IdeasVacuum wrote:It's a no brainer why people pirate.
No matter the reason, a pirate is a thief, nothing more than that. I can't afford to buy a Rolls Royce car but that doesn't mean I'm entitled to steal one, even though it's way over priced. If the industry wants to stop 'piracy', the first step that needs to be taken is to remove this romantic title and give it the title of shame that it deserves.
You entirely missed the point I was trying to convey. My post was more of an observation as to WHY people steal. Whether or not they are justified does not matter to you, or me, or even them in terms of defense; but they certainly feel justified in doing it. No matter what their core reason / ideology is (Open Source free everything vs haves and have nots, and whatever else people can come up with to justify their actions).
Until recent years, I had not actually witnessed paying customers threatening developers, on their OWN forums to Pirate software (games in this case) because it wasn't
working properly on their system because of stupid things like DRM in its various forms.
To me that is a very telling sign of HOW to curb piracy, along with the price point angle. That is also a niche market of computer software, something like PB, or ProGUI while definitely in the high-end of money I am willing to spend on actual productive software/applications - is still worth the cost to me as a consumer. And so I pay it.
But once someone (or a group of people) views the software as not justifying the price tag, the developer has lost. Period. Unless they can come up with ways to either cut the cost, provide a reasonably feature-available demo period that can convince the customer to purchase, or offer enticing new features to convince people even more about purchasing.
Game piracy can almost be summed up as: Marketing and Retail Price. That is the only, valid cure. The games industry needs to fundamentally change to address this. They are operating on a broken and obsolete retail model (And sweatshop publishers like Electronic Arts are slowly destroying the industry), and platforms like Steam (not without it problems) are the glaring obvious proof staring them in the face.
I own almost 80 games on Steam. I only started using Steam regularly a couple months ago, and I have periodically made purchases over that time. Some of it was impulse buying, others were just plain good pricing on a package of games. I have spent less than $500 to acquire all these games (possibly less than $350) and many of them if I purchased them at retail store price, or even full price on Steam when they launched or were not on sale / in a bundle - I would have spend 3 to 4 times the amount of money and most certainly would not have bought everything I did.
I could have easily pirated all the big titles I own as part of those purchases, and in some cases I have already played them in the past because that is exactly what I did.
Does that make me a bad person? Possibly, I suppose it does. But that doesn't change the fact that when Steam made these games affordable to me and offered them in heavily discounted bundles, or individually for less than $20 I purchased them. Because I could
afford to.
If I were the head of a business, I wouldn't care how I got my 10 billion dollars, but I would instantly see the wisdom in selling X amount of games for $20 - $25 versus selling X less copies at a higher price. If I sell more copies at a lower price, I get more repeat customers and establish loyalty, which gets me even more buyers for my next product as my reputation continues to grow. The problem with business is "parity" isn't good enough for them under a capitalistic model (You'll never make more than X amount of money if you maintain a constant customer base at lower prices, unless you can reduce the manufacturing cost - which can be hard to do with highly-skilled labor).
