Well, better late than never.

Unless you are Duke Nukem Forever.

This. Core reason for piracy.

On the other hand pirates won't find many sympathies in a forum full of paying gamers.

Do you want a medal for such an achievement?

Yeah, that would be good! Once, i was a pure pirate. After GoG came around, i started buying instead of stealing. Now my library contains 95 items, most of which bought from myself and the majority of them, not from cheap discounts but from full price purchases. Yeah, medal sounds good, but please wait until i hit 100! :)

lol big deal

When I grew up, the children were the only pirates around.

Then you do grow up. Have your own money. See where to spend it. Know that stealing is wrong in any case. Evaluate the role of publishers; evaluate where the monopolies are; ponder what non monopolous publishing services you should or should not support (why support a publisher who mostly sells Steam/Origin/Uplay keys anyway?). Evaluate how much the publisher needs for a good service, evaluate how much their service is a actually worth, evaluate how many employees they support instead of only just a server farm. Evaluate what kind of money the developer gets and needs. Sometimes, come to the conclusion that you'd rather not buy the game in a sale, but full price instead. Evaluate whether you'd support a crowd funding campaign to get everyone (except the pirates) a certain type of game. Evaluate your own role in game culture; pity Valve dependie developers who do not jump at the opportunity to get their game into your cone of cultural visibility.

Grownup things. You wouldn't understand.

Some of these pirates may be young kids who don't have money and wouldn't be able to play any games otherwise.
I know because I too was one of those kids who played pirated games.

Now that I'm old I only play games which I've bought.

Let the torrents stay where they are.

When you encounter gog torrents, it's a good opportunity to do some gog-salesmanship!

I used to hang out on one of the 'abandoned games' torrent sites. One of the ones with a pretty hard policy of "only games older than 2 generations behind" and so forth. It's definitely a civil-law legally actionable thing to do (definite copyright infringement), and it's a moral gray zone, but hey I don't really fret myself when downloading a Commodore 64 collection of games. Someone wants to put that crap up for sale, I'll buy it. Until then I'm downloading it. Sue me.

Anyway, some people would upload GOG.com games because they met the "old enough" rule. I wasn't a fan because the games were currently available and not even expensive. I did a little bit of a sales pitch but not too heavy, and I ran a couple giveaway contests there during Christmas seasons to give people GOG.com legit games (that they could obviously download without me). It got a lot more people interested in this site, and may have been a meaningful push for fence sitters.

Always look at it in terms of maximizing sales rather than minimizing infringement.

And i forgot the most important! GoG games are actually good advertizing, indeed! How did i ever come to buy the Witcher 2? (then proceed into buying 1 too, and after those, 80+ more games?)

I was pissed about initial DRM and Namco Bandai meddling, so i didn't buy and got the torrent, instead! By playing, i realized game was pretty good, so good, that i HAD to go out and buy it! Also, i realized that by that time, DRM was already lifted.

So i went out and bought 2 Enhanced Edition in retail, a full of 40 euros. I redeemed my code on GoG and that is how i am here today.

Kids and not enough money is a fake and ridiculous stereotype that is already debunked. At least I myself, am/was an ideological pirate, first and foremost. I only buy from people and places who have to offer me good and real deals. Like here that everything is DRM Free and you get to keep and fully own whatever it is you buy. The publisher's fault for not offering purchase options and stubbornly choosing Steam and DRM, instead. A free market should be free, allowing the consumer to decide where to buy his gear from.

Also i never did and never would up anything from GoG. Especially something that came back or is sold right now. Especially something i myself own, bought, have.

#1 piracy defense lie, congratulations!

Sounds more stupid every single time I read it.

Fact of the matter is – people become pirates because they don't want to pay for games. The idea that THEY of all people just go and buy the games they've already finished... yeah. No.

Maybe a few years after release, when they get it in a bundle at 90+% discount, just so that they can say "but I bought it afterwards" to allllllll the people who don't believe that anyway.

Moderating in a forum that swiftly permabans pirates, I'll say that this is just what GOG needs. You can't expect to be part of a community of a publisher when at the same time, you're screwing over the publisher.

There's a lot of individual stories and some may line up like you believe. However if you look at statistics for music, the people who do the most music copying as a group are the same people who spend the largest portion of their income on music.

It's not *certain* that this follows for games, but it's likely.

Would this be postception or echoception?

I disagree. Music is either played through the preexisting computer already, or through devices in the 50 to 300$ range, hardly ever updated. Essentially, as a present-day music enthusiast, you buy classy over-ear headphones and you're mostly set.

Add to that the fact that the digital music market is occupied by the company that has somehow instilled the most ludicrous and constant brand loyalty in their utterly well funded costumer base, and... well, Jobs' your uncle.

Game enthusiasts, particularly PC players, have more diversified needs on the one hand and, with the (admittedly huge!) exception of Valve, no brand loyalty at all. Ever upgraded hardware, periphery, printed walkthroughs, even game paraphernalia like action figures etc., all that can't be pirated.

