*maybe without quotes? let's try?*

This is a really tired and bogus argument. Really? In 2020 you need demos and samples and trials? Have you heard of refunds? 2 week long refunds? 30 day long refunds? No? Then I can't help you.


Fair enough, but please realise you are a minority.

I appreciate you fighting this battle with me playing devil's advocate with myself from 2012, but really these arguments don't cut it. They might cut it *for you* and that might be enough *for you*, but generally speaking in terms of this logic you speak of, these arguments don't really hold water. I mean, your amain argument is that price is the determinant for buying games...which means we should all be pirates as nobody can compete with free. The willingness to pay argument kinda doesn't work if you can get an identical product next door for free. Other excuses for piracy suffer the same fate - they are basically indefensible. So I remain skeptical of the impact of piracy according to you. The effect and impact of DRM is something you haven't even touched upon though \ you've mainly talked about the piracy aspect, which is fine, but really we should be talking about the relationship between the two, as per Ghazi's article.

It is hard not to fall into discussion even in a post such as this one.....

ah well i can use the minor style too ya know ;)

Hi

Joined about 7 years ago, found myself searching for old games from my youth and this was the place i found all kinds of links to, first through torrent sites and later on decided to join. With first games such as settlers 2, screamer 2, fantasy general and theme hospital, and the fun gog provided a fun and legal way to obtain and to compare youthfull memories with the present.

in the following years GoG grew out for me as yet another discount platform, thankfully i managed to stop the idiocrisy and now feel the love again of buying those old previous thought lost titles ;)

the forum is a nice addition for when you feel bored or have a genuine question but really can be done with some better moderation

so, a not so out of the ordinary story which i found at least a bit decent to present while reading through the hollywood novels about freedom and anarchy

You are confusing logic with fact. Logic is not facts, it is how you put the facts together or your method of interpretation.
And its not really anecdotal anyway, as it is true for me and many others and never seems to be taken into account.
It was also only one example, and there are plenty of others, and it was only part of my answer .... and you really need to take into account what I say overall.

You are putting words in my mouth, as that was not what I was saying at all.
One must always remember, that it is not just what is said that counts, but also what is not said.
There is nothing bogus at all about me being interested in some games enough to buy them at a fair price and buy others I am less interested in at a much lower price.
Where do I say I then steal the rest or steal because I don't like the price?
You totally misunderstood what I was saying.

Having an interest in a game, is not the same as liking it.
If I like a game and it is at a fair price I buy it.
If I only have an interest in a game, then if it is cheap enough I may give it a chance (take a punt) by buying it.
That was all I was saying ... other than the fact that GOG has had many games that I had an interest in at a cheap enough price .... which is born out by how many I have bought.
I was never going to buy those games for a dearer price, unless my interest in them turned into like.

Further to that, what we like or have an interest in is subjective, so I wasn't making any quality statement about the games either or whether they were value for money ... just how much I was prepared to pay for a game I only had some kind of interest in .... not a game I knew I liked.

And now you are being anecdotal .... and misunderstood me again.

You may have covered it, but you clearly failed to understand my counter argument.
Like you I also claimed you cannot know true numbers ... or they know the true numbers.
But I also gave a big picture holistic response.
I am also challenging your assumptions based on their claims or whatever you've reasoned yourself.
For instance, how can anyone possibly know 'there are 4 or 5 times as many pirates than legit gamers out there'?
Or 'They have clearly deemed it profitable - whether it's because of reduced piracy from some internal research of theirs .....'. You are saying there is only one conclusion possible, while I am saying there are others.
etc etc
In a way it is a bit like studying a group of people or animals in their normal habitat, but they are aware of your presence, so you have infected the experience by adding in another factor. That means you don't get true results.

I have no idea why you put so much faith in these studies, because I certainly don't have any. I think they are flawed from beginning to end. There are just so many factors that are impossible to know. It is a bit like some psychologists who just cannot resist labeling people and putting them in boxes ... total nonsense. If you have any understanding of the human mind at all, you would know that was just not reasonable at all.

