. Kinda like the situation with the PC.
What PC games are you playing that are literally unplayable without patching? It really isn’t a common problem anymore, certainly not for AAA games.