In theory, you can spend vast sums of money on your gaming hobby, but none at all on actual games. What you save on games will add to your hardware budget. That's in no way similar to the music industry.

You seem to be suggesting that gamers pay significant money for hardware, and audio aficionados do not. I can assure you that the second half of this assertion is false.

The Apple thing is a red herring. This data continues before the era when they were a significant player in the music STORE business (though not the playback business). Brand loyalty with music is, if anything, with the bands. Not the store.

One day, I'm going to get a copy of a game where you can play a necromancer, and the giveaway will be a necro post from the oldest non-necroed post. I will be infamous in a radius of at least 5 planets. And people will clap loudly when I leave their presence, just to make sure I know they like me leaving. But the game (Battlecry probably) will be blah blah until the end of time up and stuff. And then I will ramble on and on about old topics until nobody notices that 1'm using num8ers intead of letters and after a while 43829 it will make no sense at all. And that will be the mmenoet taht i wtire eervhtinyg wtih lttertes all swerced up. But then it will end as the world suddenly ends in a violent GOGbear of Star Trek. After I copy and paste this a lot of times just to be as ass-a-9 as arguing with a person arguing with someone about something they wrote 3 years ago on a forum.One day, I'm going to get a copy of a game where you can play a necromancer, and the giveaway will be a necro post from the oldest non-necroed post. I will be infamous in a radius of at least 5 planets. And people will clap loudly when I leave their presence, just to make sure I know they like me leaving. But the game (Battlecry probably) will be blah blah until the end of time up and stuff. And then I will ramble on and on about old topics until nobody notices that 1'm using num8ers intead of letters and after a while 43829 it will make no sense at all. And that will be the mmenoet taht i wtire eervhtinyg wtih lttertes all swerced up. But then it will end as the world suddenly ends in a violent GOGbear of Star Trek. After I copy and paste this a lot of times just to be as ass-a-9 as arguing with a person arguing with someone about something they wrote 3 years ago on a forum.One day, I'm going to get a copy of a game where you can play a necromancer, and the giveaway will be a necro post from the oldest non-necroed post. I will be infamous in a radius of at least 5 planets. And people will clap loudly when I leave their presence, just to make sure I know they like me leaving. But the game (Battlecry probably) will be blah blah until the end of time up and stuff. And then I will ramble on and on about old topics until nobody notices that 1'm using num8ers intead of letters and after a while 43829 it will make no sense at all. And that will be the mmenoet taht i wtire eervhtinyg wtih lttertes all swerced up. But then it will end as the world suddenly ends in a violent GOGbear of Star Trek. After I copy and paste this a lot of times just to be as ass-a-9 as arguing with a person arguing with someone about something they wrote 3 years ago on a forum.One day, I'm going to get a copy of a game where you can play a necromancer, and the giveaway will be a necro post from the oldest non-necroed post. I will be infamous in a radius of at least 5 planets. And people will clap loudly when I leave their presence, just to make sure I know they like me leaving. But the game (Battlecry probably) will be blah blah until the end of time up and stuff. And then I will ramble on and on about old topics until nobody notices that 1'm using num8ers intead of letters and after a while 43829 it will make no sense at all. And that will be the mmenoet taht i wtire eervhtinyg wtih lttertes all swerced up. But then it will end as the world suddenly ends in a violent GOGbear of Star Trek. After I copy and paste this a lot of times just to be as ass-a-9 as arguing with a person arguing with someone about something they wrote 3 years ago on a forum.One day, I'm going to get a copy of a game where you can play a necromancer, and the giveaway will be a necro post from the oldest non-necroed post. I will be infamous in a radius of at least 5 planets. And people will clap loudly when I leave their presence, just to make sure I know they like me leaving. But the game (Battlecry probably) will be blah blah until the end of time up and stuff. And then I will ramble on and on about old topics until nobody notices that 1'm using num8ers intead of letters and after a while 43829 it will make no sense at all. And that will be the mmenoet taht i wtire eervhtinyg wtih lttertes all swerced up. But then it will end as the world suddenly ends in a violent GOGbear of Star Trek. After I copy and paste this a lot of times just to be as ass-a-9 as arguing with a person arguing with someone about something they wrote 3 years ago on a forum.One day, I'm going to get a copy of a game where you can play a necromancer, and the giveaway will be a necro post from the oldest non-necroed post. I will be infamous in a radius of at least 5 planets. And people will clap loudly when I leave their presence, just to make sure I know they like me leaving. But the game (Battlecry probably) will be blah blah until the end of time up and stuff. And then I will ramble on and on about old topics until nobody notices that 1'm using num8ers intead of letters and after a while 43829 it will make no sense at all. And that will be the mmenoet taht i wtire eervhtinyg wtih lttertes all swerced up. But then it will end as the world suddenly ends in a violent GOGbear of Star Trek. After I copy and paste this a lot of times just to be as ass-a-9 as arguing with a person arguing with someone about something they wrote 3 years ago on a forum.