EU Commission Says Piracy Increases Legitimate Game Sales

[DonFerrari]

BraLoD said:

HomokHarcos said:

I watched a documentary about gaming in Brazil before, and the people interviewed said that if there were no emulators people would have just stopped playing video games rather than going out and buying them.

That's actually wrong.

Emulators were a thing indeed, specially NES emulators, the most famous one being a psone shapped called PolyStation (as it tricked silly parents into buying a PlayStation, lol), but even during third gen, TEC TOY support was enough proof people supported what they could.

The Sega Master System sold better here than in any other place in the world because we had a company that locally understood the reality here and fully supported it. But later with the PS1 and PS2, the consoles were also EXTREMELY popular here, because people could pay cheap for the games as they were massively pirated.

As a matter of fact, PS2 hardware sales here were very significant while games sales were basically null. People could pay for the tool but not for the products, I remember the first time I went to a store to buy a original PS2 game and it was 20x what I used to pay for 2, as yes, people mostly didn't pirate themselves, they bought it, and when the economy got better (a bubble that exploded now, but it was better to consume back then) and the PS1 kids got older, like me, a big shif happened, PS3 got more popular than the easily piratable and then successful 360 and the PS3 got more popular as it got cheaper and people could now afford a feel games, the PS3 used games market is still likely the country biggest market.

So, emulators weren't a big factor, arcade machines culture was a bigger thing than emulators here until piracy reigned supreme when the PS1 came.

And because of pricing of PS4 and X1 at start of gen our grey shops only had PS4 because to sell both PS4 and X1 made X1 very little profit (100USD more expensive and very close to the price in USA on official stores when accounted the cost to import for grey market)