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What seems to be missing, as usual from these piracy posts is that the 90% who pirated the game most likely wouldn't have bought it. Sure, pirating games is a bad thing. But, it doesn't hurt to have a little perspective on it. There was a post on HN a few months ago doing some analysis on this subject.

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"What seems to be missing, as usual from these piracy posts is that the 90% who pirated the game most likely wouldn't have bought it."

We will never know this. When I used to pirate software in my younger years, I would buy software that I needed if I couldn't find it anywhere. I suspect that the number of pirates that would never buy are a lot lower than you claim.

The problem now is that piracy has muddied the waters. We will never know either way.

Some companies have done the unthinkable and actually run some numbers... Eliminating 1,000 pirated copies tended to result in 1 additional sale. You turn 10,000 copies into 1,009.

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17350

They put out new versions of their games that fix existing pirating methods and then measure how that affects downloads and sales. How do they know what portion of the pirates are downloading the demo and then applying the crack rather than just downloaded a previous cracked version from somewhere else?

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