Re:Gabe Newell: Game "Piracy Isn't About Price"
by cookiecaper on Friday November 25, 2011 @11:20PM
(#3279047)
Don't forget that many people with licenses eventually end up "pirating" the software they use. It is usually just much easier to download an ISO than to attempt to rummage around and find your CDs and then rummage around and find your manual for the key. Also, the pure version of the software usually installs crap and/or bloatware. Additionally, I will sometimes be at a different location where the CDs are not available but where I need to use the software. This even holds true with many digital download platforms (but not Steam) -- they will make you create a username and password, they will make you jump through a bunch of hoops to download something you've already bought, which is complete BS and in that case I just download a torrent and end up using the "pirated" version even though I paid for the software.
I have a license for WOG and have downloaded it from a torrent at least twice, for instance.
Re:Gabe Newell: Game "Piracy Isn't About Price"
by DanBC on Saturday November 26, 2011 @04:35AM
(#3279506)
> [. . .] and play them each for a small amount of time
Or even never play them. There are a small[1] of people who collect all ROMs of some (or all) console systems, with no intention of playing them.
[1] I agree that in terms of overall piracy this is a tiny number.
The Wolfire team suggests (http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/05/Another-view-of-game-piracy) that a better metric would be proportion of the gaming audience that pirates. For example, if 5% of the gaming audience pirates, but pirates download 50x as many games on average as legitimate users purchase, then it'll look like >70% of users pirate games, when the real number is 5%.