Meanwhile, back when I had time to game heavily I would, as a matter of course, pirate every single game on PC because the experience was pretty much always superior, but I would also pre-order/buy on release the same games. I didn't pirate because I didn't want to pay for it, I pirated because I didn't want to deal with a single-player games requiring an always-on Internet connection and running kernel modules in Windows to do piracy/cheat detection, degrading system/game performance, and violating my privacy and the security of my system.

I own literally thousands of games on Steam, and thousands more outside of Steam. I also relentlessly pirated every game I wanted to play for decades. The way to "fix" piracy is by companies providing a superior user experience, not by beating their paying customers with sticks.

Sure, but you can’t seriously argue that there is a significant audience of people who’d refrain from buying games if they couldn’t pirate them.

I think there's a significant audience that simply wouldn't play games at all if they couldn't pirate them, because they can't realistically afford to buy them. In that case, I don't think piracy costs sales, it just allows involvement in a cultural phenomenon and art that would otherwise be inaccessible. I leave it up to the reader to decide if that's a positive outcome or not.

I'm sure you're not alone, but AFAIK every time it's actually been studied piracy appears to actually improve overall sales. Given the number of those studies that were leaked because they were run by DRM-happy companies, I'm inclined to believe them. So: You might not be the only one, but statistically your conclusion, perhaps counter-intuitively, doesn't hold out.

What do you think is the gold standard study on this subject?

I’ve seen this claim repeated often, but never with good evidence.

It also feel ripe for confounding factors. It seems likely that popular games will both sell well and be aggressively pirated. I'm not sure how obw could control this well enough to tease out cause and effect.

I half-agree with you.

The lack of availability of a pirate version of a game increases sales. This has been observed for many very popular games. Not so much for small and unknown ones.

At the same time, I have paid for games when they became available in Steam, years after I have played them, so I disagree on that point.

Sure, but Denuvo is pretty much exclusively used by the very popular games.

> At the same time, I have paid for games when they became available in Steam, years after I have played them, so I disagree on that point.

Presumably for vastly less money than they were charging at launch?

Yeah, I would say I paid about half of their original price.

> I’ve bought games because there were no cracks available, I don’t think I’ve ever bought a game after pirating it.

Plenty of others have pirated games and then paid for them. I often pirate games after paying for them. Piracy enables people to try games in genres they aren't willing to take a chance on at full price, it serves as a form of advertising giving people a chance to get into a game or franchise they might never have come across otherwise, and plenty of people (myself included) have refused to buy or play games until a crack is available.

>Plenty of others have pirated games and then paid for them.

I doubt a meaningful amount of people did this, but I’d love to see evidence to the contrary.

>and plenty of people (myself included) have refused to buy or play games until a crack is available.

Well, yeah, but it’s HN and we have all kinds of crazy people here who aren’t very representative of the overall market.

> I doubt a meaningful amount of people did this, but I’d love to see evidence to the contrary.

Multiple studies have shown that pirates are often the best customers. (see https://torrentfreak.com/pirates-spend-much-more-money-on-mu...)

It makes sense. If somebody is supper passionate about games, or music, or movies they might pirate to get early releases, alternate versions, and to try new things. Collectors may even want to keep their purchased media untouched/unopened or may just want easy access to their purchases.

I've pirated things I've purchased just because it was faster than ripping a CD myself or even going into the next room to take a DVD off the shelf and using the player.

> Multiple studies have shown that pirates are often the best customers. (see https://torrentfreak.com/pirates-spend-much-more-money-on-mu...)

But that’s a completely different claim, no?

Also, Torrentfreak is horrible quality agenda-pushing blogspam. I wouldn’t take their interpretation of a survey of unknown quality (which they didn’t even bother to link to) at face value.

And if we were to do that, perhaps the best explanation is that more technically oriented pirates were more likely to spend money on streaming services in 2016 than the average person. Perhaps piracy was just a proxy for tech savvy?