I watched a youtube video which talked about a 2015 study into piracy.
The study was conducted by a collaboration of movie, music, television, and video game studios.
Movie and television showed that the piracy rarely affected legit purchases. It did not help, but it did not harm.
Music had a slight negative dip, where sales among piraters sometimes prevented sales.
But video games is what was really special. They found those who pirate at least 1 game a year are up to 100x MORE likely to not only buy the game, but buy it in multiple forms. So maybe you bought GTA:V on release day on PS3.
Then a few years later you bought it on PS4. Then later on PS5. I think it’s also on PC so throw that in too.
Only a pirate would love a game that much. And is probably pirating because it keeps their physical copy unopened.
I can absolutely confirm the thing about being more likely to buy a game after pirating it, at least for md. It’s why I bought games like Slay the Spire, Balatro, and Brok the InvestiGator. Didn’t have the money at the time, so I got pirated copies and eventually legit copies of all 3 games because I liked them so much.
Hell, for Brok, I even helped pitch in on funding for the 2 DLCs and have some physical merch as well. None of that would have happened without a little piracy.
I pirated a game ~ 6 years ago, kept it in an external hard drive, never player it. Bought it on Steam and played it. I still have the pirated copy somewhere in the depths of my external. It really was the most space taking wishlist entry.
dustyData@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Even in 2015 it wasn’t about keeping the copy unopened. Games came in CD but internet was barely getting fast enough to download large amounts of data fast and efficiently. However, CD has little collecting value or preservation qualities. They go bad fast, half of commercial CDs go bad in less than a decade. Organic layer CDs that were used for home burning are dice rolls. Only inorganic archival medium burned at very slow speeds theoretically can go for more than two decades, and it is still recommended to keep redundancies
On the contrary, I think it was, again, about convenience. CDs were part of DRM. A type of DRM that had to have the CD in the PC’s CD tray in order to run the game, even if all the information was already locally installed. While later consoles acquired the capability to install the games to a hard drive for faster load times, this type of DRM was also adopted.
It was not rare for people to buy a game for PC, then immediately look for a crack online to play without CD. People were rigging hard drives to their consoles to install games there. Etc. To you could play your library without having to stand off the couch to change disks. Piracy offered the convenience at no cost.