Not blockbuster movies, no. But all the small indie games (not indie superhits your hear about!) both for iOS, Android and PC are typically have 10x, 100x more downloads on Torrents than purchases. Same goes for small label releases on Beatport, Bandcamp and Juno: they get hundreds of individual sales on those sites after the tracks are out on trackers. Don't know about movies though; but in the industries I'm familiar with, it's the little guys who get screwed mostly, not the big ones.

You just agreed with the fact that the motivation to produce new code didn't die - indie games have to be written in the first place to end up on torrent sites. Breaking the DRM and torrenting does not stop people from writing new ones.

Regarding the ratio of purchases/downloads, the argument goes back to the usual questions: 1) if the torrents didn't exist, how would the number of purchases change (i.e. are those lost sales, or were they never potential sales to begin with); and 2) what's the promotion channel for indie bands? I purchased a lot of music because I heard about it from someone who had a pirated copy. Now at least we've got Spotify discovery, Google music tailored radios, etc. working for us, but it's still not a lot.

1) Judging by experience of many friends in game industry, the moment a non-free game appears on torrents, sales go down.

2) For the mass audience, streaming solutions (99% of that being youtube), have completely replaced piracy. However, if you noticed, I'm not talking about mass audience, it stopped buying music anyway. I'm talking about Beatport, Juno — shops especially targeted at DJs, who have very different purchasing patterns, and usually different ways of learning about music as well. A significant part of modern electronic music labels have stopped doing digital releases altogether, going vinyl-only, and piracy is one of the main reasons.

>1) Judging by experience of many friends in game industry, the moment a non-free game appears on torrents, sales go down

In the case of most games, sales are steadily decreasing over time anyway - so it'd need to be a pretty marked step down to remove the possibility that they're simply following trend. It'd be interesting trying to account for that in an analysis.

Anecdotally, I have several friends who torrent games by default - but they legitimately wouldn't buy anyway (to quote "lol at buying videogames in the year of our lord 2016").

You just reminded me of how much of the 09 F9 11 02 9D number I still remember after all this time.

Everyone remembers that number, but you didn't use it for profit. I'm talking about purposefully reverse engineering a piece of software, to build an internal version of the solution, with direct impact to the inventor, not a global corporation. And it's not a web or a games or a movies or a piece of music.

Corporations are made of people, too. (Though in a way that somehow reminds me of Soylent green...)

Multi-billion dollar movie studios are much different than a small company releasing an Android App. They can handle the loss and make it up with licensing deals. The small company will go out of business in an already ridiculously difficult market.

It only pushes out the small companies and makes way for an app store environment where only large companies can survive. The exact same thing happened with the music industry over the past decade (filesharing was supposed to help the indy artist..or so many, like you, claimed)

Just by global warming being solved by you being cold today, right? You know, the world is a bit larger than Games/Movies/Musics/Web. Like seriously, try some fluid dynamics, or neutron leakage. Just because it's expressible in software, doens't mean that a script kiddie next door with his fingers still sticky from the unclosed pornhub tab has to have all my life's work.

^ THIS ^