EU Commission: "No evidence that piracy affects video games sales"

RPGFool said:

You asked about Geralt; said you didn't understand. So I quoted CDPR to help you understand. But CDPR isn't actually alone.

Larian Studios and other indies for example, also try to treat the gamer in a good way (e.g., making upgrades available to game owners) to encourage game sales. In the past Bethesda has released game modding tools after game releases, many times actually, to build good will with the gamer (consumer) that also probably converted some pirates to game owners and enhanced game sales. In earlier years, Bioware released mod tools to gamers, and undoubtedly generated goodwill and enhanced sales as a result. Obsidian at one point released free upgrades to KotOR 2… and so on.

Glad to see btw that we do happily agree CDPR has an excellent approach on piracy.

Best regards.

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Yes, about this we are in agreement, to gather goodwill and be nice is definitely a good way to combat piracy, some people who would otherwise pirate the game would definitely buy it because they feel loyalty towards a company. I guess what we are not in agreement about is that piracy is good for the industry and that copy protection is not necessary at all.

Online games and console games still has much higher sales than offline PC-games, I still think piracy is a big part of this issue. As pirating console games and online games is much harder. My favourite games are offline PC-games ( which are finished on release ) , so they are the ones I think suffer the most from this.

The day developers/publishers start ignoring piracy is the day I stop paying for games… why the hell should I pay when some other freeloading PoS gets it for free?

I personally don't give a rat's ass about the overall financial consequence of piracy but if this report is based on EU countries then the vast majority of the people it covers CAN afford to buy games if they choose to (which of course is not the case if you include countries where the legal price of a game is close to an entire month's salary for regular people), and in that setting piracy becomes merely a question of choice…. a choice, not necessity.

There are plenty of other things I could spend my money on where there is no "choice" of whether I would like to pay or not, so if they start labelling piracy as "okay" then I stop paying too.

Oh and I totally agree with Gothic: There is no doubt (IMO) that all the "always-online", microtransactions and similar elements are alternative methods of DRM to try to compensate for piracy (I'm not saying that I necessarily think these are good alternatives) and not, as Joxer believes, something made to piss him off personally.

Oh well, age old discussion