Dhruin
SasqWatch
That's true. Another problem is when piracy becomes the excuse for everything.
I don't really agree. Sure, game companies talk piracy up - why wouldn't they? It's a problem a lot of people don't care about, so they're trying to increase the visibility of the situation. In the boardroom, however, I don't believe they are so naive.
I'm not currently in an industry even remotely connected with software but when one of our products fails to garner the sales we wanted, we don't publically say "that widget sucked". We say "it's a competitive area of the market and we'll continue to refine our approach" or somesuch - but behind closed doors, we know exactly what happened. Just because the righteous 'net gamers want to hear "mea culpa" from game execs doesn't mean it will happen or that it should - they are the same as every other industry.
No matter how harmful it is however, I'm surprised the industry still hasn't managed to solve that problem. I mean the tools exist. We know how to prevent piracy. Other games showed how (yes I'm thinking MMOs, so what's stopping single player games from using the same model except for the monthly fee?). And yet countless publishers make stupid decisions and totally fail on how they fight piracy (like paying to include secuROM in their product only to have it removed by "fixed exe" once released, and the only people who really suffer in the end are the legit costumers).
Yeah...it's a solution for you, perhaps. How often have you seen people say they won't accept an online component for a single-player game? Plus the server and development expense with no ongoing income? Perhaps it will happen but it isn't the panacea you make it sound.
Is it perhaps possible the game execs have good estimates of what sales Securom protects, versus the license cost? I don't know - but it belies credulity that every significant publisher is wrong but the internet knows better.
That isn't to say they can't do things smarter and better, by the way.
A single pirate causes the industry a non-zero loss in revenue. Together, pirates cost the industry billions. No argument there.
But you appear to be suggesting here that arguments over the exact damage caused by piracy will themselves encourage piracy which would not otherwise have taken place. (That's how I read "enabling"; correct me if I'm wrong.)
Taken as a whole, how many lost sales do you suppose all of these arguments represent?
Yep, that's what I'm suggesting. And yes, I realise few will agree with me. Every time piracy is discussed, a whole bunch of people will defend piracy by proxy (not necessarily maliciously, of course). Game companies estimate piracy too high, they're all idiots for using Securom anyway, if they only used a free/ad-supported/whatever model instead of an outdated paradigm (have we had "nothing is removed from an inventory yet?" I didn't look).
Ultimately, these arguments serve to encourage and embolden a culture where piracy isn't that big a deal. In fact, the bastards probably deserve it.