Hi,

I have to totally disagree with the above post. Come on, you think the publishers/distributers don''t lose money because they haven''t made a few boxes and such? What about the developers. They definately lose money, through wages/resources. We are not talking about theoretical money at all.

What about the publishers who would have gone through all the statistics and figures and paid the developers to make the game, then only to find that their figures are thrown up in the air by pirates? Ok, so maybe it doesn''t hurt them as much as they say, but it does happen, not in theory either.

To be honest, I really can''t see how you think that these people who deal in warez are ''viewing the game with purchase in mind'' whoever told you that one is having a laugh with you.

This is not an attack on you personally, but more about my point, which is, pirates are wrong, not only morally but legally also. If you support these guys, or say that they are not technically stealing, well wake up. I really hope this sort of thing never happens to you guys, but if it did it would be interesting to see how you view it afterwards......


Marc.

quote:
When a shoplifter removes a product from a shelf without paying for it, the publishers paid money to print the boxes, manuals and CDs, the distributors paid money to warehouse and ship the things, the retailers paid money for rent and staff to unpack the thing and put it on a shelf, and all of that went to naught because some wank stole it. So all the money that went into physically manufacturing the product, moving it through the distribution chain and making it available to the customer has been lost.

When a pirate downloads a product illegally from a warez site, does it cost the publisher anything? Does it cost the distributor anything? Does it cost a retailer anything?

No.

You pay for the everything, physically manufacturing the product, moving it throught the distribution chain and shipping it all cost stuff you agree? What about paying someone? That also costs something, does the programmer have to work for the pirate to get the game? Of course, was the programmer paid to work for the part of the game he required (read all of it) for the pirate to get the game? Yes. So where does the money come from? Who should pay for it?

quote:
In both cases, the publisher and developer are deprived of rightfully earned income, but in the latter case, they were not obliged to spend money making the product that was pirated as they were in the first case of the shoplifted product.

They weren''t obliged, but they had already spent the money.

quote:
In many cases, pirates will treat warez as extended test drives of a product. Some will end up buying the product, in which case the act of piracy ended up costing nobody anything except possibly the interest that would have been earned by the purchase price over the time between the piracy and purchase, which is not likely to be more than a few pennies. In the case of shoplifting, how many shoplifters are ever going to legally buy a product they already unlawfully possess?

So why should the pirates be allowed to have an extended test drive of a product?

But if the pirate takes the game illegally and decides that they don''t like the game, they won''t buy it, yet if they had of obeyed the law, then they would have forked out $$ for a game they don''t like. Is this fair? Yes. There are plenty of resources for picking out the good games, online reviews, demos and so on. And the truth in advertising laws (or maybe some other laws... not sure, I don''t do law ) mean you won''t get any less than is on the box.

Think about this:
Person A produces Product A which costs money to produce.
Person B buys Product A and sells it for the cost to produce it plus a bit more
Person C buys the product off person B.
Person B now has the money to pay for the Product and keep a bit
for their own troubles.
Person A was paid
Person B was paid
Person C got a product.
Wonderful.

Now what if it went more like this:
Person C steals Product A from Person B
Person B now doesn''t have the money to pay for the product, so they are at a loss
Person A sold the product to person B, so they got paid

or if it went like this:
Person C steals Product A from Person A
Person A loses money as product A cost them money
Person B loses money as the profit they would have made from selling product A to person C is no longer there.


Person A is the factory/games developer
Product A is a tin of food/game
Person B is the shop
Person C is the consumer


See how more people end up worse off when the consumer steals straight from the manufacturer (piracy)?

See how it doesn''t matter what the product is?

quote:
I don''t support piracy. I just dislike physical theft more.

That''s an opinion, so I can''t really prove that wrong, but I urge you to think more about what the differences and similarities are, and perhaps you will see differently.

Trying is the first step towards failure.

Game magazines can tell you if a game is good or not, and usually they''re pretty close. Usually a pirate won''t pay for something after its been pirated. Thats the whole point of pirating, not to test it out, or use it for educational purposes but to get it without paying for it. Sure they might not even buy it even if they couldn''t get a pirated version, but I think if someones going to spend the time and energy to find a game on the internet and download it they must want it a little,at least enough to shell out a few bux, and to find it and download it they must have heard it was pretty good. For the most part the majority of pirated games are top sellers.
Im pretty sure that there probably are more reasons for piracy, eg: a 10 year old can''t buy an M rated game cuz his parents won''t let him so he downloads it off the internet, he was willing to pay for it but couldn''t. Though that still doesn''t make it right.

Well, as someone stated, piracy existed ever since the first commercial product. So it''s not like if game companies were not aware of it. They know their sales will get hurt because of piracy. If they can''t find a solution to it, then maybe they could start taking it into account, for the company that could mean avoiding huge losses (not saying this is the best solution, but at least it could help a bit).

Also, here''s the way I bought most of the games I have on my Playstation:

Person A produces Game A
Person B buys Game A off Person A
Person C buys Game A off Person B
Person C beats the game in two days and return it to Person B to get a partial refund
Person D buys Game A off Person B as a second-hand product

Person A is still the games developer
Person B is still the shop
Person C is still the consumer
and Person D is me, which got a LEGAL copy that I LEGALLY bought, yet the game developer didn''t a buck out of this. Now tell me the difference it makes with copying the game off a friend''s copy, or getting it from the net ?

Not to mention that I rarely play more than a week to the games I buy, because I get bored... maybe developers could improve their games durability by adding more hidden features or stuff like that, just like on older games, so that their replay value get worth buying the game. It doesn''t cost them much and it makes everybody happy