Video game piracy has been made to be the bane of the video game industry and video game pirates are usually made out to be crooks and cheapskates, but the following are several reasons why video game piracy might suck – but isn’t as bad as it’s made to be.
A pirated game gained isn’t’ the same as a video game sale lost
Piracy is usually made to be equal to video game theft and while walking into a video game retailer and shoving a few gaming titles down your trousers is guaranteed to result in a lost video game sell, pirating a video game doesn’t always equal a video game sell loss.
Kotuka.com recently did a report on video game piracy where they explain a series of experiments done by Reflexive games that revealed that most gamers that pirate games likely can’t afford to buy them in the first place and that the gaming industry only made one extra sale for every 1000 games they blocked from being pirated.
Piracy creates the best promotion money can’t buy
Not all pirates that download video games are able to buy retail copies, but every video game pirate can be an excellent promoter for great games. Gamers no longer rely on – or trust – commercials and other conventional promotion methods and now refer to blogs, online reviews, and word of mouth to find out about cool games and which ones are kickass or plain duds. Video game pirates are the best free promotion that an excellent video game can acquire; after all, where do you think most of the online bloggers and video game reviewers get their games from?
Pirated games generate more console and hardware sales
Pirates aren’t just playing video games with their imaginations, they need something to play games on and there is just no way to pirate a video game system. Even though pirates don’t buy retail copies of video games, they still buy gaming consoles and they also must purchase video game hardware like headsets, controllers, and other video game peripherals to play their pirated games with and some video game systems are more likely to be sold depending on how easy their games are to be pirated – points at the Nintendo Wii –
Overall, I don’t condone piracy and I feel that video game developers should be rewarded for their hard work and effort that goes into our favorite games, but I also don’t agree that video game pirates are the crooks that they are made out to be. Video game piracy has dramatically affected the way business is done in the video game industry, but pirates still make up a large percentage of the paying customers that you see buying video game products at retail stores.
For more, read 5 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Jailbreak Your PS3 , Halo: Reach Pirates Will Be Hunted Down by Microsoft and Banned from Xbox Live , and 5 Reasons Pirating is Popular – Besides Being Free
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