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.
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.
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.
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.
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.