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Do they just wanna play a game for free? Then you wouldn't gain any money from it anyway. But who knows, they might like the game enough to recommend it to other people and they might buy it.
Are they lacking the money? Well, they can't buy the game anyway, so they'll pirate it, no profit to be had on a broke customer (whom are often just kids who can't buy their own games, yet, or get parents to buy games for em). But hey, who knows, they might like it so much they'll buy the game later-on.
And some people just want to try a game before they fully commit to it and buy it, maybe because of financial constraints, or maybe because they're very picky on what to spend money on, or to see if it runs properly and works (though the 2-hour refund period Steam has ougta be enough in most cases).
Pirates aren't so much an enemy as they are an side-effect to the game/movie/TV-show industry. You either play it smart and sell the game to all interested audiences or some of those audiences may simply decide to take what they could've otherwise bought. Can't stop em anyway, games always get cracked and pirated. Always! (Not even MMORPG's are entirely safe from this.)
If you play it smart they can even be allies, everyone's pirated some games as a kid, no? That's what made you so interested in videogames, that's how you really got into some series, often games like the Mario platformers, and now people are buying games like those as an adult at every oppertunity to relive good old times!
It would be good for GOG to get great games like these anyway, Steam really needs some competition to get it's ♥♥♥♥ together. The only reason people aren't choosing GOG over Steam is because Steam's where all the games are at. If they had the option... Alot of people, probably even me, would start getting em from GOG.
But now i'm getting rather off-topic... (And oh boy did this get suprisingly lenghty...) :P
Any game on gog is just a single click away, then there is a rather lovely installer that doesn't remind you at any point you are a bad person. There are gog "mirror" sites that even keep the games up to date, allow you to request games, will show you which games are currently uploading, complete with a community.
If I had made a game as good as Celeste, I wouldn't be doing heavy discounts(good job dev) and I wouldn't be putting it on gog.
If I was the developer I wouldn't distribute it on itch. I'm not.
It would be nice if you actually had anything to add to the conversation. Strip out your assumptions about my character in your last two posts and you have said nothing.
DRM doesn't even protect games in any noticable way anyway (if anything it sometimes even hurts players or the game itself, like GFWL (Games For Windows Live, whom is thankfully dead now), or Valve's VAC system which is a little too trigger-happy for it's own good), they all get cracked eventually. Maybe in a few days, a week, a month, a year tops. Even the multiplayer games (though they may need to host their own pirates-only server in order to play those online properly).
So they might as well just sell to the people who don't like Steam and put it on GOG and the likes. Sales tend to be pretty profitable too. The people who want your game and find the price right will buy it on the get-go. Then there's people who don't find your game worth the price as it is, and wait for a discount.
This means you get more money from the sale customers that you would've otherwise never gained, heck, those customers may have even simply decided to pirate the game instead of paying full price! So spreading out to many platforms and not being too stingy on sales helps alot!
I misspoke when I said "hassle of cracking" I should have said "hassle of applying cracks".
I argued for DRM being an effective hurdle for a lot of people, definitely not all. That some people will go to any lengths to get a game running can't signal a total failure. I think DRM is one of the hurdles you have to jump on the way to not paying for games. Along with the hurdle of entering into the world of cracks and torrents and all the dirt and grime that comes with it. Sites that are clearly MUCH more dangerous than the sites most people frequent, cracks that will often trigger all the alarms your AV software has. Your conscience in either great or small amounts is another leap you need to make, again easier for some than others. All these things add up to making garden-variety piracy much less attractive to a lot of people.
All of that is removed when the games are released DRM free and hosted by sites that take donations to keep them running. As soon as you add the mess of DRM circumvention to the business model it sounds less alluring, as can be seen from the lack of sites dealing in cracks and torrents in the same open-arms and friendly way. Putting aside organised groups of bros and their happy sharing, just knowing it installs how it should, without any sort of "I wish I could find a crack that wasn't infected... or at least didn't set off my AV" the experience for the pirate and the paying customer on gog is identical.
