The crazy sales and insane price drops of “last-gen” made me amass a collection bigger than any gen I had built up before it. I buy used sometimes, too. Probably about 70% of the games I buy are new, with 30% used. Are the people with the “holier than thou” attitudes towards piracy going to cry that I buy used sometimes now, too? 
Humble Bundle sales are the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.
wtf. first off:
correlation does not imply causation means that stats that appear to increase similarly does not mean that one is the direct cause of the other. so piracy in your “study” does not cause more interest in movies. its a statistical fallacy. the more realistic reason for these two stats to increase is that people who really want to watch something are likely going to watch it by paying or via pirating. if something sucks so bad that people aren’t even trying to find a way to pirate probably means no one want to see via piracy or paying for it.
this would be like me saying “since the 1970’s, the number of aids cases has been increasing. also since the 1970’s, video games have increase in number as well. therefore, videogames are the cause of aids.”
when did i say anything else that you said in your post at all? you sound spazzy and like a horrible person to converse with.
edit: and also, i knew it was a bad idea responding to you. you basically posted a baseless “study” that uses a statistical fallacy to imply something that isn’t true, then said “piracy is good. unless its too much. then its bad. but a little is good. companies “pirate” their own shit to take advantage of this.”
for every case you can claim that benefited a movie/album/game helped sales, you can find hundreds of situations without the same outcome.
think of it this way. what do we use to hack consoles? simple really
A soldering Iron and chip? It’s what i used back in the day 
Anyway I just pirated Theif Gold to see if the new control scheme i was testing out would work with it. Since it does I’ll be buying it :tup:
As a retired pirate, both sides are right and wrong, it’s really just how you bend the statistics.
I have one of the LARGEST music collection of anyone I know. I’d wager that purely from a CD/DL perspective (not equipment) I’ve spent more than anyone I know. I’d also say I’ve pirated more than anyone I know.
I simply love music.
Now, I’ve gone legit over the past few years, the last album I remember pirating was Lil Wayne’s rock album (which I subsequently lost). So did piracy spurn my cost in music? Fuck no. I would have spent as much as I did on music with music and more than likely I would have spent MORE on music without piracy.
Piracy has broadened my horizons, I DLed David Banner’s first album, was like “This shit is the truth” and since then have purchased everything he’s put out old and new. But for every David Banner, there are ten Fabolous’s - artist who have never seen a DIME from me - despite deserving it.
So does piracy lend itself to people spending more money, yes. But those people were already on the higher end of purchasers. And people who REALLY pirate stuff, do NOT typically go out and buy up everything they got illegally.
Truth.com - it’s illegal. It’s wrong. You shouldn’t do it. It’s stealing. 50% of pirated stuff is never even used (made up stat, but not far off) - as heavy piraters just have so much they never listen to it all or watch it all. As well, without piracy, some of those “lost sells” would remain lost as people still wouldn’t necessarily buy it just because they DL’d it.
Both sides need to quit trying to find some silver lining. It’s a crime. It’s NOT a victim-less crime. It’s actually fucking up the marketplace in fact. Marinate on it. If piracy didn’t exist - at least on today’s scale, and people STILL WEREN’T BUYING SHIT, then prices would come back down to earth on things like TV-series to Blu-ray/dvd. But alas we have people who buy stuff at full price and people who think “Piracy is the cause” - both being used to prop up prices, feeding into each other. :sigh:
Sounds like BS
That is because it is.
@ManRightChea Normally console makers not named Nintendo put out consoles with the expectation that, after the R&D cost and after initially selling at a loss, it will reach profitability close to its end of life or by the time the next gen console is released. Ending the generation with losses usually puts the company at a disadvantage, see Sega post-Saturn or (lesser degree) Sony now. MS hasn’t played by those rules because they want Xbox in the game for the long run, although there’s less support for that strategy right now as the company goes through a transition in leadership. Most companies would have gone belly-up if they handled Xbox the way MS has.
Brb, stealing honey buns from the bodega. IF i like them i will go back and pay for them though.
Ever since i stole them all of my friends want honey buns. Stealing is good. Every consumer has a good heart. Please encourage stealing more, and then justify it with “professional” studies.
A lot of pirates do end up buying it if they do like it, but not all.
Companies are talking out their ass when they say “(Insert Product here) Didn’t sell well because it was pirated/knocked off!” The people who pirated wouldn’t have bought it in the first place if they couldn’t pirate it.
Lets talk sex toys.
That being said, the common fallacy is that if x was illegally downloaded 20,000 times, that’s 20,000 sales lost. If I could copy cars for free, I would have had thousands of different cars by now. That does not mean that “car copying” would have removed millions of dollars from the automotive industry; it just means that at a price point of ~free, my standards of “do I want this?” drop dramatically.
I would wager that the amount of additional sales created by unauthorized downloading (e.g. promotional value) is more than the number of actual sales that would be gained if the product was not downloadable for free.
