Just ignore them. They obviously crave attention.

Another flaw with their estimates is that they assume that every single piece of software that was pirated would have been purchased without piracy. However, I'm certain that a large percentage of those still would not have been purchased if pirated copies hadn't been available.

Of course the estimation is flawed, but they didn't consider abandonware. According to the accounting rules, the vast majority of abandonware titles falls under "impaired assets". That means that on the companies' balance sheets, those games have a zero value.

However, what's really flawed is the assumption that all that money would have gone into the development of new titles. Most likely, some of the money would have evaporated into higher salaries and larger marketing budgets, while the rest would be direct profit for everybody involved - from retailers to publishers (and maybe 1% or less even to the development teams). There wouldn't be many extra titles, and the quality of those few would be even worse than the quality of games that are published these days. There's not enough money in the world to offset the lack of the designers' imagination.

Hehe, that forwarding page is great indeed!

That estimation could be flawed, as they probably calculated abandonware piracy into that. But they don't lose any money to abandonware piracy.

Edited by Da_Goat at 23:13 on July, 21st 2003

Let's say they developed 400 titles last year (a high estimate), and lets forget about their quality for a while. If 1600 titles weren't "lost to piracy", the grand total would have been 2000 titles. Does it mean that piracy accounts for 1600/2000, or 80% of all revenues from games?

I'm not sure if that's funny or sad.

I wonder if they'll ever change their policy regarding automated emails...I hate when somebody that's offering shareware gets a "you're infringing copyrights" notice.

They don't have time for such details; the worldwide games conspiracy is taking away all their resources.

I really enjoy the professional quality of the IDSA website concerning the name change, as well.

Don't celebrate yet! They simply changed the name from IDSA to ESA. I guess they figured it brings more prestige when they are confused with the European Space Agency than the Industrial Designers Society of America. In addition, they probably think that the hassle of changing all the "Download removed by IDSA" messages on abandonware sites will force some webmasters to shut down.