AN EXAMPLE I KNOW FOR SURE
Several years back, there was a year or three where CD sales did not meet projected expectations. They were still making huge profits, but not as much as expected, going by previous years.
Those same years, DVD and Blu-ray movie sales greatly exceeded expectations.
Did those music companies then put two and two together? Not that I ever heard .... they just blamed piracy.
I know for a fact, that I bought many less CDs at that time, because i was spending most of my money on movies.
And it seemed quite obvious to me that many others had been doing the same.
I am a big music collector, but like most people, I have limited finances and so limited choices. So I decided to hang back on CD buying for a while and take advantage of all the great movie sales. However, I did not neglect music altogether, as many of the movies were music related (concerts etc).

Gawd, you really need to think deeper.
If I buy one game and I play it within days, then yes a refund option is a great one.
However, many of us are way behind with our game playing and are collecting or archiving, so it is just not a relevant option for us.

There are also different reasons involved between buying a game you like and are going to definitely play, and buying others that interest you on some level, that you might or might not ever get around to playing.

Like my music and movie collections, I often buy based on variety and to have choice ... with a mind toward that possible rainy day scenario or just because it makes me feel rich like a king. It means I reduce my reliance on others.

Experience has also shown me that games often become unavailable after some time. GOG was built around that aspect and DRM-Free. So archiving or collecting comes into its own when future proofing choice etc.

Maybe among the young and single who often have no patience ... or those who have plenty of money to waste.
Most people have limited finances to spend on games, so many of course try to make the most of that, so game price is very important.

You are clearly not understanding what I am saying if you believe all that.

Take price for instance, you are just looking at it one way ... paid or free. What happened to fair price and cheap price?

Once again, you are attributing to me something I never said ... that price is the only determinant for buying a game. It is an important consideration for many of us, but is coupled with how much you like a game or think you do. The more I like a game, then the more I am prepared to pay ... up to a point. Likewise the less sure I am about a game that I feel some interest in, the less I am prepared to risk on it.

You are also ignoring many things that I have said.
One of the important ones, is that I gave up getting cracked games quite a while ago, and that since joining GOG in May 2017 I have bought or acquired nearly a thousand games from GOG legally. I also stated that along with DRM-Free, price has been a major factor for me doing so. That's two kinds of prices.
(1) A fair price for games I like, and many of those I already had on disc ... so I have paid twice for those games.
(2) A cheap enough price for games I only had some kind of interest in.

If you haven't understood what I have been saying in relation to DRM, then you haven't been reading me properly enough, which is born out by the number of misunderstandings you have shown. DRM and Piracy are linked, but so is DRM and Price for many ... and no doubt Piracy and Price are also linked for many.

P.S. And of course, I have given you my personal perspective .... so yes some of it is mostly just relevant to me. That said, I was also trying to show that those doing all the guessing and making fabulous claims, forget the logic of what are other possibilities .... they wear blinkers and use Tunnel Vision with the few facts they have, which are not the complete picture.

The replies and quotes are getting out of hand. New numbered list.

1. Logic vs facts vs anecdotes
Here, you've argued there was a lack of logic used by me or others with these arguments about piracy/DRM. I countered that was not a valid observation, if your own logic used was merely based on anecdotes (which it is). You then went on argue your anecdotes were not anecdotes at all, by quoting how they were the definition of anecdotes. Brilliant.

The little side diversion of you stating that I mixed up logic with facts doesn't reflect what I said. I criticised you for using anecdotal evidence as the basis of your logic, when in deductive logic it should be something based on facts (which are themselves based on evidence) to be truth-preserving. If the deductions and the logic thus used are based on mere anecdotes that do not hold true outside of the limited premise where they were presented, then the whole deduction is invalid for the larger premise. In a way, when criticising people for lack of logic, you need to look in the mirror, pal.

