Piracy Good For Gaming?

Piracy, its something that sends chills down every developers spine. It's something that destroys sales of games every year or is it something that promotes sales?

Team Meat the guys behind super meat boy had a different view to piracy.. In an interview with IGN [credit to them] the team basically said that piracy was good for their video games because eventually the people who pirated their game, a large majority of them would end up buying that game because they would like it and would feel guilty about pirating it. Also a large majority would want the extra's such as steam achievements and leader boards.

I can understand their statement and can see it working as I do believe that a lot of people pirate games to demo them before purchase. Also in this generation of gamers, in which people are too scared to try anything other than their old franchises. I believe that sometimes people just need to be able to fully play a game, may they be demoing it or keeping it forever. I think that when people pirate a game and start liking that new franchise they would eventually either buy that game or buy the next version, dlc, iPhone version, etc. I believe that those pirates will end up buying something for that franchise and will become fans of it. Later on when piracy gets decreased or eliminated [ yeah right ] in the next generation of consoles and the pirates cannot pirate any more. I believe that they would end up buying the next instalments of that franchise of which they became fans of due to the piracy they did in the beginning.

Also team meat stated that when people pirate games, they can make their friends buy the game by talking about it so one pirate copy could spawn a customer purchase. I do understand this statement and I agree, people who pirate games can make others purchase by talking about them and raising product awareness.

Ultimately I agree with what team meat said, people in this day and age are too afraid to try new franchises and if we did not have piracy, people would not try new franchises and so ultimately would not become fans of new franchises... and once they become fans of the franchise, one way or the other they will purchase something from or about it and will eventually give money to the developers.