How bad is piracy?

Might be interesting read for some :

• Saving a penny -- pirating the Humble Indie Bundle
• Another view of game piracy

pirating EA games is the only pirating I support.

gamers want to play all games without paying 40/60€ for each one. 10 to 20€ is the price that should be to all games on pc. piracy is like valve said before a service, you can only beat piracy with a better service in this case cheaper games and constant updates to make the people happy and addicted to the game they paid

All games, music, videos, and other forms of media are a luxury. They aren't a necessity, so I am against piracy, and have a strong dislike for people who are pirates. I do make an exception if the media is no longer available to buy any longer, however.
I can't "try" a sweet to see whether I like it(At least not most the time anyway), before I buy it, otherwise I'd be arrested for shoplifting, so there's no reason why I have an entitlement to try a game before buying it(Though, of course, it is good if there is that option).

I admit that i have pirated games to see if they will run fine on my computer or to see if they will interest me. But i buy them if i have the money and i liked it. Piracy is bad and i know it, i don't have any dilusions that what i'm doing is not bad. It's just that i don't want to buy something that i don't like or it won't run on my computer.

not that bad.

Piracy isnt bad at all imo. If somebody likes something, (s)he will buy it. Piracy helps people to try out some products they are not sure about...

Is there anything wrong with piracy? Creators get less money? Not really, they get free advertisment and new customers will come:)

Piracy is bad. True pirate accepts this fact instead of trying to defend that shit.

I pirate, I do buy what I like. DRM is a factor for me (Steam DRM is fine, I mean games with evil activation limits)

Piracy is very bad for publishers/devs due to the fact that you will not purchase their game once you realize how bad it is :P

Piracy is bad for indie games or things like that because the devs actually need every cent. Pirating Triple-A games doesn't really hurt anyone though.

Calling it "piracy" is just a way that the thieves who come up with copyright try to justify their lazy life style. If you can't work in a business which you don't hold a monopoly in, you probably shouldn't be in that business at all.

although i pirate on occasion, i feel bad every time i do... personally, i hate pirating due to the fact that it means that either 1: it isn't worth the price being asked (which leads to me being angry over the fact it is over priced) or 2: i am not supporting those who deserve the money for it... this is my opinion but keep in mind this DOES NOT mean i hate people for pirating, because, you never know what position they are in financially...

according to ubisoft, every pc gamer is a pirate...fucking assholes...

i say piracy is as bad as we give credit for

Oh, and for those still having trouble with the concept: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4

Piracy only exists because the price and service some companys have are ridiculous. I mean look at steam, steam is bigger than it ever was, the sales are good, the service for the most part is really good, so people buy on steam and don't pirate.

If the service and prices other companys would offer the sales would be higher.

piracy is just natural of human nature

It's bad. Just last week my shipment of silk got stolen and I lost two ships to pirates.

People Pirating games because: if they bought a games, they must create 4214 accounts to register games, pass through thousands of DRMs, if servers is offline they can't play.

Pirate: Download -> unpack -> run .exe -> play

How to fix it? No DRM, No accounts, No online authorisation.
Like Wither 2: Instert disc -> install -> play without disc and registering

People sometimes are tired of paying for stupid games that could have been better. PC games are cheaper so I will focus this from consoles side: Here a game cost 70 euros for PS3, imagine paying that for a crappy CoD... Also, pirate games are better in some cases because you don't need to be online to play it.

I have been a pirate all my life, I played all the "new and awesome" games that came out, sometimes before their release date, and I can honestly say even if I had the financial possibility to buy all the games I played, I WOULD NOT. Specially if the game only has Singleplayer. I did however buy games that were worth it and offered a long play life ex: GTA4, BF3, Red Dead Redemption and Gran Turismo 5 (ALL on PS3), because on the PC everything can be cracked nowadays and cheaters and so on ruin the whole experience.

Well it depends on everyone's point of view.

