Sun Jun 06, 2004 2:30 pm by Esquilax
It has been brought to my attention that certain parties in this thread are making gross generalisations based upon "evidence" that cannot be supported, due to the reticence of Microsoft's and DA's financial departments. In addition, said parties are also impugning the entire FL community by arguing that the "statistics" that they have presented "prove" that a large percentage of people who play Freelancer are doing so with illegal copies. Furthermore, said parties are also citing evidence from another third party who, although a regular member of TLR does not, to my knowledge, have access to Microsoft's/DA's profit/loss statements concerning sales of Freelancer.
Until more conclusive evidence is presented, said parties are not going to be able to convince the FL community that a large percentage of them are in fact, software pirates, as the asssertions of said parties are based upon unsupported second-hand evidence, and supposition. Additionally, said parties seem to be implying a cause and effect relationship that is not supported by the facts; that is they argue that FL profits were low, and that the proportion of people with copies of FL is far too high to correlate with sales of the software in question. This is a rather myopic view, as there could be many reasons as to why sales/profits of FL were lower than expected (if indeed they were), and why there is a large proportion of people who play FL online.
Basically it boils down to this; we do not have access to the information concerning FL's sales, and therefore it would be an exercise in futility to make such assertions, based solely upon assumptions of sales figures that we do not, and will never have access to.