A quick note: Most of my posts are not this inflammatory! If you’ve found this piece by way of Penny Arcade or a link by somebody who found it by way of Penny Arcade, welcome! Glad you stopped by. Consider checking out the rest of my blog, where I make plenty of other posts that aren’t so polemical.

No, not everyone who pirates a game would have bought it. But when you can go to any torrent site at any given moment and see thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people downloading a game, even weeks after it came out, how can any reasonable person not accept that there were lost sales?

Sure, we don’t know what percentage of those pirated copies are lost sales, but just because we don’t have that figure, does anyone truly believe that means the potential sales are negligible?

We know from firsthand statements that Ritual, just as one example, saw considerably more technical support requests from pirates than from legitimate customers on Sin Episodes. Does it matter if you thought that game wasn’t good? No. Those pirates must have thought it was good enough to try to get it to work properly.

And that is clearly not an isolated example. Because every time anyone brings this up—be they a top-shelf developer, or a less prominent one—people think of a million reasons why that particular game or that particular developer just don’t deserve the support of the discerning PC gamers. It happens every time, with the excuses tuned for each game. At that point, they stop being isolated examples, and they become part of a very clear trend. (more…)