• KoboldCoterie@pawb.social
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    1 month ago

    I’m not going to purchase the document to find out, and the abstract doesn’t really cover it, but I’m curious what the methodology was here. I seriously doubt that piracy is that prevalent. It’s possible that people are upset with certain companies and aim to pirate their games, and the fact that those companies are the same ones that use Denuvo is happenstance. It’s also possible that they’re using total downloads of pirated copies vs. total sales as their statistic, which is misleading, because I’d wager the majority of folks who pirate the game would not have purchased it if it wasn’t available to download for free.

    I’d also be curious if the price of the game was a factor; I imagine more people are looking to pirate a game priced at $70 than one priced at $40, for example.

    Really, there’s too many factors to consider here and I don’t think there’s a reasonable way to say how many folks who pirated a given game actually would have purchased it.

    • Grass@sh.itjust.works
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      1 month ago

      In elementary school, back in the days when only 2 or so kids in a class had a computer I learned to pirate software, games, and movies my parents said we didn’t have money for. By highschool having a computer was more common and I became one of the nerd heroes by teaching others how to pirate games and avoid viruses, and save their allowance/meager part time pay.

      Once I had my first decently paying ‘real’ job I just bought my own games on steam and while a lot of friends stopped gaming they still bought movies and eventually netflix subscriptions because it was cheap, easy, and had customer support included. Now everything is becoming shit again so all the corporate types are inventing bullshit reasons for the losses they created on their own.

    • FiveMacs@lemmy.ca
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      1 month ago

      It’s possible that people are upset with certain companies and aim to pirate their games

      I’m kinda the opposite. I won’t even pirate some companies games because those company’s suck that much…ea and Ubisoft being major players in the slop I don’t even pirate.

      I will pirate almost every other game though, as a full version demo. If it’s good, or I boot it up more then once I tend to buy it. Otherwise, I won’t even give it a second though.

      The 2 hour refund window is sometimes not enough time to find out how trash a game is, so I use my above full version demo method.

      • Ænima@lemm.ee
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        1 month ago

        Yeap! On principal, I won’t buy any game that dumps pre-orders of games on Steam in lieu of exclusivity, from other non-Epic platforms, even if I liked the game series before. For instance, I have really liked the Metro series of games. However, as soon as the third game was announced as exclusive to Epic, I refused to purchase it on Steam even after the exclusivity deal expired. It didn’t help that the creator of the Metro games caught wind of people refusing to buy the game and threatened to not make anymore if sales bombed on Epic.

        I’m just so tired of all the entities in this world that would rather make a quick buck, then milking as much from the player-base as possible, while standing in the way of me eeking out some sort of happiness in this shit-ass capitalistic hellscape. Would I rather be doing more creative shit with my free time or enjoying life in some capacity? Sure, but until we tear down this shitty pyramid scheme our society has bought into, games are the one thing that I still enjoy. I watch them actively deleting content for games I love, or making the content only available on specific platforms, and it makes me want to flay these wealthy fucks and leave them for the crows…