(finally I get to show off Persona 5 ;) )
So it might sound surprising to you when I say that companies actually benefit from people pirating their work as it creates a bigger fandom base or people consuming their products. In the report taken back in 2014 by the EU commissions found out that "illegal downloads of video games do not affect sales" and figured out how these illegal actions were really affecting the market.
This by no means meant to be a message to say, "Go and pirate all the games you have been wanting to play!" No, that is not my intention at all. It is quite interesting to see how there researchers saw a positive trend to the market though as they successfully converted "illegal users to paying users". Some tactics companies uses are extra bonuses on their purchase of the game through legal means such as character design books, merch, and special features in games to list a few.
The gist of the whole situation is that, "there isn't enough data to show that there is a financial loss for companies when European copyright law is violated" in contrast to how illegal consumption of games lead to increased legal consumption; where there is positive growth.
As mentioned earlier, people that fall in love with the game and want more of it tends to lean toward supporting the companies that produces it and actually start to pay respects to it by legally purchasing them from then on. Most people have the fear of trying out new games for they are afraid of ending up not liking it, and wasting a lot of money for it but these illegal practices allow players to try out new games without a lot of consequences... if they are careful enough that is.
Source: No evidence that piracy affects video game sales – EU Commission
The actual study
That is really surprising because I feel like when games are pirated the companies would lose out on the sales of the game. I understand that pirated versions might promote the game, but at the same time I think that copyright mostly has a negative effect on companies. But maybe that is not the case in the video game market.
ReplyDeleteI think piracy is shown not to affect video game sales mostly because not enough people do it. Either they don't know how to torrent, or they're afraid of viruses, or they feel like supporting the developers is more important then getting the game for free, piraters must be a small fraction of the consumers; otherwise, if they were a significant portion, then game developers would actually have something to worry about because that would lower their revenue.
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