akakaze said:
I plan on buying the game for consoles if it materializes. I guess my main concern is this leak may cause them to not even bother. I know for a FACT, having attended a gathering this weekend where lots of BB:CS was played, that there are lots of people (based on my small sample size) that fall under category #5.
But I'm a software developer myself and hang out with a lot of other software developers who understand the need to support companies - especially in this climate - and when they do pirate it is only under circumstances like this where the software isn't available any other way, and will purchase the program when it is.
Yeah, the crew I hang out with is also very much demographic #5. I expect that sentiment to be fairly common among longstanding Arcsys fans, which isn't so much a justification of piracy on my part as simply being realistic.
While they love the product and want more of it - which entails keeping our A(rc/k)sys overlords paid and fed - the simple truth is that it's really, *really* hard to stay true to a person's better morals when they know that they're going to buy the console version anyway, and that many others are already enjoying a slice of what they've been waiting for. I call it "grey morals" - you plan to do right by the piracy you're taking advantage of, but that doesn't change the fact that many of the other pirates don't have nearly the same good intentions.
Ultimately, I think the silver lining of the cloud is that anyone who really does like Blazblue will still end up buying the console version no matter what, because of the excellent amount of work that both Arcsys and Aksys put into the console localization. That really does pay off in the end, not just in terms of customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. It also ensures that in the wake of an early arcade leak, people are still eagerly waiting in anticipation of a product which will be vastly superior to it.
The worst thing they can do at this point is let this piracy outbreak dishearten them too much, and that's part of why I'm here and doing my best to pencil in-between the lines of "pirate" and "won't pirate".