Do you think PC game piracy is getting rarer?

Game sales are undermining the value of games. For some developers, they are forced to put there games on sale for it to sell. However, these sale prices don't pay the bills and may be just as bad as the game being pirated.

@Pedro: I didn't know about that but I always try to buy a well-deserving game such as Witcher 3 at its full price immediately if I can. Not Far Cry though for example, Ubisoft can starve.

Hard to say. Personally I never play pirated games or any other form of pirated stuff ie. movies, music, etc. If something isn't worth me spending money on it then I just don't get it, period. Companies deserve my money for things that I want, I don't deserve free stuff from them.

i don't think piracy discussion is allowed here tbh pal so don't be surprised if it gets locked. i just wait for sales for pc games. my steam backlog is huge. i don't even remember buying half the games in there.

and didn't some big cracking group announce a month or two ago that they weren't going to crack anything for a year to see if pc game sales improved? interesting experiment if they were the main source of cracked games

I dont pirate games but I have a subscription to spotify and netflix and if there is a series or song that is not available on there then I will pirate it.

I never pirate anything. Just seems like an unstable way of doing things to me. Much easier to buy something on Steam. Prices are cheap enough.

I'll admit that I've pirated a couple of games years ago, But It stopped cause not only is it risky cause you can never be quite sure what you are downloading and installing, but primarily cause the prices of PC games have dropped overall here and with services like Steam, Origin and GoG.com it's kinda easier and even faster to use those.

I'd say so. And it's not exclusively due to DRM. But I think Denuvo might be the final nail in the coffin for the piracy of AAA games.

It's just the general interest in piracy has diminished over the years. There's an abundance of Free-to-play games. There's deep discounts. There are grey market key sellers. The Establishment of account-based-services like Steam that PC gamers are becoming attached to. There's greater developer/consumer transparency. Ongoing cases of pirates being ridiculed/witch-hunted in the age of the Internet and an odd one: but PC Game Piracy has never belonged to the silly values of the coveted "PC Gaming Master Race" identity.

Even though there will always be a market for piracy out there, there's probably alot less interest in the establishment of cracking groups to even begin cracking games.

That is actually not even close to the truth. I know a few game dev´s and sales are actually a boost to their sales revenue not to mention that it´s a contributing factor to getting their game out there.

Also not forgetting that no developers are forced to put their game on sale, Steam do not force devs.

As to the op´s question.

I have never and will never pirate a game, with bundles, sales and reduce cost, games are cheap enough to buy.

Its not even close to the truth? You have high budget games will all their DLCs selling at the price of indie games. This undermines the worth of their game. To say to the contrary is ridiculous.

Online-only DRM is the only invincible means of anti-piracy so far

i pirate about 25% of the time. I often buy the game if its good (has some form of replayability) and doesn't have a drm system that will ruin the performance of the game, or ruin chances of playing the game far into the future.

Biggest thing that causes me to download a game is the DRM, if its got no drm and the game is good, its an instant buy... Witcher 3. I've bought games with DRM but its much more rare because i don't support it.

If i was a gaming company, i'd just be making my games massive with tons of content that basically be impossible to share in p2p and that way you could have no need for drm. I still wonder why they haven't started putting pc games on blurays and packing them full of content instead of horribly compressed textures that don't even look good at 1080p. If they all put out a game thats over 100-200gb, lets see how well that shares out... it won't at all because very few can afford to download that much, and even fewer have the upload bandwidth to share it out to keep the file alive. Only big downside to this would be digital sales, but most people im sure rather have a nice clean physical copy of a game on bluray that will run forever instead of a digital copy that you have no real attachment to or ownership of.

You are talking out of your butt here.

If you are talking about AAA games, they usually never go on sale until the sales either have died down or its a short push to bring the game back into the spotlight. Just look at GTA how long is it since it came out and it is still selling for almost max price, yes there has been sales but not more than max 30-40%.

And again developers are the one deciding the price drop, no one is forcing them to put a game on sale.

So no it does not undermine anything, it´s absolute nonsense to claim

I used to pirate games because, well, i couldn't afford to buy them anyway.

Thanks to the pirating, i kept up to date with gaming, I now have a well paying full time job and have an X1, PS4 and gaming PC and buy all of my games. Piraters are most likely people who cant afford to buy the games anyway. It's too much hassle to download, then run a patch, Keygen etc...

Im only speaking for myself here, but pirating kept me into gaming and has allowed me to continue 10 years later

Only had one pirated game in my life, if I remember, and had it for a week before going out and buying it.

Dislike pirating, as well as industrial scale used games sales. So not something I never really delt with, I am well aware of the work going into a game, I would not pirate music, movies or other either.

The only cases where I can see piracy is 1. If the game is not sold in the country you live in. 2. Has gone out of production completely and impossible to get a hold on, on any other means (in theory, never sought out such a game, but I do see the logic in that when people bring it up).

As for people who pirate games, I do think a small amount of people are simply people who does not have the money, and often really young. But the majority of Pirates I always considered a group of people with a very specific mindset, hellbent on "sticking it to the man" as a justification, and would pirate more for the sake of pirating then anything else, on near all platforms. Those are the ones I have met who were pirates, and more often then not the reasoning tends to border on insanity.

While I fault both I would be pretty happy to see the second group die out, but then again, those pirated copies would never really equate to a lost sale, as those people would never EVER buy anything. I wonder why they did not have the same mindset with their pc hardware and consoles?

I bought most of my triple AAA games for less than $20. Some as low as $5; Assassin's Creed Brotherhood few months after release. GTA V has been reduce to 52% during winter sale. There is a healthy amount of gamers than simply hold off until a game goes on sale. I browse Steam gaming catalog daily because its part of what I do. So try not getting all riled up sir and stop taking it personal, its ok to be wrong sometimes.

