Leaving aside that theft of property and copyright infringement are two different concepts with wildly differing needs (the former requires some misdirection, speed and has not great consequences that are not unlikely, the latter requires no real effort, no real skills and is unlikely to see me up in front of the beak) I am not sure that even tracks there. Most have a limited amount of fun stuff money and well is, as the accountants say, fungible (what you do not spend on one thing you can spend on something else). Charities see something similar with this when you earmark money* or have percentages go to overhead or not ( http://www.sciencemag.org/content/346/6209/632 ).
Think of it as similar to "if the police can catch me then I do not deserve to be driving" and similar such things.
Yeah by most accounting logic the pirate now and pick up later model is not very sound at all. It was more that something may differ between "most will never pick up a legit copy" thing and reality.
I have serious issues with the concept of genre, especially if you are going to try to classify things as broadly as "AAA" and "indy". It was not as much one game, just that your division was poor and that could have been an example, one of many, of that.
"Gaming industry is like any other industry", it is like any other entertainment industry. Deserves is an interesting word and budgets in games also seem to have gone odd -- give me billions and the best people and you will get something special, however if billions and use of the best people will not make a financially viable product then you do not give it to me, as an investor you then get to figure out the right amount to pull something off. If piracy that you can not counter has such a deleterious effect upon what you can do then that sucks, still the case though.
I have seen some people say things like "I have a degree and so I deserve a job", I view a lot of this in much the same light.
This is all besides the point though. I will spin it another way -- I like the idea of remote control planes, especially if I can control them first person from a camera mounted on the thing and have actually played with some of it. In various countries around the world there are governments scrambling to make laws to stop it (or make you need enough tickets/paperwork that it becomes really hard), chances are at some point one will fall out of the sky, land on some toddler, kill them and then we will get some kneejerk laws as a result (despite all being less dangerous than eating sweets or something). Now it might be that I am falling into the "first they came for the ...." mindset but frankly the loss of such remote control planes would not really bother me, I would not go to bat for it, and I would find something else to do, I know full well though that for others it would effectively represent the end of a seriously enjoyable hobby for them. I fail then to see how something similar could not happen for some other people with computer games.
I do not know about specific instances but if a publisher sat in a meeting and attempted to account for some theoretical lost sales because of piracy and it helped tip the balance towards the "not a viable project" decision then that would have been the right decision to not make it, give or take the accuracy of the theoretical lost sales and future developments. Piracy exists, has for a long time as well, and will probably continue to exist, it is not like it appeared out of nowhere and suddenly grew to the extent that it ruined someone's day, though even then a competitor popping out before your product is made and shipped is always a risk/possibility you take. Equally I have no problem with second hand sales and actually find it quite aggravating when game dev types try some kind of not-logic to convince people it is bad, that and they managed to pull it off in the first place (I saw the early articles and laughed, and then it stuck).
Realistically the only ones I have proper issue with the were the "bad money management" stuff, you were just dangerously close to drawing lines in the sand and that is rarely a great thing to try to do in a moral debate so I thought I would try to provide some counters.
*my favourite example came out of the anti abortion world. Someone decides to give some money to a hospital under the condition that it is not used to, say, fund abortions and the like. Hospital says thank you very much, they buy optometry a new machine that goes ping and send the person that made a donation a shiny certificate saying all the people with the new machine that goes ping their patients now no longer have to worry about going blind, everybody is happy. In reality the machine that goes ping was always going to be purchased that year, however it was designated as "first priority if we have the money left over after whatever emergencies we have" (so about 99% chance it would have happened) and the old money then went and funded the shortfall in the abortion clinic. Such are the wonders of accounting. Perhaps not the most relevant to this but a nice worked example.[/url]
