And there are plenty of people who see the game that would never have otherwise and become loyal fans, which increases not only immediate income but future income, as well. You can't completely disregard the fact that this does happen.

People who are intent to steal will steal, and they'll find a way to steal with or without a file-sharing client. There's rarely a paucity of options for the morally flexible, so such people don't really contribute to sales because there are never no options. You can't count them as "lost" income because most of them would never pay; the only question is whether the free PR and brand loyalty that piracy occasionally creates balances out those very few actual lost sales.

I take it you have never generated anything worthwhile in entirety of your existence that you would like to protect from abuse and benefit from? Should I feel pity for you at this point?

It was you who argued that there is no way to measure or attach worth to virtual or intellectual property. Do you really believe there is a note or a coin for every dollar/zloty/pound/mark on this planet?

Since that is not the case... then your entire theory falls on its face.
Virtual means are used to measure real world property...

Furthermore, by your argument since a team of talented individuals at CDPR have worked hard on their product they should only sell it once, for agreed value (I would imagine set by some sort of non existing entity) that would compensate them for their hard work and involvement, and from there on the one sold game can be copied for free to everyone.

Or are you so dense that you are unable to comprehend that the product was made to sell a number of copies of the same product with a profit in mind? I do assume you understand the principles of capitalism and free market?

Or is this an argument about flows of capitalism and a free market and wonders of anarchy?

So, copying homework is not cheating as well?
Who is the dense party now?

Furthermore, your argument could be applied towards every fundamental product offered by our society, both virtual and physical. After all, by your reasoning an author of a book has no right to earn even a small percentage from every copy sold past the very first one, regardless of how much time he has spent writing it...

Good god I certainly do not want to live in your world...

Anyway, allow me to take a moment and forward your comments to CDPR...
I wonder what they will think about piracy of their software (as an example) and how will they feel about being called dense since after all that is what you just called them because I am very sure that a piracy is certainly a crime in their minds.
At this point I can only assume you are either a troll or working for BioWare...

You're pretty dumb, huh?

In your mind:

copying = cheating = stealing

"You stand accused of cheating the $20000 plasma"

"Your honor, I promise, I didn't copy it!"

Feeling is mutual buddy...
Though I have a feeling you lack a sense of ethics and morals to comprehend the issue at hand.
It's either that or you are just not interested in reading, just in voicing your opinion.

Gonna play only copied games from now (learned my lesson_somewhere down the line it does not matter).

-Edit-

I have entered the DARK SIDE of the force, there is no turning back.

hmm, that is true only to an extend. without file sharing programs like torrent and file sharing websites like megaupload, the pirate community will be very small, will only include the tech savy ones. with the options people now have, pirating has become way, waaaay too easy. if these options are taken away, it would be a whole different ball game. I am talking about normal people, potential customers. the pirates will always be pirates, but with such easy pirating ways shove into regular people's faces, I am sure a good chunk of money is lost. file sharing websites are especially bad, it is like they are profiting from the hard work of the game developers.

do you go into a restaurant and order food only intend to pay if it is good? this logic is pretty screw up. there was this girl that changed her order 4 times, she payed for every single one of the dishes. you must pay for services rendered, doesn't matter if you like it or not. I thought the manager handled that the correct way. you try it, you don't like it? don't ever go back. games are sooo much better already. we got demos, and we got gameplay videos, and we got previews. I am sure we all got a couple of game sites we like? I personally like eurogamer + ign. I watch the gameplay video for raged, I was floored by what I watched in that video, got it on pre order since. oblivion burned me really badly, I would not be touching skyrim till I am 100% sure it is better. oblivion is a totally different case, it is like you got a plate that you didn't order. that is when I want everyone to pirate the crap out of it to teach them a lesson. yes, I am still piss. I played it for like 15 hours and stop, never touched it again. I can honestly tell you all that I just might pirate a game from bethesda to make out for the 50$ I lost on oblivion. the good thing about restaurants, when your food is wrong, they can immediately make it up to you by bringing you what you ordered.

I respect your view and I actually agree with it...

The best thing about it is your attitude... you are prepared to consider piracy (as I would) in some rare circumstances but you are not pretending it is legal (not against the law) or some such nonsense.

It's like stealing office stationary, everyone does it, but it is STILL stealing :)
As for IGN, they are all sold out, so I take everything they promote with a giant grain of salt :)

Of course not, but if the food is inedible and gives me food poisoning, I'm going to feel pretty justified in grabbing some bread and walking out without paying the check.

I think you and I are agreeing more than we're disagreeing, actually. And yeah, you can take away file-sharing and piracy loses a bit of steam, but if you knock down one method of sharing another will just pop up. It's not something that can be eliminated because of the nature of the internet. Devoting money to countering it is just burning through that money playing whack-a-mole--nothing substantial will ever come of it, and if game companies are losing so much money to piracy they should probably be holding on to all that DRM-inventing, torrent-tracking money anyway.

There is no feeling. But misapprehension of the facts doesn't seem out of the ordinary for you.

Copying software, illegally or otherwise, is not theft. It just simply isn't. Accordingly, no court in the world tries it as such.

You have all of these things so conflated that you've drawn a distinct good/evil schema and lumped everything in each section as fundamentally equivalent. Once again I have to point out the irony of doing so and apparently being a fan of The Witcher.

