Now if everyone pirated their games, this website would be only half interesting, wouldn't it?

piracy isnt the big issue that the industry makes it out to be, it can definetly be a problem though.

Alot of developers have made statements inthe past that they dont worry about piracy and they themselves grew up pirating games, at the end o the day even with massive amounts of Wii and Ds piracy happening, they are still making nintendo and 3rd partys ALOT of money, the same for the PS1/2 inthe past, and so on.

There is a train of thought that shops selling second hand games is actually worse for the industry than piracy.
Someone who wants to buy a game will go into a shop and buy the s/h copy to save a few $, this isnt an additional sale and the only person that profits is the retailer. The average person downloading a game and playing it for a few hours before getting bored would have never entered the shop in the first place.

Piracy may drive up hardware sales because obviously, you need to buy the console before you can play backups. But increase in hardware sales without an increase in software sales is not necessarily a good thing. Just take the case of the psp..  custom firmware has made it easily accessible for any average person to play pirated games without a hardware mod. Software sales for the psp are abysmal save a few exceptional games even though hardware sales for the psp still remain strong. Now less and less developers are making games for the psp because they don't want to lose money.. Bottom line people need to buy games for game companies to make money and if no one buys games for a system, the companies won't make games for that system. And that is very bad for any console. The dreamcast went under soon after the backup loader was released which allowed users to play backups without any modchips..

The fact of the matter is that game prices have increased because of higher development costs combined with the fact that tried-and-true games(Madden, Halo, MGS4, GTAIV) aren't reaching new audiences.

DRM has proven to only hurt people who actually buy a copy of the game in which it is installed. *Starforce? SecureRom? Sony's rootkits? Hello!* Ironically, DRM has probably caused devs to lose sales because people who would have normally bought it might turn to P2P to get a copy that doesn't have any DRM in it so that they won't be hassled by it.

PSP owners just are not interested in the PSP software. It has nothing to do with piracy. My daughter has 10 DS games for evry PSP game, and doesn't pirate either. We have the stuff for homebrew DS, so if anything it's easier to pirate DS games.

For those who pirate some software, they typically will not pirate all software, and even if they do, it's more about collecting and they would never buy the software they pirated in the first place. So, lower hardware sales from hard to pirate systems does mean lower software sales.

you are more the welcome to fly over and see for your self.

some time games are just too expensive for some family.......
so piracy can be a good thing!!

The hell it isn't. The first industry that got hit was music and while the big recording labels that everyone likes to mention when justifying piracy took a hit but still keep chugging along, independent labels who took their time and risked money producing albums for promising yet relatively unknown artists have died by the dozens.

Niche genres that were barely holding have been killed by piracy. Token example: opera - labels used to assemble orchestras and singers in studios to record operas, that fed instrument players, it fed the singers, it fed the studio workers, etc. This was barely profitable but it was profitable and there was a market for it. Then piracy came and *poof* that economic activity is now gone. Mind you, the ph4t EMI execs are still raking in massive wages managing their back catalogue but all those small guys who made a living can not anymore.

But don't worry and keep pretending piracy is fair and it doesn't hurt anyone. We all know those kind of statements exist only because piracy benefits you so arguing it's validity validates your behaviour.

To be honest, piracy would not be a problem if people used it just to expand their consumption of cultural products. In other words, if you used to spend 100$ in albums before and now on top of downloading dozens of cd's you still bought 100$ worth of music per year it wouldn't be a problem. The real issue is that people at large have reduced their spending to 0 (or close to) and pirate everything.

Not necessarily, I'm sure there is a sweetspot somewhere between cost and development that is still a reasonable cost.  A $60 price point for a game?  People look at that and scoff, murmuring "I'm not going to spend $60 for a game."  Who do you think thought up a $60 price point?  Developers?  No.  Artists?  No.  Corporation?  Yes, because they think they can pay off the development if they can charge more for games, but what these morons don't understand is that nobody will buy their non-AAA games hence they will not be earning much.  Now that I thought about it, I think PS360 games are usually priced at $60 a pop and so if you look at it it's mostly the corporation's fault.  Now if they priced it at a more reasonable cost and actually tried to find a sweet spot, maybe they will make more sales and less people would actually look to pirate their games.

But it's a vicious cycle. As piracy increases, companies need to draw more money from the guys who actually buy games in order to make even. They can't go and say "hey, let's make this one 30$ and see what happens" because research data shows the guys who are getting the games for 0$ won't start spending money to buy them legit even if they sell for a smaller price.

The only people who react to lower pricepoints are those who buy games legit. Such buyer will buy one game at 60$ or two at 30$. But the people who are used to spend 0,20c (aka cost of the DVD) won't settle for anything more expensive.