mjk45 said:
If that is the case , why are the good games with real market appeal the ones most pirated, the fact is if you can get it for free without to much hassle and your the kind of person that is ok with that , then you will do it. |
Because a game does not hold the same amount of value to everbody.
It's actually a REALLY simple concept if you understand economics.
Though I suppose fairly hard to explain without knowing how much you know about economics...
Do you know about Price Elasticity, Emotional Cost and variable value?
Price Elasticity basically states that not everbody values everything at the same price. An antique sewing kit may be worth $1000 bucks to an old lady who loves sewing but it doesn't mean anything to me, and it might meant $20 to a sewer who doesn't care about sewings history.
Essentially Piracy holds with it an emotional cost that is, a cost that isn't money related.
Say for example....
Your average pirate feels somewhat sketchy about downloading a videogame... which we can value at $10.
Then they value their harddrive space at about $4 dollars because it's a pain to have to delete suff and games are HUGE in size.
Throw in downloading which coudl vary anwyehre between a couple bucks to a LOT depending on your internet connection... even downlaoding it whie alseep or at work adds emotional cost because of how often these things can screw up. Lets say another dollar just to round it out pretty even.
(This is a simplistic thing, not including stuff like fear of lawsuits, social ostrasizing, cost of chipping by breaking warranty, offset cost by already having a chipped console and wanting to prove the chipping was worth it due to cognitive dissonance....)
EC of course will vary according to person, but this is just to illustrate the point. People with a higher EC then the cost of the product are people who don't pirate.
The point is, piracy itself has a cost attached to it just not one in dollars. Keeping price the same for all products, an more appealing game will get more sales because more people have crossed that threshold of $60 value, HOWEVER, it will be pirated more, because the game will cross the Emotional Cost of more pirates while NOT passing the $60 threshold. (People are actually more likely to pay for something than take it for free, even when there is no chance to be caught).
There are far, far, many more people out there who are somewhat interested in games but not at the price offered then there ever are people who would pay for it... this is really true for any industry because people are extremly diverse.
Well except the medical industry. People more often then not will shell out whatever to save their own lives.