In my perfect world DRM wouldn't be needed, or arguably useful. My internet-utopia is a lovely open place without age-gates and paywalls, everyone plays their games without any trouble and developers can keep the lights on.
I thought more about itch.io which is a place I really like, and I would be more likely to put my game there. Itch isn't the giant neon "free bird seed!" sign that gog is. If you compare the reach of gog, steam and itch... itch is almost hidden.
I don't think there's much chance of us having a progressive discussion.
So i guess it's a question of how far are they willing to go, would they rather buy it then risk their computer or wait for a proper version? I suppose most pirates pirate games out of necessity, lacking the money to spend on such luxuries, so they'll have a ton of time and a virus scanner handy to seek out that playable non-infected version they desire. DRM or no DRM they would've likely just pirated the game either way.
In the event of a DRM-free version i'd imagine there would be people taking advantadge of it and pirating it, but i'm not certain if those would ever be customers to begin with if DRM did prevent them from pirating it, which i suppose is the main question to ask.
DRM's pretty useless to prevent piracy overall, so wouldn't a GOG version be worth it just to reach out to more customers who dislike the DRM practices and mechanics?
People whom lack the money very much have a reason to pirate, but i'd imagine the lazy people who are well-off enough to buy games would rather buy them, with the added benefits like having the latest, system-compatible version, updates/bugfixes, multiplayer in some cases, and depending on where they bought it easy mod support, cloud-saving and/or community stuff, and of course always being safe to download and play.
Can't say i'd go back to piracy with all those benefits if i can just buy em, and if i couldn't, i wouldn't be a customer anyway so no profits would've been potentially had. (Sheesh this post got quite long, guess i let my own thoughts ramble on for a bit too long.)
Hm, not much to say about Itch.io or whatever it was called, all i've seen about it is Vinny (from Vinesauce) playing weird/bad games from it, so my knowlege runs short on that one. Steam definitely could use more competition though...
But i get why people without money do it, or people who do not have the console/etc for it when the devs are too lazy (or just unable) to expand to more markets. (Reminds me of the whole Mother 3 fan-translation thing. I woulda bought it, but they didn't translate and export it in non-JP areas so, alas...)
Doesn't always excuse their actions, but there you can see the reasoning, atleast.
I don't think threatening those types of people is gonna help anyway. Alot of these people are barely making ends-meet with the money they earn, they wouldn't care less what some internet guy says about them as they find a game for free to just unload some stress and forget about the difficulties of life.
Or more often than not they do it with shows/movies instead.
(Ugh, now i'm reminded of Netflix and how they NEVER put up decent shows. No wonder people pirate them instead! Whatcha gonna do? BUY EM??? HAH ♥♥♥♥ YOU! YOU CAN'T! Why do i even have a subscription active...? Meh, laziness, i suppose.)
Hm, ok now i'm rambling again...
Plus, gaming wouldn't even exist in those countries if they didn't "steal them", the reason so many consumers appeared once prices went down for them is because they were already gaming, they just didn't buy the games before because they were too expensive. Sometimes pirating can be harmful for sure, but there are a lot of times that there isn't even another option, for example, anime watching in the west was done mostly by pirating because there wasn't any other viable option other than buying really expensive dvds from Japan that don't even have subtitles. But there are now legal streaming plataforms for anime because somebody saw that the potentials consumers existed, and that is because of pirating.
If you don't want people to pirate, you have to offer better service than the one they cant get if they pirate your game, examples are: frequent updates, the workshop, multiplayer.
Another example is when you screw your consumers over, if I didn't pirate Nier automata I would have ended with a game that keeps crashing because of what a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ port it is, so at the end I buy the games that I feel they truly deserve it, I don't like pirating a game from someone that releases on gog because I feel ♥♥♥♥♥♥ by doing that to someone that didn't go with drm.