Says who? I'm not going to say any bull**** (like some publishers do) like "every copy pirated would be a copy sold" but I'm fairly sure pirating impacts sales and therefor less pirating equals more sales.
I have "a friend" who bought quite a few games back in the days that he wasn't absolutely after, games like Hi-octane, Trespasser, Syndicate Wars. He still bought them, just like you occasionally watch an only mildly entertaining movie at the theatre. Today he would download them.
I'm not going to argue that piracy doesen't have
some impact on sales, it undoubtedly does, especially of crappy games, what i am arguing is that i dont belive, not even for a second, that it is a significant impact, like the industry claims, since we all know that most of the pirates where never going to buy the games anyway, i'd say the vast majority of pirated copies are not infact lost sales (and when they roll out thouse lists of "ohh dread, look how many people downloaded our games", thouse are global numbers, how many of thouse downloads do you think belong to poor countries? and does anyone really belive that piracy is going away in thease countries?).
And thus, thease draconian "anti-piracy" schemes are utterly unwarrented, they don't stop piracy at all, all of them, even Starforce, got cracked and beat, and even if they did actually work, most of the pirates would probably never buy the game anyway, so why subject your paying customers to this BS? all they are doing is making it harder for us to play the game legaly, who came up with something that stupid!?
And besides that, seeing how many people are boycutting games like Mass Effect because of this BS, they are probably loosing more money on it than they are saving, thease boycuts are definately lost sales, but the pirates can allready download it for free, i'll bet you its actually loosing them more money than if they had used no copy protection at all (like Sins of a Solar empire, which incidentally has sold really well).
And it is definately earning them angry and disgruntled customers who are likely to not buy their next game, thouse are also lost sales.
They are shooting themselves in the foot here, and sadly, they are also adding another nail to the coffin for PC gameing, if BS like this becomes the norm for PC games, then who the hell would continue playing on the PC? even i woulden't, i'd buy a console where i dont have to put up with that sort of rubbish, and that despite my legendary disinterest in consoles and their games.
Yeah but this group consists of two sub-groups
3a) those that will actually buy the game afterwards
3b) those that don't give a damn: Why pay money for a game you already finished and probably won't play again in the next few months (e.g. Bioshock). Any homo economicus wouldn't.
No, not really, if they don't buy the games they like, then they automatically become Group-2, Group-3 was reserved for the pirates who actually do buy the games they like, though admittedly my Group-setup was a bit hamfisted and overly simplistic
