Confession...

[iTIMMEH]

By that logic, one person could buy a game and get pirated copies for everyone else and nobody will be deprived of anything. Sounds silly doesn't it? That's because it is.

No that is not the same because you're distributing it free of charge to people who could have bought it. Which is, as someone else said, lost financial potential. There is no lost potential in my download because I had no more money to give.

Gamasutra has an article from 2008 where a casual games developer discusses piracy. You can read it here. That's accurate information, straight from the horses' mouth.

Here's an excerpt:

As we believe that we are decreasing the number of pirates downloading the game with our DRM fixes, combining the increased sales number together with the decreased downloads, we find 1 additional sale for every 1,000 less pirated downloads. Put another way, for every 1,000 pirated copies we eliminated, we created 1 additional sale.

True, those sales are important to an indie but it is a tiny percentage of downloaders. Piracy is not, on the whole, responsible for sinking developers.

And to the person that suggested I'm rationalising my behaviour: every game I play, I paid for. As I said, I don't condone piracy but if you're going to talk about it at least be realistic.