Why do you personally pirate?

I like getting games and programs and music and the like for free. It's awesome.

 

Exactly what I was thinking as I watched a movie in the theaters for the first time in quite a while.

 

While MvC3 was still a good game, there's no way in hell that it deserved a 60$ price point. It deserved at least 40-30$ in terms of content. Almost every fighting game has more content than MvC3. Atleast MK has a lot more in it to even begin to warrant the 60$.

Content and quality of said content justifies the price for me. I so regret buying mVc3, what a waste of money.

 

Ah, that makes much more sense.

I haven't actually played the game, but the tone of his post just bothered me. I am that petty, yes.

 

Why should opinion not justify how much I'm willing to spend? I'm the only one who can judge how much I value something. Capitalism, however, relies on the market to set its own prices at the consumers' expense. Piracy challenges the economic foundation that our society is built on.

 

I wasn't referring to what people value things, but how these things are valued in the market. A single opinion from a consumer has no bearing on the item's price.
If everyone bought things at the value they personally believe an item to be worth (or more realistically; how much they're willing to spend, if anything) that would financially destroy entire industries.

 

And that's exactly the problem. Capitalism favours the entrepreneurs over the consumers.

So what? Has it never occurred to you that maybe entire industries should be destroyed?

 

For me it's because:
1) The album/movie/game/book/etc,... is not available in retail stores in my city
2) I don't really have a credit card to use for online orders and my parents are very strict with me using their credit card even though I would be the one paying for whatever it is I'm going to buy and that I only needed their card to buy the album/movie/game/book/etc,... that I am trying to get.
3) the album/movie/game/etc,...is taking a while to arrive to stores but they're (mostly) a day or so early for downloading
4) it saves me from drooling my head off when I'm broke and I wanted to listen/watch/play/readetc,... the music/movie/game/book/etc,... that I want to get my hands on
5) so that I wouldn't be frustrated when the album/movie/game/book/etc,... isn't as good as I thought it was and I wouldn't regret buying the thing
5) because it just annoys me sometimes with the whole piracy=stealing when they charge so much for the original that it looks as though they are the ones stealing from us (highway robbery, anyone?)

A question, though...does it still count as piracy if I downloaded the thing and then bought an original copy of it after I enjoyed what I listened to/watched/played/read/etc,...?

 

That would leave little incentive for indie developers to follow careers in said industries.

 

It takes a lot of people a long time to make a game, their wages must surely add up and dont forget they have rent to pay, electric bills etc, theres the cost of materials, manufacture, packaging, shipping, wages for all involved with each stage. Then the retailers get their cut and obviously the government takes the tax. I dont think £40 is excessive. Anyone saying its too much is either tight or making excuses to pirate.

 

lolwut? Do you know how difficult it is for indie or wannabe developers to break into the industry the traditional way? The internet has changed all that.

But gee, don't take it from me. Read what Notch, the creator of Minecraft, has to say.

 

Obviously there is word of mouth. And that does spread media to people that normally would have not heard/played/watched whatever it is.

But that's not what I was referring to.
People who have significantly decreased their spending on media (or stopped altogether) due to discovering piracy are far more common than those who have bought media after sampling. This lowers revenue for those industries, and wild-scale piracy would be disastrous. The appeal of taking a shot at those industries would be lost if piracy were commonplace.

Also, I don't really care about the above. I was just writing what one might argue. This isn't meant to be a debate or anything similar, otherwise I'd have put it in that section.

 

Good grief, all that propaganda has gotten to you.

 

I never said it justifies anything. Piracy cannot be justified. I told you my reasons. They don't have to be logical, right, wrong, noble, good, or bad. They are my reasons. That is all. Accept them or reject them.

The basis of a capitalist economy is what people are willing to pay for a product or service. If people think it is too expensive, they cut back on purchasing or don't purchase it at all. That Aston Martin is a couple hundred thousand dollars because people value it to be a couple hundred thousand, and are willing to pay that much for that product. You don't see a Ford Escort MSRP at $200,000. Why not? Because people would never buy it for that much. If you're wondering why some cars only have 8 produced in the entire world, it's because some rich collector(s) is (are) willing to pay a shitload of money to have 1 of the 8 cars produced for that year. Supply and demand. A company that does not respond to market changes, especially rapid changes will surely fall. Mediaplay went out of business because people were downloading music for free. Mediaplay went out of business because it did not respond to that market change. It didn't put out special sales that would have "competed" with Napster, Morpheus, and KaZaA. It wouldn't have competed well, because free is the best deal that there is, but it would have saved their asses on the bottom line, or at least attempted to.

