Piracy is nothing but a customer need to assume for example average customer from Poland earn monthly 1600 złotych which gives you calculated to euro about 362 ~ euro and you need pay your rent , bills buy clothes and something to eat :) now check prices in Polish retial store for PS4 games one new game cost around 200-249 zł which gives you 1/8 your monthly earnings. More funny compare this to steam store prices new games cost around 60 euro on steam :D its 1/6 your monthly earnings for just one game directly from steam store on release day...Canadian earn way more monthly then average customer from Poland and still got cheaper games on steam store.Problem is pricing in some regions and this make piracy nothing more i would love to see on steam store games for 60 złotych(1euro = around 4.5 złoty) not 60 euro.Pricing in some regions are just crazy when you compare them to monthly earnings who would not want orginal box in their storage but they simple cant afford it.
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I had quit "gaming piracy" since Steam had became my main platform. I see a good game, I save some money til I could buy it. GTA V was my last exception, as buying a 80~100GB game that I'm didn't sure it will run on my rig could be dangerous. Ubi and Activision prices are pretty bad, and Bethesda games are even more expensive here; new games like Fallout 4 and Dishonored 2 are R$220. You can complain about currency conversion, but 10 dollars have the same impact as 10 brazilian reais.
Btw, I still pirate movies, in other hand, my dvd collection is growing up.
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Then came CDs and DVDs which despite the price of production being dramatically reduced stagnated and then even rose, provoking even more piracy.
I stopped reading right there. Piracy is at the very least part of the reason for prices going/staying up. Fewer people buy it -> they need to make more profit per copy sold, or just go digital. Also, just FYI, there's this thing called inflation, which basically means your money is worth less over time. $20 for a vinyl in the '60s would probably be closer to $40 today, so a $15 CD is still much cheaper (not an expert on inflation, but you get the gist, I hope).
Edit: Okay, the rest of your post is even more nonsensical (less sensical?). You contradict yourself in your third paragraph already - first you say CDs and DVDs are super cheap to manufacture, then you complain that digital content costs the same. Yeah, like you just said, CDs and DVDs don't really cost anything, why would there be a big difference? Not going into your other points, but overall it seems you've been doing a lot of thinking into only one direction there ....
One more thing: Why are people who pay the normal or sale price for things "hypocrites who'll accept any crap shoved down their throat"? This money is meant to support the people who created that "crap", so they can create more, and so people like you can happily pirate it and laugh at the stupid people who paid for their entertainment.
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Why buying games should be dead in the first place? I do not steal, there's still an alternative.
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Then came CDs and DVDs which despite the price of production being dramatically reduced stagnated and then even rose, provoking even more piracy.
Source that takes inflation into account?
And then the internet .... Yet price remained the same although the offer multiplied, hence piracy finally exploded.
False. Piracy exploded when media was easily copied. This happened way before internet was widespread.
Also, if CDs are super cheap, should that not just have a negligible impact on price, thus should CDs not just be marginally more expensive than digital goods?
But the video game market, contrary to other media market, had the chance of successfully transitioning to digital thanks to several adapted schemes: first, the likes of Humble Bundle or PS+ which gave a certain amount of games bundled for a very low price
You do know that the video game market, on the PC side, had done a major transition before Humble, right? Humble did not change this trend.
Therefor the pricing scheme that made Steam and digital game so successful was that a game would release at full retail price for those ready to fork-in 60$, but then months after months it would get down to reach lower and lower thus more and more pockets, and eventually have very low flash sales. This is not only rational in terms of business but also in term of mercantile rules: the older the object, the lower the value for it to be adopted and distributed by more people.
I suspect that you're quite young, and don't actually remember the olden days, before the rise of digital distribution. High profile items tended to stay at a higher price for a long time, lower profile items tended to drop in price quite fast. Like on Steam.
now most games are released at full retail price and barely go down even long after, but never below a certain point making them unaffordable if you play lots of different games or you're young/student, the worst being GTA V: this now 4 years old game is STILL a 60$ retail price, only to be regularly cut at the same high 30$ price, especially if you don't care about online.
You're cherrypicking. I can also cherrypick. Metal Gear Solid V had a price slash a surprisingly short time after release. What does this prove?
you will have to pay 5$ to play a game for a hour, 12$ for a day, 20/30$ a month, 50/60$ for the year and IF you want to own the game (if it's still possible) and never own it, it'll probably cost you 80/120/more to fully buy games like GTA, Battlefield, CoD, The Witcher...
Source.
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...is it time to go back to a new kind of "piracy"? Everybody now knows it (except for the few hypocrites who'll accept any crap shoved down their throat)...but do you know a little about the background?
There's a lie which consists in thinking that popular media formats scheme changed with the internet. But it's not true: since the first vinyls sold in the 50s, the relative price of records have always been balanced with a bootleg market which emerged first in russia (called roentgenizdat). Then K7 and VHS came-up, of which the cost of production was way lower and yet prices remained the same, which made piracy grow. Then came CDs and DVDs which despite the price of production being dramatically reduced stagnated and then even rose, provoking even more piracy.
And then the internet. But was it different? Absolutely not, the thing is you still buy a licence to use a copy of a media, wether it's on a physical format or directly the digital file, except of course digital format crush the prices of production, manufacture, distribution...close to zero. Yet price remained the same although the offer multiplied, hence piracy finally exploded.
But the video game market, contrary to other media market, had the chance of successfully transitioning to digital thanks to several adapted schemes: first, the likes of Humble Bundle or PS+ which gave a certain amount of games bundled for a very low price. Then there was the rational business idea that, your goal as a publisher since there is no format cost, is for a maximum of person to get your games no matter the price, be it for them to buy DLCs or have more people talking about it to friends then buying it or for them to be locked into your franchise to buy the next opus.
Therefor the pricing scheme that made Steam and digital game so successful was that a game would release at full retail price for those ready to fork-in 60$, but then months after months it would get down to reach lower and lower thus more and more pockets, and eventually have very low flash sales. This is not only rational in terms of business but also in term of mercantile rules: the older the object, the lower the value for it to be adopted and distributed by more people.
Unfortunately this has now changed. Because piracy has backtracked thanks to this legal scheme, as well as denuvo and corruption, but also because game streaming is on the horizon, the new pricing scheme is worse than EVER in ANY market that exists (beside housing): now most games are released at full retail price and barely go down even long after, but never below a certain point making them unaffordable if you play lots of different games or you're young/student, the worst being GTA V: this now 4 years old game is STILL a 60$ retail price, only to be regularly cut at the same high 30$ price, especially if you don't care about online.
I'm sad to say, as I rapidly mentioned, that this will get 3x worst in the coming years, not just because "piracy" is not counter-balancing with the legal market greedy price abuses, but also because streaming is on the horizon and it changes everything: with streaming, you're not paying to own a legal licence anymore, nor can you pirate the game in any way: you will have to pay 5$ to play a game for a hour, 12$ for a day, 20/30$ a month, 50/60$ for the year and IF you want to own the game (if it's still possible) and never own it, it'll probably cost you 80/120/more to fully buy games like GTA, Battlefield, CoD, The Witcher...
So as the title announced...what are your ideas.
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