I'd warrant that I have a much more sophisticated understanding of morals and ethics than you do, and I swear this is the only use I'll ever get out of my liberal arts studies. You've already made a decision that's awash with truthiness as you shoot from the gut and take no arguments.

I've stopped well short of making a good/evil assessment and decided that the act itself (which isn't theft, it's copyright infringement (sometimes)) is complicated and nuanced. Furthermore, I'm not automatically signed up to an account on the forum for re-downloading all the old games that I already own (hint-hint).

People who wouldn't have ever paid for the game and play it anyway cause no actual net loss to the companies involved. They may howl and moan about lost revenue but it would never have eventuated. On a related point, how is this different to listening to a song on the radio, or watching a film on TV? The exposure of the game is increased, and companies do benefit from this.

Other people try out the game, then by it. Good on them, everyone should be entitled to know exactly what they're getting before they do so. You want to see true ethical apathy, you should try reading through that End User License Agreement that you always skip through. Think that you own the game and the data installed on your computer? Think again.

The people who are the issue are those who would have paid for the game, but instead found it easier/cheaper/more convenient/whatever to pirate it. You'll find that they are an incredibly small subset of all those who are involved in piracy. There are even those who have carefully constructed ethical reasons for why they pirate. You might not agree with them, but you cannot call them unethical, especially where you have presented no moral framework for your own stance.

Finally, repeatedly, and once again: software piracy is not theft. The distinction is a legal one, not a moral one, and you'd better believe that the distinction exists.
You're well within your rights to do that, at least in Australia you are.

I have to say, for all well spoken argument you are still applying your own perception of morality and logic to it... which makes this argument unresolvable. You are presenting yourself as right and others who do not share your point of view as wrong and call us silly for superimposing the whole conversation into good and evil, right and wrong setting... the irony is right there... except it is also on you. It's actually on all of us....

You are also applying the letter of law to your arguments and not the spirit of law, if I did not know any better I would have said you are a lawyer. Fundamentally we have a right to ask for protection of our intellectual creations (legal or otherwise), yes some people abuse it, others seek that protection with best intentions in mind...

This is NOT about the financial gains or losses resulting from copying of the games or other software materials, this is not about what is right or wrong because number of us have admitted to knowingly pirating software and recognizing it is morally wrong... this is exactly about the spirit of the action and the application of the spirit of the law towards it.

You are implying that if an institution permits a man to hit a woman and does call it legal, there is no problem. I am implying that there is... sure I do not pretend that I have a insight into some sort of universal set of ethics (such thing does not exists) I am simply implying that is it immoral and unethical from my point of view. What your point of view, legal or otherwise is... makes little difference in that kind of scenario does it?

No I'm not. I'm simply stating that a man hitting a woman isn't theft. You're the one who wants to paint it with broad moral brushstrokes that says that hitting is wrong and so is stealing, and therefore hitting is stealing.

I haven't outright stated my own moral stance on the subject of software piracy except to say that it is far more complicated than a right'/wrong analysis, but you've taken it upon yourself to invent my position for me and criticise me for taking that stance.

And you're right, I do call myself right, and others wrong, but only on matters of fact. And that's pretty much down to a frustrating ability to see the difference between objectivity and subjectivity.

I cannot believe that there are so many on this forum who actually believe that software piracy is not only acceptable, they feel it is their right to get something for nothing.

Maybe that is what is wrong with this world. We seem to have an entire generation of people who have lost their moral values.

People are going to pirate games - for whatever reason they can justify to themselves. At the very least, one would hope they would feel a tinge of moral wrongdoing for that act. Many writing here do not.

It's a sad state of affairs.

You would really pay if you walked into a restaurant and they served you something that was inedible and/or poisoned you?

If you take away an easy option, an even easier option will pop up. Remember--p2p programs like Napster and Limewire used to be the way people stole music, and when they attacked those everyone moved to torrents that allowed people to steal greater amounts of music at an even faster rate. History doesn't seem to support the notion that taking away one option cripples the pirates. Instead, it seems that the technology behind piracy becomes easier to use and harder to track out of necessity the more it's attacked.

I'm arguing on the pro-piracy side because I've seen what happens when companies consider every download to be a lost sale. All of this has already happened in the music industry, and that industry shot itself in the foot by refusing to adapt. Sure, they were technically in the right. Right and wrong clearly don't factor in, because the entire industry is crumbling anyway (labels gouging all but the biggest artists, smaller artists barely having enough money to make an album, much less live off of). Morality aside, it's all about PR in the end, and pissing off your customers just pushes them to the more illegal (and often more convenient) methods of obtaining the product. I'd just hate to see the games industry go the same way as the music industry by making the same mistakes, you know?

By the way, a company forcing DRM on legitimate users to put a dent in the secondhand market under the guise of "fighting the pirates" while those very same pirates are playing the game DRM-free isn't exactly a gleaming example of morality, itself.

In this world's economy things have value because there aren't enough of them to go around. Under such a system, how can we be reasonably (and morally, to use your polemics) asked to pay for something that can be recreated over, and over, and over again at no cost to anyone where there's enough to go around for every single person to have the same thing 10 times over, and where it's given for free to some people in some circumstances and not other people in other circumstances?