PC Gaming and Piracy: Examined

this is a very good article which was posted recently over at TweakGuides, brought to my attention from this thread.

people in the industry, regardless of what side they're advocating, don't usually pay this debate the attention and research that it deserves in order to discuss it properly. because usually those people in the industry have an agenda, one way or another. so you'll only hear the bits and pieces that favor their desired outcome.
and just like any good political issue, there's a metric f*ck-ton worth of misinformation out there regarding the implications of both pirates and the game producers that fight them. both sides contribute to this information, or lack thereof, depending on who they're trying to convince.

so it was nice to see someone try and give this discussion a fair shake.
first, the article: PC Game Piracy Examined
it's 10 pages long but worth every sentence, imo. they look at this issue from numerous angles including international law concerning copyrights, the pervasiveness and economics of software pirates, Ye Olde PC vs. Console debate, evolving business models, and practical solutions.

second, a brief summary from the Conclusion page with the interesting points in bold. this paragraph is referring to pirate providers (like torrent websites), but specifically they make an example out of The Pirate Bay. I'm not sure how much of a secret it was, but the guys who own and operate TPB have "secretly" been profiting from their operation for years even though they contribute virtually nothing to the cycle.

that article said:

What's objectionable about this practice isn't so much the amount of money these people are making, but the fact that they're doing it without contributing a single cent to the people who are actually responsible for creating the content that is being pirated. These sites are the ultimate free riders, because their content is almost entirely made up of other peoples' hard work. It also reveals the fact that there are millions, maybe billions of dollars up for grabs in the lucrative world of piracy, so for obvious reasons piracy sites love to put on the front that piracy is all about freedom and altruism, that DRM and big companies are evil for opposing piracy, and that there are endless flimsy studies which purportedly show that piracy is actually beneficial, despite actual evidence and logic to the contrary. Plausible misinformation is the key to their survival, so they've become extremely adept at it. It's a very successful business model and there are millions of eager users who are more than happy to swallow any excuses given to them as long as it gives them access to lots of free stuff. It appears that the idealistic concept that P2P is supposedly all about sharing without profit is not one shared by those who actually profit from it: piracy sites.

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didn't catch the most important part of all that?
here it is one more time, for good measure...

"It's a very successful business model and there are millions of eager users who are more than happy to swallow any excuses given to them as long as it gives them access to lots of free stuff."

food for thought.

if it was up to me, I wouldn't let anyone reply until they had actually read the entire 10 pages.

but it's not up to me, so I'm sure we will invariably get some people in here who think they already know everything about the PC piracy issue, and will repeat the same argument they pose in every single topic about it.

which is fine, I guess.
however, if you have any kind of opinion on the subject, then it's a disservice to yourself not to read the article. at least for new insights into the same old problem.

Sir_Brizz said:

but how does TPB make money other than selling shirts and junk?

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I don't have the information for you in detail, partly because there are still ongoing court cases and accusations unaccounted for.

but, I've read a little about it (aside from that article) and I can tell you that it has something to do with ad revenue and taxes.

project cofounders Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm have admitted to complex tax arrangements bordering on what appears to be either money laundering or at the very least a serious attempt to hide their income. More importantly however, The Pirate Bay doesn't host any pirated material, it has an extremely basic text layout with minimal content and virtually no images (aside from ads served by other parties), which means bandwidth costs and server requirements are actually considerably less than any other major sites. An enterprise class server can be purchased outright for a hundred thousand dollars for example, and obviously you don't need to buy new servers every year. Certainly, they seem to have enough money on hand to offer regular visitors the opportunity to win prizes such as trips to Dubai with $5,000 spending money despite supposedly operating at a loss.

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SleepyHe4d said:

Just judging from that quote, it sounds like the article is a 10 page lecture on common sense and other obvious things.

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obvious to some.
common sense to some.

but not obvious or common sense to most.

I guarantee at least half the people who read that article didn't know half the sh*t that's in it.
you give the public too much credit common sense is the most uncommon thing in the world.