If there's one thing you can learn out of this, it's that people don't respond because of morality, because it's the right thing to do or because it is illegal and you shouldn't do it. They respond based on how likely they are of getting caught. If everyone stopped doing things because they were illegal, then we wouldn't have people speeding and running red lights. They do it because they think they won't get caught.

Apparently my single opinion of how MvC3 was not worth $60 and a waste of money given the shortchanged content is something other people agree with. And I'm glad Natewlie agrees with me because her opinion is the only one in this thread that I actually value.

 

Really?

 

And Reider.
Everyone else is either new, has changed his or her name at least once, or hasn't participated in enough topics to where I can gauge their opinion.

 

Not exactly true. I use to spend maybe $400-$600 a year on media content, if i go through my bank account most likely i've still spent $400-$600 for last year. Piracy has been something i've done since i was little and discovered Kazaa and Morpheus. Now given that i have over 10TB of HDD space, its true that not everything i have is something i bought. But everything else i've seen or played are things i wouldn't have touched for ages if ever. Now i do buy games i know are going to be good or have online features. Games i wouldn't have touched otherwise, ive downloaded to try their single player.

Despite what many have said and those specially worded, very limited research has offered. In many cases, even isolated incidents, have reported that illegal file sharing has increased sales of certain great products. However it has also proven that bad quality products have dropped in estimated sales.

Its like the consumer now "knows" what they are buying! Scary thought huh? It is for big companies anyways, they can't put out half-assed products and expect as many people to buy them anymore. Now they have to make items of high quality. For me personally, i have gone out to buy items i would have normally avoided and avoided items i would have normally bought. One of the biggest issues has been the trade in power from developer to consumer, we no longer buy it just cause they make it.

 

I find it to be the opposite case. I find that developers are making games that are of lesser quality compared to games in the past. Look at the old Final Fantasies compared to the new ones (X-2 and later).

I feel that this is the case not because of piracy, but because a whole new demographic has entered the market, namely the "family" clientele. Some games are good, mostly Nintendo IPs, but there's just heaps of shovelware across all consoles.

I liked games better when they were geared towards a limited demographic, sort of an elitist view. I also liked facebook when it was just colleges only. Traditional RPGs are losing ground because of the wider targeted audience. They want to please everyone, and not just one group, but by trying to please everyone, they fail. It's like trying to be a politician with a platform that tries to get everyone's vote, when in fact, you'll get no one's vote because your platform doesn't represent the views of those groups well enough. A Republican group will simply choose the Republican candidate and not the one that tries to appease to everyone because the Republican candidate reflects more of the group's policies. The same goes for the Democrats.

Developers are shifting towards games with better graphics, and neglecting the gameplay aspect. Yeah the game looks pretty, but the actual game isn't all that fun. Now Nintendo Wii games get the most heat from this because it doesn't even have graphics as a saving grace. It not only has crappy gameplay, but also less than par graphics. The sad part is that the shovelware still makes money regardless of how crappy the game is.

When I was growing up, I never had to consult an IGN game review to get a gauge on how good a game was. I just went out and bought it. And most of the time, I'd end up with a good game. Most of the games I've had for the SNES and N64 were all good games. It wasn't until the Gamecube came out where I had quite a few crap games. If anything, you should be more wary of crap games now than before.

I agree with everything else you said, including the tendencies of pirating. If they ban piracy completely, it won't boost "lost sales," we would just not buy it. We pirate things we normally wouldn't buy because it is at no cost to us. I got Dynasty Warriors 7, I like the game, but if it were in a store priced at $60, I wouldn't rush out and buy it. I would have survived not playing the game. In the middle of this recession, anything deemed luxury is the first thing to go and videogames/movies/media is the first item on that list.

 

lol okay.