2. Price as a determinant for buying games and Piracy
In this argument you state that price influences a person's willingness to buy games. Well duh. You use the anecdotal example of yourself to show how you buy games if they're cheap enough. You don't pirate (though you used to a long time ago), showing the fact that pirating is not an option for you, irregardless of the price of the game. You've essentially removed yourself from consideration in this demographic. We are not talking about you when we are talking about pirates. You no longer represent them, and cannot use your own example of what pirates do. You certainly lost all plot and meaning when arguing about price and piracy, especially backtracking and stating that price doesn't actually have a relationship with piracy, and that you weren't even saying anything about piracy. Which begs the question, why bring this up at all when discussing piracy.

Whatever you said or claimed, in no way disputes my argument that using price as a determinant whether to pirate the game or not is disingenious at best and flat out false/dishonest at worst. After all, what is a worthy price of a game to a pirate? Is it the same as what the game should be worth? Even to just recoup the losses based on projected sales? Will a pirate pay the bottom price (if at all) after seriously sampling the game, possibly the full game? Wouldn't they deem it worth a lot less and get it from the bargain bin after they've experienced everything? This still makes piracy impact the creative content creators, clearly, even if the pirate decides to contribute slightly to the creation of games, as a sort of charity almost. Again, these 'semi-honest pirates' barely exist compared to the actual pirates - else the pirated copies vs legit copies and sales (thus the piracy rate) would be a lot smaller, which we know is not based on evidence.

3. Piracy rates and loss of sales
You talked about piracy rates and loss of sales, whilst confusing the two. Piracy rates have been empirically measured, by various independent methodologies by various sources, each corrobarating each other with similar numbers. I referenced this already, and you clearly did not read it and surely did not understand it. Where the guesswork comes in is the estimation of loss of sales due to that piracy rate - how many of those pirates could be converted to sales? This we will never know accurately without an alternate reality device at least, and even the survey based studies are probably wholly inaccurate as it's based on self-confessed illegal activity. This is why I've never even talked about putting a number on the loss of sales, but I did use logic to argue that the factual number doesn't matter for using DRM and its profitability and why companies still use DRM. Which you handwaived and dismissed as me dictating only one conclusion is possible, without arguing even a little bit what the other possible conclusions could be, i.e using logic yourself.

4. Sampling and lack of demos as an excuse for piracy
Here you argue that refund policies are inadequate for sampling games. This is based on some group that presumably does not buy games, and instead pirates them to see if they would like the game and ultimately purchase it. You no longer even use anecdotal examples of this happening, like yourself (who isn't even a pirate anymore), just some fuzzy excuses like people having a back catalogue of unplayed games. Again, what does this have to do with pirates? You're basically saying that people buy games on a whim not intending to possibly play the game ever, as a counter to my point that lack of demos are not an excuse to pirate games. Don't you see how non-sensical that is? Don't you see how irrelevant your argument is to piracy?

5. The actual argument about DRM and piracy
THat's what this discussion should be about - not this side diversion argument about the scale of piracy (well established) and the excuses for it. So far, you've only briefly mentioned that DRM is evil and harmful without going into any details and that presumably piracy and stealing (or copyright-infringing) is justified depending on level of DRM. I'd like for you to finally connect the dots and instead of excusing piracy based on these flimsy excuses of lack of demos and price, talk about DRM and its reasons why it's being used and how it affects creative content creators and gamers on the whole. According to you, of course. There's still a bunch of peer reviewed literature and argumentation in my summary article that nobody's touched or willing to even glance at. Topics to discuss here still remain even without going to my summary article, like intrusiveness of DRM according to the majority, and how piracy resulted in the detrimental shifting of business models for PC gamers. These were the numbered points I mentioned earlier that went unanswered.

6. Tunnel Vision and wearing blinkers whilst using your own example as anecdotal counter-evidence

Nuff said.

There is no such thing as facts versus logic, they are two entirely different things. Logic is how you process things like the facts. And you really don't understand what anecdotal means either.