When I was young (12 or 13), I pirated Garry's Mod. But once I got a job in high school, it was so much easier to just pay the money and play it normally. People pirate because it's convenient more than because it's cheap. As a recent example, I have a copy of the Sims 3, but I lost the activation key and my new laptop doesn't have a disk drive. Well, I sure didn't buy it twice when I wanted to play again. The same goes for games on consoles I don't own. I really want to play Metroid: Prime again, but I'm not going to buy a TV, a GameCube, and the game itself just to relive some nostalgia. I tend to rationalize this with the fact that the money I'd spend on a used copy is never going to the developers, anyway, so why spend money at all?

Wait, now i remember you.

So i can´t figure out if you are being serious or just trying to be funny and trolling.

So lets agree to disagree and of course it makes sense for a publisher/developer to put their own game out there and lower the price so they do not make any money. Because isen´t that what business is all about, it´s not about making money.

I haven't downloaded a pirated PC game in years...maybe 6 or 7. Piracy for games probably hit its peak around 2005/06, sincet hen, things h ave gotten a lot more difficult.

I have no idea since it's too much of a hassle for me. That's why I read/watch a couple reviews before purchasing a game.

While I don't pirate at all - I don't necessarily feel obliged to pay full price at release date.

Look at Fallout 4, for example - it's almost like it's still in beta and the public are serving as unpaid game testers!

I'll wait until they actually have a COMPLETE and bug-free game before purchasing. (Instead of getting mad about dlc doubling the price I just wait till I can get the whole lot for a reasonable price.)

@thereal25: Paying full price on purpose is something I rather for only a few select studios though. Incidentally, these studios usually are the ones who price AAA games half as expensive as other companies like Ubisoft or Bethesda anyway. For example, as I said, CDProjektRed, Square Enix or Creative Assembly.

@pcfascist: exactly, you're right !

I don't believe piracy has become any rarer but rather there is less attention drawn towards it and companies are putting less blame on it to justify some of the crazy DRM they were trying to implement in the late 00s.

I always download a pirated game before I buy it, just to make sure I`ll be able to run the game smoothly (except low demanding indie games). I also check if I really like the game and going to play it further. I wanted to buy Project CARS, but was unsure about handling it with my gamepad, after trying the pirated game, it turned that it was totally unplayable with my gamepad. So, I think that pirated versions is the best way to demo the game. I wonder why developers almost stopped to make demos. Anyway, I heard that piracy really boosted game sells, you want a legal copy with full support and updates for the game you really like, don`t you?

I think that in today's world more developers are realizing that piracy was never their issue.

It's great that there are so many avenues available today for PC developers to take in releasing their games to the world. The availability and service provided with games today is what has reduced the impact of piracy, and let's PC developers easily sell millions of copies of their games just like on consoles.

@cold_void: You know you can buy it on Steam, play it for maximum 2 hours, and return it before 2 weeks and get a full refund even if your reason is simply "I don't like the game"? I think this is better than dealing with cracks, viruses, slow downloads and etc.

I think it has to do with the fact that games are released in such unfinished state that in order to get the full experience you almost need to have the post release support. Also F2P and multiplayer games in general did a lot to chip away at the pirate scene as well.

I still pirate stuff sometimes. I cant blame anyone for doing it seeing the half assed way so many devs optimize and generally dont bug test when they release a game for 60 bucks. Just in the last 2 yrs, Watch Dogs, Witcher 3 (Great game despite the terrible engine and optimization), F04, Rise of The Tomb Raider, XCOM 2 (despite being a pc exclusive), and a few others were games my rig should DESTROY, and yet I had to lower settings way down to achieve decent framerates.
Fallout 4 looks like an Xbox 360 game, yet I still can barely ever maintain 60fps.

When devs consistently optimize, quality control and polish their games before releasing them, maybe less people would feel the need to say F you with their wallets.

I've never been big on pirating PC games. Back in the day, I mostly played multiplayer PC games so that threw piracy out the window, now it's so easy to get tons of games for cheap that my backlog is saturated.

I used to heavily pirate Playstation 1 games though. I think games like Metal Gear Solid basically demanded to be pirated because of how short and easy they were. That wasn't even a rental length game.

No I think people who are selfish enough to steal their games don't care about the developers in the first place. If piracy is dropping it is for different reasons.

Though I don't know if piracy IS dropping. I know since Pirate Bay started being blocked by ISP services that pirating is a lot harder but I don't think it is THAT hard that it is a problem.

@dexda: i genuenly believe that peole who were pirating have grown up and now have jobs and can afford it. I know i couldnt afford to buy then when i was younger as i had no money.

@Myron117: Yeah but there are always broke people who can't afford stuff and there are always self entitled people who don't think they should pay for stuff.

There will always be pirates.

Ive pirated every game i own so far... over 400 titles so far. Key word being I own them. If i purchase a game i always download a back up with a crack just in case steam or what ever service it's on goes down in the future. call me paranoid but what ever...

The poll is meaningless as the answers don't fit the question. The question asks for an objective answer but there are only subjective choices.

As a kid (circa Commodore 64 days) I pirated every game, because I didn't have any money.

When I grew older, got jobs and had a bit of money, I started buying them.

One thing to keep in mind about pirating, is that most of the time, the people who are pirating these games, wouldn't buy the game in the first place. So, basically, if the publishers/developers find a way to eliminate piracy, it doesn't necessarily mean more sales for them, because the people originally pirating the games, had no intent of buying them, even if it was there only option, if that makes any sense.