Long-awaited Doom 3 leaked online

Found on BBC News on Monday, 02 August 2004
Browse Filesharing

Copies of the game on file-sharing networks and newsgroups are being downloaded by thousands of people.

At one point on Sunday, more than 50,000 copies of the game, which weighs in at more than 1.5 gigabytes, were being downloaded.

Translated in lost sales, this amounts to $2.7m (£1.5m), if all these people instead bought the game.

"Despite the relatively low price of PC games, many gamers are still choosing to resort to piracy rather than pay for legitimate boxed copies," said Matt Pierce, publisher of the computer games magazine, PC Gamer.

"Whereas in the case of Doom 3, it almost certainly won't prevent the game being a massive seller, it will still cost both the publishers and developers of the game millions of dollars in lost revenue, an outcome that can only serve to harm future game development on the PC," he told BBC News Online.

That surely is an exaggeration. Games (and software in general) has always been pirated. Copies were made on the C64, then on the Amiga and after that on the PC. The first two were mainly used for gaming, and games are still developed, despite the piracy. If Pierce was right, there wouldn't be any software today anymore.