Most likely. I'm sure it does happen, it's just a matter of how often. That'd include me, but I suspect it's a very small minority.

Thanks for putting the arguments and the sources out there so succinctly!

A consumer may hate DRM personally and make buying decisions accordingly, regardless of the efficacy of any particular DRM implementation. Thus a lot of GOG-ers.

But, the industry needs arguing with, because their decisions have not been made based on the best information.

Plus, everyone really needs more facts and logic to counter the ranting.

Thank you!

If you plotted a graph, with sold copies on one axis, and pirated copies on the other axis, with a data point for each game, you would have an upward-sloping diagonal line. You can put this down to any number of reasons, but one thing you can't say is that piracy kills companies... since the games that fail miserably in terms of sales, tend not to get pirated a lot compared to the games that made tons of money. Of course there are always exceptions to everything, but that's the general trend. Here are two data points... Aliens Colonial Marines, and Skyrim. Which game gets pirated less? Yet, which game sells more?

Looks like the games that are the most appealing to people, sell the most (well you could also trick them with pre-orders and then refuse refunds afterwards, but that's another topic). If your game sells poorly, don't blame piracy, blame your crappy game. Otherwise, why do the most pirated games tend to be highly profitable? There are enough people with a secure job, who will buy your game if they like it. Preventing unemployed people from playing your game doesn't help your sales in any way.

Indeed all valid points. There is however some empirical evidence of similar measures as DRM, that affect the demand for piracy and lower the inequity between the pirated good and the legit good, that being legislative measures in France to reduce torrenting, that piracy does indeed result in lost sales in the music industry, as explained in the OP. Whether or not similar conclusions can be drawn for the PC software market is another matter though. Just looking at the demographic differences of the two, one could argue that there are relatively more 'hardcore' pirates ready to implement VPN, proxies and Bittorrent protocol encryption to circumvent the law and keep pirating, whereas these might prove too big a hurdle for most of the 'casual' pirates of the music industry. Thus, piracy levels would not be affected as much for the PC software industry.


Indeed, the monopoly setting is there to simplify the model, yet Jain for instance managed to model a duopoly: All very valid points, though most admittedly discussed in OP.

I agree - whether or not the positive effects of piracy with more stringent DRM outweigh the negative effects of piracy with more lenient or no DRM is an extremely difficult and complicated question, one we may never know for sure. Keeping in mind there are alternative ways to reduce piracy - such as changing business models. Whether this is a good thing for the PC singleplayer when developers are focusing on multiplayer, microtransaction, console-centric games is subjective of course, but I want nothing to do with that. Preserve the sanctity of my PC singleplayer exclusive experience please.

An Internet discussion about something is even less effective than a real discussion.
I don't believe that anyone posting here will change his view because of other arguments.
So no thanks but no.

How about DRM and its effect on second-hand sales? I do believe that a lot of publishers care about that as well, perhaps it became the main concern even.

This isn't too far off than what Ghazi did in his article, and found a correlation between the popularity of a game and its piracy rate (with the exception of Spore) by using torrent statistics.

http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_4.html

Meaning the oft heralded case of DRM free resulting in less piracy becomes invalidated if this is true, as most people will still steal the game. On the flipside, the presence of DRM quite possibly had little effect on the piracy rate, though this already reading far too much into the anectodal and lacking data. If Ghazi had included DRM that is arguably more effective at deterring copying, we could maybe see, such as Diablo 3.

Yes, considering most DRM is more effective at deterring second-hand sales and casual sharing of the game, than its piracy, this should be a valid concern.

However, if you simplify the issue to its basics, the developers actually gain very little directly from second-hand sales, or actually nothing. In that sense it is quality, innovation and welfare reducing as some of that income could have been spent to buy new games. On the other hand, some of the used games buyers might like the original so much they would be more receptive to buy the sequel (a sequel that may never happen as the buyer never contributed to the making of it though).

I believe Gamestop's go-to argument is that used games are not in direct competition with new games. And the counter-argument is that actually, by selling used and new games side-by-side they do become competitive with respect to each other and new games' sales are displaced.

I doubt anyone really knows what the answer is, but it is clear with more DLC and server-side content that it is becoming more difficult to get a good second hand experience.

DRM is just another tool to track people as if NSA snooping wasn't enough. Seriously, why bother putting DRM on your games when talented crackers can just rip it off in an instant? I mean millions are spent whereas this money could be used to further enhance the end product.

What nonsense from Gamestop considering they buy used games for a pittance and sell for near full price. That money does not go back into new games, it goes into Gamestop's pocket. Over half of Gamestop's profits were from Used game sales.

I'd say Second hand sales and DRM are far more relevant than piracy and DRM. While piracy is a 'potential' lost sale, second hand sales are buyers who are absolutely willing to buy a game 'at a certain price'. At least in the digital realm, because DRM/account based services prevents resales, this means that the eventual 'at a certain price' point is a sale by the publisher/developer and the money actually goes to them, rather than a second hand sale where money 'might' have gone back into gaming, and 'might' have gone to the dev/publisher of the actual games.

