Illegal downloads - Free advertising?

[Dezm0nd]

First off, sorry if this topic isn't suited to the boards...

I was looking at all the torrent sites in the gaming section and noticed the sheer amount of games there are to easily download. I don't download them with the intention to get away without paying. If I did download a game and absolutely loved it, i'd buy it.

But it got me thinking about people who do download DS/PS2 games etc. Do they air their sentiments about how good a game is in message boards and in essence offer free advertising for the company X and do gaming corporates allow this to happen to a certain extent because of free advertising?

I see stuff like this happening no matter what industry I look in, Music, film, TV. It's everywhere.

This thought came to me whilst watching that boring Ross Kemp in south london interviewing "gangs" which claimed that guns and drugs are there because of the government.

Do Nintendo, or any other bigwig company, allow their software to be pirated on a very low key level for cheap, easy word of mouth?

[iloveannie]

I think it definately helped shift vast numbers of PS1. Not sure about it otherwise though.

[tom-nook]

Do Nintendo, or any other bigwig company, allow their software to be pirated on a very low key level for cheap, easy word of mouth?

No chance.

For one there is no way of allowing piracy to happen on a small scale. Once someone figures out how to do it the floodgates open and it becomes widespread. Regardless of how good companies think their copy protectionpeople always find away to (easily) circumvent it.

Secondly why would they need pirates to generate word of mouth for them? surely there are enough journalists/ paying customers / diehard fans to do that for them.

[NekoFever]

No. The number of people who frequent message boards is miniscule next to the industry as a whole and they don't want thousands of people downloading to evangelise the game to an audience of tens of thousands to risk an audience of millions. I can remember the day Doom 3 was leaked and it had 60,000 downloads from one torrent site alone, and when most of the feedback was average it probably hurt sales to anyone who didn't want to show off their graphics card.

On the scale of hacking helping a console to achieve more sales (i.e. PS1, Xbox, PSP), then maybe. That becomes a bit like the situation with Windows, where Microsoft might turn a blind eye to piracy because they'd prefer you have pirated Windows and keep their market share up than switch to OS X or Linux.

When we're talking about single games, though: no. Piracy of the games themselves doesn't help at all.

[charlesr]

I'm sure they'd rather everyone just stumped up the cash. But people who pirate games wouldn't suddenly pour hundreds of pounds a month into retail games if piracy suddenly became impossible....

[markgreyam]

Well lets see, either you're reading the opinion of someone that didn't have to pay for the game, and possibly has their own biases regards the games they play, or you read the thoughts of the people that pirate it.

Zing.

At least pirates wouldn't get paid to swing their reviews a certain way. Although, if they aren't paying for games, they are probably cheap enough to want to be paid to say that a game they illegally obtained is ... err ... worth someone else going out and buying it? Now I'm confused.