[tossedaway334]

its perfectly rational if it increases sales, there are indications this is the case with PC piracy, especially with titles that would otherwise lack exposure.

Its also rational if it allows them to move away from custom designs entirely, and save a truckload of money, more than they lose to the nebulous spectre of "piracy".

[BoorishBears]

But the parent post references AAA games. In reality "piracy is organic advertisement" is a tired excuse. Large titles are already spending spending large portions of their budgets on advertising (sometimes more than their development budgets!), and small titles get shafted by petty piracy all the time (see mobile gaming, I've known multiple devs whose games show up on pirated APK sites before their main sites on google).

People usually cite narrow cases where an AAA game succeeds in spite of lacking DRM as if piracy helped, or games that didn't spend anything on marketing and get big through marketing, which is an exceedingly rare lottery to win.

No one ever cites games like Crysis 3 which had been pirated more times than it ever sold days before release

[izacus]

Oh come on, people sell (and have sold) in millions of copies through PC gaming history, even though piracy was "rampant".

The major boost in sales was improving the sales process (Steam and similar stores) and dropping prices, not attacking legitimate users with DRM rootkits. People keep repeating this DRM suppor mantra when up until now there STILL hasn't been any good proof that it does any good. If anything, it only damaged sales due to people not buying games that randomly stop working when internet fails.

[dageshi]

It seems to do a pretty good job of protecting the game from piracy when it's at its most expensive. Numerous companies now seem to be implementing DRM for launch and then quietly remove it after 3-6 months once it's fallen in price. That leads me to believe that they think piracy is a real issue at launch and not one later when prices fall.

[chii]

but those pirated copies _would not_ have been sold had there been no piracy. I argue that piracy doesn't decrease sales, just increases the amount of utility that society gets from software.

[BoorishBears]

I hear that all the time and I don't buy it. Denuovo is a DRM being sold on the premise that there are in fact people who will buy a game if it's not cracked at release, and in places dedicated to monitoring games with their DRM plenty of people have admitted they bought games they really wanted.

Piracy will obviously cause some non-zero number of people not to buy games because it turns a games cost from a price, to a suggested donation.

"I'll pay if I like it" isn't the profit model a publisher who puts out a multimillion dollar game wants to support.

Not to mention, paying for something can be a great motivator. It's a lot easier to dismiss a a game saying "I wouldn't have wanted to pay for this" at the slightest flaw when you haven't paid for it.

[prodmerc]

I'd say that is not true anymore - it used to be pretty hard to buy games before (with retarded regional restrictions and no Steam, etc). So people couldn't be assed to buy a game if they could not find a cracked one.

But today, you can do it with a few clicks, so if someone really wants to play a game because it looks cool/interesting/whatever, I'd say a lot of people will just pay for it if they can't find the crack.

[Fnoord]

Nevermind a game is quicker to download than install and complete the first level. Games get pirated and then not played. Heck, I got an entire Steam library of unplayed games.