I'm with you about GTA V not being that great, I played every GTA tons up till that one since GTA3. GTAV however was a one and done, meaning I've done the main story once then forgot about the game.
Low expectations are only key to not being disappointed. However a bad game is a bad game whether I expected it to be bad.or not. Being right about expecting a bad game won't make me happy.
Downvotes always have a reason, it is not arbitrary. It shows that they are not giving the people what they want. It is gaslighting that a vocal minority would be responsible for ratioing trailers. Youtube is used by everyone, so the ratio on popular trailers published there is a pretty reliable indication of how much of the audience it clicks with.
Publishers like to lament that every pirated copy is a lost sale, by that logic every downvote or "review bomb" is also a lost sale. Because it originates from someone who was interested in the product but was turned away by what was shown.
There is certainly a truth to that
some pirated copies are lost sales, but it is far from all of them, and may even be a small minority of them.
People pirate things for two reasons:
1.) They don't want to pay for it.
2.) A form of protest.
3.) Warez community who download pirated stuff just to have it, and never even use it.
When I do it, I fall into
category 2.
I don't have time to play very many games these days, so I only average like 2-4 new games per year (depending on the year). If a game does something I strongly disagree with (like try to force me to be online, have an account and be connected to their servers in order to play a single player game, I was never going to buy that game to begin with.
Or if they enter into some evil exclusivity agreement with a store that requires me to sign up for a new service, create accounts and install new clients. I'd be boycotting that too. Even if it was a series I was looking forward to.
But sometimes my thought process goes along the lines of "why should I deprive myself of something that I like just because
they are being *******s? I'll then help myself to the "community edition" and if they at some point reverse their bad behavior, then I buy it as soon as that happens
on principle to make my point, even if I have already finished the game. Right is right.
But even if the majority of those who pirate things are not like me, and instead fall into
category 1, that doesn't mean a pirated copy is an automatic lost sale.
I tend to think back to the old Napster lawsuit era, when some 13 year old kid's parents were sued because he had like 100,000 pirated mp3's (or something ridiculous like that) on his iPod. They were treating every single one of those 100,000 mp3's as a lost sale, when the kid wouldn't have been able to buy more than like - what - 200 of them at most if he had to actually pay for them. Even most really wealthy kids couldn't buy 100,000 songs at 99 cents a piece.
The remaining estimated 99,800 songs were decidedly NOT lost sales, because they could never have afforded them in the first place. And this goes on a lot with games as well.
...and then there are the weirdos in category 3, god bless them, who get some sort of feelings of social status from having
all the WAREZ, and even better if they have it
FIRST!
Sure, there are
some sales lost to piracy, but it is by no means 100% of pirated copies. Many of those pirated copies are downloaded just because and never even run. Others would never have been bought if people actually had to pay for them as their either wouldn't have had the money, or would rather have spent it on other things. And then there are the people like me with our protests who were going to die on that hill on principle, and never buy it unless something they adamantly object to is fixed (whose sales they still might get in the future if they shape up...)
As for what percentage of pirated copies represent lost sales, I would have a difficult time wagering a guess, but I wouldn't be surprised if that figure were in the single digits percentage wise.
