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Originally Posted by gimpy117
The Thing is piracy is a big problem today, more so then when SH3 came out and possibly even more than when SH4 was released . Furthermore the only reason those servers went down was because of a malicious attack on them by hackers. This was by no means UBI's fault so for them to apologize for one and a half days of having my game out by giving me 30 bucks worth of free stuff...id say that's a good deal to me.
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I once was of your opinion, but I have had quite a time looking at this from different perspectives by now. Pirating does damage, and costs sales. As does shoplifting. But the recent decade is just too full of example of small start-up studios and developers that land a "first-try superhit". Why? Because they deliver a highly valuable, product, and one that customers want (satisfies their wishes, ideas etc, and is novel, not just copy of an old game idea/concept with new eye-candy), instead of delivering something "that a company wants to sell" and is developed orthogonally to market/customer interests. And they didn't die of piracy, but actually customers voluntarily buy their products, and pay the money. Sales are high, that is why it is a superhit. Let me elaborate further.
And to do so, I will pull up the counter example of companies like Microprose that went away long before piracy and downloads were developed (to this extend, or at all). Hence, you cannot claim piracy as primary cause for their end. But what you will find if you think about their fate, is for one that their casual products did not succeed in the broad market (for many reasons), and their specialized nice-products (like a sub simulator) didn't generate enough revenue. That is what it is, and if you get into the business of developing a niche-product, you can't expect to be a millionaire in no time, if at all.
Now, there is also a second class of examples, and that is companies that just warmed up game ideas time after time, and didn't spice the product up enough. To make it enticing. Say "Sid Meiers Gettysburg" was a successful game, but the sequel "Antietam" ended the series -- why? I guess it was but a new map, and everything else was just the same. And there is many examples of that class, maybe even the two points I mentioned above are just two symptoms of exactly this issue here.
And that was even before the times of harsh DRM or OSP-DRM, which now add a very bitter taste to everything particularly for legal owners, and induce them to see minor flaws of a product in a darker light then without. (EDIT: ) Moreover, the entertainment business has been expanding at a much faster rate than population growth or wealth ("money") increase. Each entertainment sector, movies, games, music, books, and real-life from sports to paintball, has grown strongly over the last 10-20 years. But since the consumer are limited (in number, their free time and money), every company and product will naturally get a smaller piece of cake every year and will have to present much better than average "products" to expand.
So I begin to think, and I bet with the SHV disaster it could have proven clearly this time if the pirates had for once stayed out of this, that it is the companies failing to bind customers by delivering "novel" games, added-value products (a thick printed manual, and other thing that you can't download on a site) and better service!
I think SHV would be a premier example of a product developed tangentially to what the community had hoped for (see Neals review), and that is why there is so much outcry and disappointment. And this may turn into lack of commercial success, and the consequences. I think Ubisoft may have done more harm with a repeated buggy release and the OSP-DRM to its own sales than the pirates could have.
Unfortunately I have as little credible and unambiguous evidence for my hyothesis as you do have for yours, so it's not worth arguing about anything that we can't change either opinions on. But I want to put it out there as a possibility that may be worth thinking critically about, and not focus on one possibility and ignore all the others (thats why the world is round...).
The future will likely teach how bad piracy really is, or whether companies are actually harming themselves more by not treating the customers as kings.