And you continue to think it reasonable that they claim to know stuff.
I call bullshit, as they can't possibly know enough about what they claim. They have some facts, but not near enough of them, and one missing fact can make all the difference ... like the CD and Movie example I mentioned.

So just no point saying any more as you continue to misunderstand and confuse things, and I am not interested in talking in circles and having to repeat myself. I don't think I have missed anything with my replies, so if you want answers to your latest quotes, I am sure they are already there.

You are entitled to your view, which is not mine, and you are welcome to it.

P.S. And what I said was cracked games, not pirated ones. The only games I have gotten that could be classed as pirated, were those called Abandonware, and that was the only way I could get those games. I'm a collector, and I have always preferred to buy the games I like. However, I resent and despise DRM, so I always got cracked EXE for my games which needed it, that I either bought or got from friends (to try), which I then used with a virtual drive program. That's because the other thing I hate and despise is whirring disc drives, and most importantly the risk to discs going back and forth between cases and drives ... accidents happen and are costly, and maybe devastating if the game is no longer available. I've also never uploaded (shared) a game ever. NOTE - Virtual drives always ran faster too and more smoothly with quicker loading times etc.

I know many people do decide to get a pirated game due to it being too expensive, but I have never done that myself ... I just wait and be patient, until the price drops enough.

Sensible collectors like myself, are the backbone that supports the media industry. We don't make them megarich, but we give them a reliable consistent revenue stream.

I agree. You're not actually arguing anything anymore by the way, instead you're just completely ignoring everything I say. Even when they are easily digested in a numbered list. You don't even explain your claims or justify them. You just say "you really don't understand what anecdotal means" or that whole thing about logic, and you never actually explain further. It's literally the same as claiming the day-time sky is purple, without any explanation or backing it up with some clarification.

So there's no point to this, I actually think you're not arguing in good faith anymore or that you ever were if you can't extend the same courtesy I did for you, which is to address your points. I spent some time on my answers and expected at least a reply to one or two of my points - something you seem incapable of doing. So I am in fact glad this goes no further, it really was a waste of time.

Literally none of them are, hence why they're being discussed. In fact, it's called discussion, because it moves forward by discussing things. Not ignoring them completely and assuming you answered in a previous post. Because you didn't.

All in all, this whole exchange was completely unproductive and useless. I learnt nothing from your anecdotes and arguments, and you refused to even go through my points or read my referenced articles. You never even asked about my summary article which started this whole exchange. Your very weak arguments boiled down to "I, myself, have experienced A, therefore A must be true for most people" and "I have never experienced B, therefore it must not occur very often". That's literally the same as when arguing about climate and warming and someone points out it snowed yesterday in their hometown. I have no interest in arguing with someone so weakly versed in logic and debate. So I'll let you part ways with the old saying 'agree to disagree' even though you never replied to most of my points. FYI, there are actually some good arguments to be made in this whole discussion regarding DRM and piracy from your side in the debate, but you failed to make any of them, especially when you focused solely on the piracy aspect.

I've had more useful discussions with GameRager. That should tell you a lot.

Yep, it tells us everything, all that I and others need to know. ;)

The so called discussion had nowhere left to go, so the height of silliness to continue with it.
It's not like I was ever going to be able to convince you, as your continual lack of understanding clearly showed, and you needed to understand if you were ever going to have a hope in hell of ever convincing me of anything.

Anyway, as they say, it's all there in black & white.

When you ignore 98% of my post content, I can forgive you for thinking that.

OMG, you didn't need to convince me of anything! Did you yet again miss me explaining not once, twice, but three times that I no longer believed DRM free was detrimental to PC gaming?? This was supposedly an honest discussion or a debate about the points between two people arguing in good faith. As you weren't arguing in good faith, the whole thing fell apart and was less productive than a discussion with GameRager. Why? Because at least he doesn't ignore 13 points and paragraphs that I wrote, that were relevant.

Clearly. Not that anyone cares on these forums. Anyways, I'll let you have final word on this matter, as you clearly suffer from last-worditis.

