I think all of you are correct. On one hand, we have situations like the humble bundle fiasco , where a bunch of indy developers released their games in a pack and told people "give us whatever amount you think it's fair". Well, there was about 20 games in there and a lot of people were minimal amounts, one dollar or even less.
Some people lack the disposable income, some are just cheapskates and some suffer from an entitlement complex. And piracy does cost sales and even the closing down of studios and jobs. On the other hand, the reason piracy is so detrimental is, guess who, the publishing industry itself!
For example, Troika games made the two vampire: the masquerade games before closing down, a transfer of a pen-and-paper RPG game to the PC. Small studio, cool games, they still didn't make it even though they were signed under a bigger company. Why? Because developers get paid minimal amounts compared to what the company gets and when they can't make what the company wants, the studio closes down. It's the same in music as well, where many artists take a few cents per CD sold while the recording company gets the big cash.
This story has happened before, will happen again and if you take a good look at it, it's usually studios that make great games which the publishers don't like. Why? Because the publisher's definition of a great game is different from the gamer's definition of the same. For the publisher a short, half-finished, DLC capable game with minimal replay value that will justify its high price on graphics and sounds alone is best, because it will give that "it was good but not enough" feeling, so that you can buy the sequel in as less time as a few months. For the gamers, a great game is one that is focused on the core elements necessary for the gameplay experience, leaving the rest to be improved along the way as more powerful PCs become available, having good support, replayability and a long life...just like IL-2.
The reasons are simple...when you sign up with a big publisher like EA or Ubi, you pretty much give them free reign to do whatever they want with how the end product will be presented and lose most of your creative license as a developer. Your job is to provide content, meet deadlines and deliver products that cater to as much people as possible instead of products that cater to parts of the gamer demographic but are actually focused enough to do a good job...in that order of importance if i may add. So for example, if the deadlines can't be met the content gets axed and then sold separately as DLC.
When the people who expect a certain game to belong in a certain genre, or the gamers simply don't find it compliant to the standards outlined above, the product is faulty in content, user-friendliness and functionality, etc, then the people with the most interest in having a focused game abandon it. These are the people who usually buy games however.
The people that the companies try to lure to their products in droves are not the ones who will buy games, or to put it more accurately, they have a higher percentage of pirates among them...the part of gamers that mostly cares about visuals and sounds to the expense of everything else, who go through games like t-shirts in summer and of course, they can't afford to buy that many games. The thing is that if they learn how to pirate once, they have learned it for life and now they know where to look and how to set things up. So, is it then the fault of the paying customer if games flop? Of course not.
Piracy is an existing problem. It's also a problem where the publishers share a big part of the responsibility by making their games unfriendly to the ones interested in buying them. Doesn't take a genius to figure out what happens next, does it?
It's also true that the majority of the most pirated games are also triple-A titles that already rake in millions of sales.
On the other hand, indy games like the aforementioned sins of a solar empire where also pirated like crazy because of a total lack of copy protection, but they also sold like crazy and the developers turned a good profit. It's very simple how they did it...they didn't have to pay a horde of lawyers, marketing executives and advertisement consultants because they sold their game themselves. In that sense, indy companies can afford to not be greedy and maybe even turn a blind eye to the piracy problem, because they only have their own pockets to line.
In another case Amanita Design, a small studio making adventure games in Flash, launched a so-called pirate redemption sale (actually anyone could take advantage of the sale) for a week, offering Machinarium at a price of $5 and that game is already cheap to begin with, with $15-$20 for the collector's edition.
That didn't happen overnight though, it happened quite a few months after the game was released, with sales having tappered off and the launch of the sale did a few very important things for them: gave them "cool guys" points in the eyes of the gaming community, put them back in the spotlight and enticed even more people to buy the game, people that despite the already cheap price might have been put off initially, but will drop their cash when they realize they can get an award winning game for small change. A guy from EA or UBI however, even if they ever did such clever marketing which they don't, will not be glad about getting a chance to effectively re-launch one of their games. They'll be too busy crying over the fact that those 200000 extra sales were made at $5 a piece instead of at $15 a piece and come up with a statistic claiming a 75% loss of profit, totally disregarding the fact that these sales wouldn't have happened at all with a higher price.
The differences in how different groups within the industry view the situation is not only obvious, but paramount to their success and failure as well
So what is the fuss all about then? The second hand market. That's the real reason the big names want to tie everything to accounts. Not one of these accounts is transferrable, at least not without a fee and some not at all. If i buy a car i can resell it, if i buy a DRM-ed game i most probably can't.
Yes, i know it's getting old with the car analogies, but let's consider the flip-side too. Suppose the companies are right and buying a game doesn't give you ownership of the items involved (physical or immaterial), but only a license of use. In that sense if i buy a game and my original DVD is damaged, my license is still valid. I didn't buy a DVD, i bought the rights to use the game and how that happens is up to the publisher, as long as my PC is within the specs. So, shouldn't the company send me a replacement DVD since my license still stands? Do you know any cases of this actually happening though?
If suddenly there was a strange atmospheric condition that corroded media discs and people starter asking for replacements because their license still stands, you can bet that all of the big publishing companies would abandon their license rhetoric overnight
