Sad, but I doubt piracy will ever end. I think developers need to find different ways to fund their projects, one example is kickstarter..
People are willing to pay for great ideas or games, it's evident with the success of many projects in Kickstarter.
I'm not sure of the ins and outs of game development, but we gotta find different ways to fight piracy, DRM doesn't really work..
All DRM does is ruin the experience for paying customers. The games get pirated either way.. I remember tons of upset customers because of Ubisoft DRM..
Anyway, I think anyone would be open to good suggestions..
This never makes sense to me, people are more than willing to pay $20 to a hack in a garage using kickstarter campaign to start a 'cool' new project. Why bother? Once that same project is actually up and running as an actual app, it is declared evil, because a developer wants a whole $4.99 the buy the game!
If i am correct there was also a freeware version so you could try the game out before you buy!
If that is too much then maybe we should all go back to playing XBOX and PS3, games only cost about ten times as much there and few if any of those big game developers offer usable demos for their games!
So instead of paying someone a VERY reasonable fee for their work, people just rip them off, overload the system and since many of these copies are illegally stolen, then the developer cannot afford to pay for the server and other resources needed to upkeep and further enhance the game.
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Secondly, one download does not automatically equate to one lost sale. There are serial downloaders who will hoard everything they can get their hands on. They probably never even play/listen/watch it all, and it's highly unlikely they'd have ever bought the thing.
Yeah and these serial downloaders you speak of... so they just hoard everything they can get their hands on... they would never go and upload it to sites and torrents where others can copy from!!! Because its fun to waste hours downloading and filling terabytes of hard drives with stuff you will NEVER play/listen/watch.
or i dunno maybe in your world they just store them away these files on floppy disk never to be used again?