What is a game intended to do? To entertain the masses. True, the companies need to make their money on games that they develop. True, game sales are their source of income.

What I want to point out is this:

The people that buy the games, or other forms of media, have the money to do so. Whereas at least some of the “pirates” out there, don’t have the necessary source of income to purchase the entertainment they would like to have. Granted, that does mean that there are those pirates that do have the necessary source of income who still pirate media. Statistically, I don’t know what the percentage is, but I can guess that probably a good majority of the pirates do have the money. The main point is: When something gets “pirated,” there are more (key word) copies of that product out in the world for others to see and possibly buy in the future.

Solution?

Let the economy run as it is.

The novelty that will wear off is the game itself if he doesn’t refresh it regularly.

As for the stealing arguments, we have heard before. I won’t buy if I can’t try. Simple as that. So if I don’t download it’s a certain “lost sale” while if I do download then there is a possibility of a sale. Note that “lost sale” should be used with caution. A “lost sale” implies that the sale would take place if the conditions were different. Which means that “lost sales” may occur either with the file sharing or without it.

In this sense, you cannot take a money from a “lost sale” for granted as MAFIAA does. Auto makers had a bunch of “lost sales” since 2007 because of the subprime crisis. If there was no crisis they’d have sold more cars. If we take the “downloading is stealing” reasoning to the extreme then the customers that decided not to buy the cars because they had to focus on other priorities are thieves since they deprived the auto makers of the money he was going to spend on the car before the environment changed and made the financial situation deteriorate. And yet it’s not a good example because you can’t “try” a car for an unlimited time (which would be awesome since today some cars lack endurance/resilience in the long term) but you can watch a copy of a movie twice or three times (as I did with God of War II by playing through 3 times before being able to buy).

In the end what’s the point here? Sharing is not stealing because you can’t state that the one that didn’t download will surely buy and that the ones that downloaded certainly won’t buy. The point here is how to quantify and improve the buy rates in the downloading population and how to make money out of free. If you ask me, the minecraft guy succeeded in it for the short term. I mean, even if he’s working with a small crew, $200k per head in an year is plenty of money. What we need to address now is the long term.

Copywrong morons can say whatever they want. Either they failed to grasp what is the challenge now or they are blatantly ignoring it simply because it’ll need effort and it’ll wield less profitable margins.

The original question correctly implies that MOST people don’t care and that you would have to look for the “who” that do care”

You are confusing the statement “I couldn’t care less” with a question form.

Try applying logic next time rather than using rules that don’t match because you saw it on youtube.