I, as a developer and economist, should be against piracy. Not saying I am for piracy but somehow I can't be against it. In fact, I consider piracy NECESSARY.
Even if I would like people to buy the real thing I do feel somehow that my work is appreciated if people download the thing (app, game, you name it). And the truth is piracy DOES NOT AFFECT ME AT ALL. I will get paid anyway, based on a contract. It does however affect the publishers aka the company itself. But this is also relative.

Most software companies are run by marketing & management departments (yeah marketing dictates if you didn't figure it out by now). All other departments don't have much to say, especially production department aka coding monkeys aka me (and others like me). In the end a company's goal is to make money. And no matter how money they get it's still not enough. This is usually happening because those companies tend to act like a communist country - they don't estimate sales, they PLAN sales. And here lies the problem.

Companies will invest more money in marketing instead of investing into actually creating a quality product (see Vista) and then they will come up with prices to get their marketing-invested money back fast. Obviously this won't work so they will start imposing all sorts restrictions to make sure the plan will work.

They will start banning sales in some regions, usually poor countries (if they can't afford it, fuck it). Obliviously, a smaller market means less customers so (if) they will change their mind and start using different prices for the same product "to help customers" (see steam's/itune's $1 = E1 = L1 or sometimes even worse - however, you will never see $1 = 1 YEN - or similar - even though this ACTUALLY HELPS customers :)) ) And because they are fully aware that investing more money in marketing does not necessarily mean they will release a better product, they stop releasing demos. Again. this won't work simply because if I play a game and the game sux I'll tell my friends and they will tell their friends and so on and in the end people won't buy the game. They will download a pirated copy and try it. If they don't like it they won't buy it. So it's time for more drastic DRMs (permanent Internet connection, limited installation or Ubisoft's famous OEM games :|). But instead of fixing the problem, DRMs will start pissing off those people who actually paid for the game/program. (raise your hand if you never had problems with genuine games :D). So, instead of making more money, companies will start loosing more money.
And because they keep flowing this stupid logic, at the end of the fiscal year all companies report losses due to "increased piracy".
But as I said, this is a relative problem simply because companies don't report there losses to the actually amount of time & money invested to actually create a product but to the planned sales. Obviously this will ALWAYS fail because their plans are way too unrealistic. You can't sale 500 million copies of [INSERT_GAME HERE] in 20 countries unless you buy 'em your self.

But this is not the only problem. Companies like EA & Ubisoft claim to "estimate" their sales based on the amount of people playing & downloading X game. And this includes both, people who buy the game & people who download the pirated copy. This means they assume that EVERY SINGLE person who downloaded a pirated copy of a game will actually buy the game if there was no pirated version.
And I remember reading something interesting (I'll post back the link as soon as I find it) - same companies came up with some interesting statistics - a gamer will buy an average of 2 games/month while a pirate will download an average of 300 games/month.
Ignoring the fact that no one in his right minds will ever download 300 games in a month, it's technically impossible to play 300 games in such a short amount of time, even if we're talking about Modern Warfare. This leads to some more outrageously statistics published a while ago by EA - 90% of the iPhone users play pirated games while only 10% use jailbreak devices:|.

This is why piracy exist. As long as companies will keep following the same logic and will keep treating their potential customers like this, they will only justify piracy.

And just because I mentioned I'm a dev - a little while ago, shortly after AC2 was released, while still a student, I applied for an internship at Ubisoft.
After going through a lot of testing (with good results), I was supposed to have a final interview with some guys from management & marketing department. They all start asking me a lot of questions about what would I do to make the company more profitable and their products more appealing bla bla. In the end they asked me what do I think about piracy and how would I implement "the ultimate DRM".
I guess they didn't like it when I told 'em that they should make better PC games, not just ports, and loose their recently released DRM. They never called back.

The high court of Ireland takes Piracy seriously.
Eircom, the main Irish internet supplier (not for long) watches the sites you visit and also blocks some sites like ThePirateBay.
I remember going onto TPB and I got a warning that I could be prosecuted for proceeding. :P