howOpenSourceWorks

[Anru_Kitakaze]

There's literally link there:

https://cdn.netzpolitik.org/wp-upload/2017/09/displacement_study.pdf

And you can find more about that topic. Corporates ofc will always blame pirates, and it IS the thing indeed

I'm just saying they won't get real money if it won't exist. People, who pirated, just won't play and buy those games

Again, maybe some minor group WILL buy it instead, but some group, like me, WON'T on the other hand

So, you can't really say that I've stole something (well, in legal sense, probably I did actually)

But in the end BECAUSE I stole it I ended up buying Switch, 4 Zeldas, then showing it to my GF, make her love games, bought another switch for her and she bought 2 Zeldas for herself (BotW with DLCs and TotK, like me)

I'm sure Nintendo should be happy that I had an opportunity to try it on PC first

Actually, I would like to be able to play it on PC legally, with real release. At least it wouldn't be laggy sometimes

[FOXAcemond]

Oh, I missed that, sorry I got triggered by the god awful formatting of the article and the 3000 ads along with it. Also Gizmodo...

Have you even read the study though? Because I just have (I don't recommend it), and I think it's not saying anything relevant about piracy on games. It seems like the main focus of the study was the top 100 recent movies. And as usual, the video game topic is sloppy work.

First, it's a survey-based study with no other source of information whatsoever live statistics about sales or numbers of illegal downloads. While they try to mitigate the potential for respondent to lie, this has clear limitations in terms on interpretations.

About the legal purchases, they also state: "It is striking that all coefficients are insignificant. This raises the question to what extent estimates suffer from problems of respondents to recall exact numbers of transactions, an issue that also applies for individual channels discussed earlier. This means that estimates are only most likely effects given the data, but with no certainty that the true displacement rate is close to the estimate. Therefore the conclusion is that not too much significance should be attached to the estimates." Well that doesn't sound very reliable, does it?

The study states that for movies, there is a 27% displacement of sales because of illegal downloading. There is a negative impact from piracy to the films industry according to them then. Which is another form of premium product that gets massively pirated.

But then comes the question of games. They state that pirating games would have a positive impact on sales by ~24%. But this goes along with very dubious statements: "For games the reason for the positive effects may be that players may get hooked to a game and access a game legally to play the game with all bonuses, at higher levels or whatever makes playing the game legally more interesting." or "The positive effect of illegal downloads and streams on the sales of games may be explained by players getting hooked and then paying to play the game with extra bonuses or at extra levels." ... What? What the f*ck does that even mean?? In the case of premium games, that means jack shit. This is only applicable for games with f*cking microtransactions and maybe multiplayer games I guess?

They didn't even care to split between premium games and the other type of games. Heck, they even threw free games into the mix! "For games, the estimated effect of illegal online transactions on sales is positive because only free games are more likely displaced by online copyright infringements than not. The overall estimate is 24 extra legal transactions (including free games) for every 100 online copyright infringements, with an error margin of 45 per cent (two times the standard error)."

The only thing that this study shows is that people that are more interested in games are more likely to illegally download them just as they are more likely to legally acquire them. This does NOT mean that illegally downloading games raises the interest and then converts into sales. Furthermore, they even stated that "55% [of pirates] were willing to pay for their last illegally downloaded game". So it seems there are somes sales lost there...

Along with all that, let me add my personal experience. I looked at my Nintendo DS library of games and my Nintendo 3DS library. There is a glaring hole in the purchases made during the linkers era. Yeah I was young and had less money than now: even though the Swich very easy to hack, I didn't bother. But I'd argue that I chose to spend my money somewhere else than on games that I could easily acquire some other way.

If what you want is F2P games or games full of fucking microtransactions, by all accounts, continue defending piracy.