| cleveland124 said: Piracy doesn't lower prices. It is not competition. You cannot compete with free. There was a gamer in this thread that thought you should pay $5 for a brand new retail version of MGS4. LOL. That's what happens is what price competes with free? In the end none do. People pirate because they don't want to pay the money. What piracy does lead to is increased prices because the consumer pool shrinks and evasive DRM to prevent people from pirating software. |
Of course it's competition. It competes directly with the instore product. It is therefore competition. That's not really debatable.
Firstly its worth recognising that pirating software isn't free. There's the cost of the disc and the time spent buring it. If you're purchasing it then there's the purchasing cost and then of course there the cost of getting caught. Then there's the advantages of purchasing a real copy, there's the packaging and many games have special editions with items you otherwise couldn't obtain.
People pirate because the cost of obtaining a pirated version plus the advantages of obtaining a real version is less than what the retail version sells for. In short, they do so because they benefit more from the lower price than they are harmed by the lower quality (or less features). Naturally to combat this prices are dropped to lower the difference between the two, which helps make pirating software less beneficial.
Furthermore, pirating doesn't increase prices. Stealing from a shop raises prices because stores now have to cover the purchase price of something they no longer can sell. But piracy is already built into stores purchasing decisions - they don't have to cover for copies they don't get to sell. Therefore they only have to compete with the pirated software, which they do through lower prices.
