Okay, let's face it, there's no physical analogy. Sure, if there was some Magic Pudding that infinitely produced pudding and someone spent their livelihood researching how to produce infinite puddings for retail, just to have someone reverse engineer the puddings to produce the initial pudding and give out free infinite puddings, they'd be pretty peeved and would suffer not necessarily financial loss, but decreased financial gain. However, conservation of matter/energy/whatever prevents that analogy from being real.
In the end, something is being duplicated that can be duplicated at a negligible cost, infinitely many times. If someone steals an apple from a store, the store loses the apple. If someone pirates a copy of Watch Dogs, Ubisoft does not lose a copy of Watch Dogs. However, there may or may not be a loss involved, depending on the consumer. This begs a question. If the pirate had no means to pirate it, would they buy it? This is where things get fuzzy and very uncertain, because that scenario is purely hypothetical. They had the means to pirate it, and they did.
There definitely is an aspect of piracy (the whole 'not paying for it' part) that short-changes content creators. However, without the ability to read minds (or alternative timelines void of piracy), there's no way to determine how much the income is curbed. Hell, the increased popularity of the game due to piracy might reel in enough sales to negate the loss, I don't know. Does it repel a substantial amount of content creators away from making content? Probably, again, I dunno.
As I do support Pirating, It does cause loss of profit for bands, game developers, and producers. It sort of falls under the No Vote effect. One person will say "Well it really isn't hurting anyone because so many people buy the game and it really won't make a difference." So more than one person will of course torrent. Say a game costs $19.99 and it's a rather small, but promising indie game. So about 10000 people torrent it. Well 19.99x10000= 1999000. So that is $1999000 lost. Alright so 20000 people buy it. 19.99x20000=399800. Well after paying dues,taxes,employs, and upgrading gear that $399800 is gone quick. So while I'm not saying pirating is not bad, it isn't very good. It does cause loss of profit, profit that would be vital to paying bills of the Devs. Thanks for your time.
In the end, something is being duplicated that can be duplicated at a negligible cost, infinitely many times. If someone steals an apple from a store, the store loses the apple. If someone pirates a copy of Watch Dogs, Ubisoft does not lose a copy of Watch Dogs. However, there may or may not be a loss involved, depending on the consumer. This begs a question. If the pirate had no means to pirate it, would they buy it? This is where things get fuzzy and very uncertain, because that scenario is purely hypothetical. They had the means to pirate it, and they did.
There definitely is an aspect of piracy (the whole 'not paying for it' part) that short-changes content creators. However, without the ability to read minds (or alternative timelines void of piracy), there's no way to determine how much the income is curbed. Hell, the increased popularity of the game due to piracy might reel in enough sales to negate the loss, I don't know. Does it repel a substantial amount of content creators away from making content? Probably, again, I dunno.
So you disregard Luvitus' input because it has a logical fallacy, thus committing the fallacy fallacy.
Hmm...
What do you reckon is the percentage of pirated copies that are pirated because the pirate can't afford them?