Did you actually read the links I posted for you? The Xbox has been profitable since 2008 on. MS has higher software attachment and services income than Sony. That has been the basis for 360’s profitability. Whether some in the company think it is smart are not is irrelevant. There is no way they will dissolve a division after a major console launch. I am not sure if you are aware, but Sony investor Daniel Lobe also pushed for the PS division to be sold or heavily restructured but ultimately did not have the pull to bring such an effort to fruition. http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2013/05/17/triple-points-daniel-loeb-urges-sony-to-break-up-the-business-what-that-means-for-playstation/
The difference here being that MS has not lost nearly as much on the Xbox brand as Sony has on the PS brand. MS also has nearly ten times the operating capital and has not suffered 16 billion in losses due in large part to consumer electronics that Sony has faced.
There is so much bullshit in your logic. Simple fact, before digital music piracy, Bands could make a living off their recording sales alone. The Beatles Stopped touring all together and only released albums. Artist can no longer make enough income off music sales alone and have to tour much more to repay what they owe the lables to the point they are injuring themselves due to excessive touring [details=Spoiler]http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/480383/vocal-problems-why-so-many-artists-struggle-to-stay-at-full-volume[/details]
If you are a pirate you are a thief and a piece of shit and I hope you get caught.
watch the homemade porn you made with the giant VHS camera
That’s quite odd, considering bands make virtually nothing on sold albums. That money goes directly to studios. I actually KNOW musicians and they’ve straight up told me that’s how it works. They get all their money from touring.
I know what it means you stupid cretin, you copy and pasting from wikipedia however shows you have no idea what it means and how it’s being applied to the conversation at hand.
This is why I hate even conversing on the internet, stupid people like you are impossible to teach reasoning to. Just how bad are the school systems that morons like you are the result?
If investors and potential replacements for Ballmer’s job are advocating selling off Xbox, that matters more than speculation/extrapolation from public sources. The specific details are one thing, but there isn’t a lot of confidence in PS, Xbox or Nintendo (home consoles) right now.
He already knows that and he’s being hostile to you because he already addressed that, by speaking in terms that precluded confusion with what you’re getting at. He clearly referenced (the unsourced, granted, but if you were at all knowledgeable about the subject then you’d know this to be true) the years running trend where if two titles which are equal in terms of marketability, hype from potential customers, general quality of the product, etc with the only difference being one is hard to pirate and the other is trivial to pirate (but not as trivial as buying), the easy to pirate title will be the one that sells better. He furthermore mentions a clear cause for the difference: The more people playing the game, the more word of mouth the game has, the more word of mouth advertising the game has, then the more sales it gets.
This isn’t some mystery, either, Steam sales operate by the same principal. Not only do Steam sales increase sales of whatever game is on discount, but even after the sale is over the game continues to sell at a much higher rate than before the sale. Because people bought it and then their friends see that he’s playing it for three hours a day for the next week and they ask him whether it’s any good.
I’m sure you think you’re informed, but you’re not reading anything he’s posting and then you’re trying to talk down to him. Against an argument that is anything but a “correlation is not causation” fallacy, which you are repeating again without reading. This is clearly a large conversation, to which you haven’t paid much attention to and are just reposting a day one opinion that has long since been debunked.
actually, bands get a lump sum to produce their album that they need to pay back to their labels before they turn a profit. they are also usually sacked with having to deal with recoup costs while they get a turn around of around 3-5% of their album after paying their advance back. so in a way, what you friend’s say about making money from albums is true: you make shit from actual album sales. touring usually cuts out middle men and sales on merchandise and albums without going through retail means bigger cuts on your end. but its not like people don’t see money from sales… you obviously have heard of royalties, and that is usually tied directly to album sales and commercial profits. i have friends who still see royalties from albums they released 15 years ago, so it obviously all still doesn’t go to the labels.
if you’re so smart, please tell me where i was wrong in my usage of the phrase. you essentially said “a certain level of piracy is needed for maximum profits” which uses a statistical fallacy (that it being pirated directly results in profits). i would love to see the data of how many people pirated a movie and then loved it so much that they went to see it in theaters. or bought the dvd. or the album. THAT would prove causation. but chances are you cannot provide those stats: all you have are two comparable figures that correlate but do not have any direct impact on each other. if i’m wrong about that, and since i’m so stupid, please point out where i’m wrong with what i said about what you said.
i understand the concept well. i’ve said as much in this very thread. but the idea that hype coming from pirates is equal to hype from paying consumers, and that hype from pirates does not directly result in more pirating. its an assumption that “hey, i got this for free… YOU should go buy this.” word of mouth is a STRONG marketing tool, but saying that piracy contributes to positive gains to a company is fully ignoring that it also promotes a means that keeps content producers from receiving gains.
it isn’t a 0 sum scenario. shit just doesn’t stack on top of each other. hype from word of mouth from payers + hype from non-payers =/= X payers.
it would be more like hype from word of mouth from payers and non-payers = X payers and Y non-payers. if you are ignoring the promotion of piracy along with your piracy pro-points, then you are ignoring a major factor that is reallllyyy convenient.
i heard game of thrones was sick. i’m not gonna pay for hbo. people told me to torrent it. so i torrented it. watched it. hbo hasn’t seen any of my money. thanks for the hype, pirates.