Good. This article actually makes me very happy. When customers can't vote with their opinions, they vote with their dollars. Hopefully EA gets the message. But if they don't, I'm fully content with never playing anything from EA again. Plenty of quality studios out there to choose from.
Unforuntely, the "vote with their wallets" argument doesn't really work because there's no proven correlation between piracy and loss of sales; there's no telling if people who pirate the game were actually going to buy it.
A majority of the pirates I have talked to pirate what they do because they had no intention of ever buying it, ever. If they could not have pirated, they simply would have done without it.
I'll admit to having pirated a few things, although the majority of the time its for games that I've either scratched the CD to hell, lost the CD Key, or otherwise have problems installing the game. When it comes to a game that requires me to constantly have a CD in the disk tray STILL or even worse makes it near impossible to play, I'd sooner have a working pirated version than deal with the headaches mentioned above.
I won't make any excuses for the things I pirate. But I will say this. The software I have pirated I never would have bought in the first place. Nor have I yet to pirate any software and in turn liked it so much I went out and bought it. The fact is the stuff I've pirated in the past has either been software that was so ridiculously expensive I'd have no way to acquire it legally, especially to just play with. Games, well they are games I didn't care enough to buy in the first place so I got them played them for a bit and like I expected grew tired of them.
On the music and movie front, totally different. My music and movie purchases haven't really changed at all, I still only have so much money. But I've made better purchases then I would have before. About the only tangible effect piracy has had on my spending habits is in reducing what I've spent on movie rentals.
I have used pirated games... at LAN's (not IC's mind you) because I refuse to buy 4 or 5 games and play it 2 times. If I like the game and it has long term playability, I buy it. Also... most of my pirating was when I was too broke to buy them,
Unforuntely, the "vote with their wallets" argument doesn't really work because there's no proven correlation between piracy and loss of sales; there's no telling if people who pirate the game were actually going to buy it.
True, but you have to admit that it is pretty ironic when publishers quote piracy statistics as a justification for Digital Rights Impingement (DRI), and then wholly discount those same statistics when evaluating the efficacy of same.
In addition to pirating games with DRI, we need to make sure we are purchasing games that do not have DRI. There are two sides to this.
I don't understand how or why people think pirating games makes them DRM free. Pirated games do not have DRM removed unless they happen to be rips of the installed product, you can in fact download no cd cracks that can turn legit products into the same thing. Because that is what pirated copies are repackaged images with no cd cracks included nothing more.
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the MPAA, RIAA, FBI, CIA and Obama will be at your door tomorrow. I gave them the addy.
Especially when it is snowing and you can't see chit
On the music and movie front, totally different. My music and movie purchases haven't really changed at all, I still only have so much money. But I've made better purchases then I would have before. About the only tangible effect piracy has had on my spending habits is in reducing what I've spent on movie rentals.
In addition to pirating games with DRI, we need to make sure we are purchasing games that do not have DRI. There are two sides to this.
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