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A history on Piracy. What the gaming industry should do.

 
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poster55
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PostPosted: Fri Mar 03, 2006 7:35 pm    Post subject: A history on Piracy. What the gaming industry should do. Reply with quote

Piracy began because the software industry was misleading customers. It was back when we didn't have all these review sites to look to, and only the product box to go by. For games, a demo was an option but often developers would include material in the demo that wasn't in the actual game to make it look better. OR They would make a really good first level, and the rest of the game after what the demo covered was pure and utter crap.

In other words, developers brought piracy on themselfs, by cheating their customers. The original pirates had a code, that went along the lines, play it, like it, buy it. Don't keep pirated copy longer than 3 days. The reason for piracy was to get a full version trial demo to get around all the industrys lies and cheats.

Once people started doing that they noticed a considerable drop in sales, not because people were getting the games for free, though this was a part of it, but because people saw their crap for what it was. They then assumed it was the fault of piracy and people not paying for games due to getting it free.

This was back when games were about 10-15$ USD, and most were still being distributed on floppy disks. Copy protection wasn't around yet, so piracy was rather easy for anyone with disk space and a few spare floppies.

After the drop in sales, games went up to about 20$ for new releases. I never understood the logic behind it though. You raise your price of the game, its more incentive for people to pirate the game first to try it out. You don't go to a store and spend 100$ on anything else you haven't been able to see in action do you? If so you're not a very smart shopper.

As the prices kept going up and punishing their true customers more and more, it increased the population of pirates. People started saying, "Why should I pay these outrageous prices when I can get it for free now, and easily too?" So again, the industry shot itself in the foot.

I guarantee you if they would drop their new release titles to prices along $24.99-$29.99 they would see more sales and make MORE money, and less piracy, than they do now. Increasing prices is the opposite of what needs to happen to resolve this issue, as it is what blew it up into a bigger problem from the beginning. It seems odd to me that a solution so simple seems so hard for the gaming industry to grasp.
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The Outlaw
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Joined: 18 Jun 2004
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PostPosted: Wed Mar 08, 2006 7:20 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thats true that reducing the price wud directly effect the amount of piracy. People wud certainly prefer and original game and enjoy all the support rather than get a pirated version and not be able to play online even.
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