Is that true, though? I'd expect that the people who only download cracked games will wait for the game to be cracked and up for download, no matter how long that takes. The people who download games to trial them and then buy the ones they like will likewise wait until they can give it a shot before potentially wasting money. The last group, those who buy legit copies of games at or near release, are going to buy it no matter what.

When it comes to watching movies, I will take the path of least resistance. Not even for moral or philosophical reasons; I'm just lazy. Netflix/Amazon/[streaming site] is easier than pirating is easier than buying a Bluray disk at a store, so that's the order I'll do things in if I want to see the film badly enough.

I don't even own a DVD/Bluray player. If I can't find it on a streaming site (whether subscription service like Netflix, or buying it, ala Amazon) Then... :-/ Hoist the Jolly Roger.

It's frustrating wanting to give money for something, and not being able to.

I have a friend who has an approach I like. He buys the Blu-Ray from Amazon, usually used if possible, then immediately goes and pirates it on to his home media server. When the disc arrives, he tosses it in a box that sits in the corner and never touches it again.

This way he made a legal purchase and exchanged money, but still gets a DRM-free high quality copy to move around to his various devices.

That's a really cool approach, but taking the time to rip the disc means you get the extras and other features that were on the disk, along with a significantly higher quality encode of the content.

If the focus is on quantity and diversity, I can understand just getting a decent-bitrate MKV or MP4 of just the film, but it might be worth it to see if there are Blu-Ray rips of the media in question "around" before just grabbing what's out there; at the very least, complete (and perhaps even decrypted, since that's finicky) rips have reasonable value on private trackers.

I'm guessing this sort of thing has probably already been taken into account.

There actually are people who would pirate a game but then buy it if it's not available for download. I suspect they're a fairly small group though. Too bad we don't know how large it is in comparison to the group of people who don't purchase before they get to try a (likely pirated) copy, or the people who don't buy games with DRM (I'm mostly in this group).

I agree in principle, but I think the adage that "Every day that a new videogame stays off Piratebay is an extra day of full revenue" is a bit of a false equivalency.

There is almost a controlled experiment here (similar data to many economics papers).

For each movie, copies are released over time and a correlation can be looked at between quality of rip, distribution by file sharing, and box office receipts.

That would actually be an interesting study.

The "problem" is that it would obviously show that the impact of torrenting is much less than one lost sale per download. And reflect that even the downloads that are lost sales are offset to some degree by the people who download to sample and then buy when they otherwise wouldn't have, and the free promotion from the people who downloaded it talking about it with other people etc.

The result is that the likely "negative impact" would be small or could even be positive, which isn't the narrative Hollywood wants to spin. Because they actually want DRM for entirely different reasons than that, specifically because it allows them to control content delivery and thus prevent independent content from being displayed on equal footing with big studio content.

> a new videogame stays off Piratebay is an extra day of full revenue.

Yes and now, You cannot say that people who pirate games are necessarily going to buy the game if it were not "free". That's the argument used by the industry to justify DRM and it makes no sense whatsoever since the market would be like 100 times bigger if you calculate things this way. It would not.

> The point of DRM is to make that time, motivation, and quality equation not make sense. Every day that a new videogame stays off Piratebay is an extra day of full revenue.

This can't be true as written, as long as people expect it to show up there eventually. Every day it stays off piratebay is an extra day of revenue intermediate between full and "already out on piratebay" levels.

The DRM works because the value of these things appears to be greatly time-sensitive -- most of the cost is already getting-it-right-away, which DRM can protect, rather than the fundamental timeless value of the product, which DRM can't protect.

It's a great idea, but I don't know if it's like that for video games though. They may earn more money, but when they fail to code a proper backend and the launch breaks their system, they lose even more. Like for the last SimCity.