• humanspiral@lemmy.ca
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    1 day ago

    If you say something nice about the game to 2 friends where 1 friend pirates and the other buys, the company makes net 0 from the sales, and they tell 2 friends and so on. Then after buying company in bankruptcy, use remote exploit to delete all copies and send shares skyrocketing even more than OP.

    • refalo@programming.dev
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      1 day ago

      except most pirates would never have bought the product in the first place… so is it really a loss for the company?

      • Fizz@lemmy.nz
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        6 hours ago

        How do you know they never would have brought it if they made the choice to pirate it?

        There are games I don’t want to buy and I’ve never pirated those. The only games I pirate are ones I want to play.

      • humanspiral@lemmy.ca
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        1 day ago

        OP, like my, math is flawed in that deleting the game does not actually enrich the company, in case “woosh” was necessary.

        Piracy, when the alternative was no purchase, still helps the company if it has a good product. Recommendations to others, and “popularity” benefits companies. Free to play games with “pay to win” features benefit from the same general model as “popularity through piracy”, where the F2P only player base justifies more fame for paying to win.

        • refalo@programming.dev
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          23 hours ago

          I agree, I think Adobe/MS have even said in the past that they would prefer people steal their software if the alternative means they would use a competitor instead.