There are things to consider besides that, even. Myself, I do not believe there is any benefit in second-hand market when it comes to videogames, but I can see a LOT of drawbacks. As it is now, getting a cheap game soon after release is easy, you just watch for sales - and you'll get it even cheaper than used at gamestop that way. So myself, I just can't see the benefit - then again, the only way I have ever used second hand games was to get the cheap, period, never sold those I already have.

But then, there are places where it hurts. I think the important thing to understand here is that videogames don't get screened in movie theatres, they don't get played on TV (not traditionally anyway), they don't get time in radios - videogames have one stream of revenue, and that's first hand sales and first hand sales only. Now if we take that away from publishers, naturally they will start looking for ways to get around this - numerous DLCs tied with an account, microtransactions, payments for multiplayer access. Now I don't think any of these are unfair, but for instance, I could do without microtransactions in singleplayer games which is something EA is currently pushing, going as far as claiming they find second-hand market helpful now. More power to them I guess, but I don't really trust EA with DLC, considering how much do you have to spend to get important content for Mass Effect and how long does it take to go into GOTY edition

Humm, for a second i tought i was on the steam anno 2070 foruns.
Anyways, for me the problem with drm and for that matter drm free is convenience. I don´t want multiple drm methods and launchers, and even for drm free i dont want to keep track of a multitude of websites from wich to purchase and update my games.
ive played mmo's, i understand why always online is needed.
Ive played diablo 3 (got it for "free" with my former wow sub), experienced the error 37 launch disaster trying to play a single player game, was quite disapointed with the game and didnt touch it after i completed it once, and have no intention of getting the expansion.
Ive played the anno 2070 demo, i didnt buy it from steam with the current setup (steam+uplay+tages). I might buy it if the price drops lower than it did in previous sales or i might buy it from uplay if i ever give in and create an account. Fortunately, my backlog works in my favour when im feeling tempted.

Second hand sales are the main reason for account tied games. Want some evidence? Look at EA (no EA rant, just an observation)!

EA stated openly that they introduced the online pass system, to make money from second hand sales. Andrew Wilson (one of the EA Sports heads) said "We want to reserve EA Sports online services for people who pay EA to access them". Now the online passes are gone, because EA "listened to the feedback from players". But look at the timing of this move... Origin was well established on PC, thanks to some Blockbuster games like Mass Effect 3 and Battlefield 3. And on consoles? Which console got announced shortly after the end of online passes? Which console was promoted heavily by EA? The XBox One?! And which console was planed with "always" online DRM (once every 24 hours, or your console blocks you from using it) and games tied to your account? Online passes would have been useless on PC and XBox One, because Origin and the (dropped) XBox One DRM didn't allow reselling your games.

DRM isn't about pirates. Games still are available on the internet, often before they're released. That's a known fact for years. No sane CEO would spend money on DRM, if it was a measure against piracy. They get paid for saving money, not for wasting it.

Heck, till medio 2013 they were still planning to forego an optical drive in the Xbox One alltogether. Digital Account based consoles is the future. The only reason it didn't happen is because the PS didn't follow along the same line yet, but even PS is getting bigger and bigger on digital sales every day and they have their own attempts like the PSP GO.

I was surprised when I read 20-25%, though at the time of my response I elected not to address those numbers directly. That said, I did want to check them out. There are two things that catch my attention.

The shape of the graph immediately caught my attention. The divergence between the treatment and control groups began before the passage of the bill, widened substantially after the bill passed, but then narrowed over time to return to values similar to those prior to the bill's passage. I'd be interested in seeing later data points to see whether the values stabilized, continued to converge, or began to diverge again. It's like a story got cut off right before the climax and you don't know how it's going to end.

Secondly, the data set is restricted to digital distribution on a specific platform (iTunes). The authors remark that overall music sales in France were in decline at the time, and the the increase in iTunes sales did not reverse this trend. The authors conclude that although overall sales did decrease, they would have decreased more had Hadopi not been enacted. However, this presumes that a relative increase in sales in one class (digital, in this case) is indicative of a relative increase in sales in all classes. I do not believe this is a valid presumption; it may be the case, but it's just as possible that the additional digital sales displaced physical product sales (ie, my "zero sum" hypothesis). Without looking at numbers for the entire music industry, you just can't say.

That's not to dismiss these findings, because at very minimum they demonstrate a large change in consumer behavior that is directly tied to the timing of Hadopi. It's something that vexes me, as well (and multiplayer gamers really don't have it any better than their singleplayer counter-parts). On the one hand, effective monetization is necessary for a developer to continue functioning. On the other hand, you don't want monetization to get in the way of the gameplay. If we presume that the purpose of copyright law is to maximize profit and incentive for the creator then this logic would make sense, but this is not the case. The purpose of copyright law is to maximize the availability of creative works by incentivizing creators.

Second-hand sales may not directly serve to incentivize creators, but they improve the availability of creative works by providing a limited pool of second-hand items that are sold at a discounted price. In that sense, they directly serve the underlying purpose of copyright.