It was you that just had the last say, not me ... you can't even get that right.

Anyway this is me having MY LAST SAY about it all ... no doubt you will follow with yours ... or not ... LOL.

EDIT
Well it seems I did indeed also have THE LAST SAY, not just MY LAST SAY.
So in that case, I might as well do a proper one, that is a summary of what happened in my conversation with rojimboo.

One and all are free to agree or disagree with the following, but I am not going to discuss it further. I only do this summary, for those who may have misunderstood what happened, and are decent enough to care.

In his first post in this thread, he mentioned something, that I decided to air my view on.
I did not really want it to develop into a full blown argument, and take over this thread, which it did for a while, else I would have done so at his own thread that he mentioned.
I was giving my view and he was entitled to agree or disagree with it.
Right from the start though, he wanted to discuss various studies, which were better left to his thread, and I tried to make it abundantly clear, that I was not interested in discussing those, that they had no validity with me or credibility. He kept bringing them up, so the conversation eventually broke down.
He also kept claiming I said various things or supported them with my arguments, which I did not. In truth it was just the way he interpreted them, which made me feel he was only doing a shallow read of my replies.
He continued to do these things, so yes I did not even bother to address the other things he wrote in later replies, especially as it was clear he had not realized I had already addressed some or many, if not most of them.
There is no value in artificially continuing a conversation that is absolutely going nowhere and has started repeating itself. I gave my view and was happy to leave it at that.
As for his claim about me barely addressing DRM. That only shows even further, how shallow he read my replies ... and honestly, what more was there to say, that hadn't already been covered.

As I stated in my personal journey post, I rediscovered GOG back on the 1st May 2017, and because this time around I could partake of their offerings, I've been hooked ever since.

What I neglected to specifically mention though, was that until that moment, I had stopped being an active gamer. So the gamer in me also awoke at that time, and my rekindled interest in games hasn't just been limited to the GOG store.

In fact, I finally addressed the elephant in the room and re-engaged with Steam, where at least this time around I had a reasonable web connection. That's not to say that I was softening my stance on Steam. Just that I could finally access what I owned, that had a Steam requirement. This was SiN Episodes (original SiN included) and the Valve Orange Box with some Half-Life etc games. Somewhere around that time, the Complete Valve Collection went on sale and was incredibly cheap, so as I was already in for a penny, I decided to go in for the pound as well, and so bought that. I've not bought anything else from Steam since, until another favorite series, Tomb Raider, went on sale at great discount prices too a month or two ago, so I made an exception for a few of the games in the series that I didn't have, that weren't available at GOG. It was an opportunity and I took it, bearing in mind they weren't costing me much, and so I would still buy those games again, if they ever do turn up at GOG.

For completeness, I must also mention that a month or two before that, I bought two Total War games at the Humble Store, that were extremely cheap, but alas were Steam keys. All in all though, I have spent less than $50 AUD with Steam for the games I own there, and it is not my intention to increase that ... it's almost all I am prepared to risk there. Contrast that with around $3,077 AUD that I have spent on games etc at GOG so far.

The story doesn't end there, as I was gradually coaxed into also getting some Indie games from Itch.io, though until the recent Racial Justice & Equality Bundle, I hadn't spent any money there, just picked up the odd freebie. In fact for a good while now, I have been on a bit of a free game spree ... especially since the advent of COVID, where so many more became available from many places.

So now I have heaps of games way beyond GOG and Steam and Itch.io. I have many at Epic, many at IndieGala, some at Humble, many at Microsoft, Game Giveaway and beyond. A rough estimate says something like 3,000+ games.

As I have said before, I have so many games now, I really need not buy or obtain another one ... though I will continue to do so of course ... certainly for series I am a fan of, but also for those that grab me enough. I'm always on the lookout for something different, and I don't play games according to the order I obtain them, I play according to mood and desire.

So my journey with GOG continues, despite the odd upset.