Ok, how do you lose money on a Crash game being sold for a dollar in Bangkok?  Like anyone buying games for a dollar in Bangkok has enough money to buy games for 60 USD.  Money isn't lost if the person who pirated couldn't afford the product to begin with.  The way people look at digital crime is rather perverse if you ask me. And I mean clearly  Rubin isn't starving if he's able to jet set around the world to check Crash prices.  Greed is so unbridled and accepted in the west its sickening. 

This is good.

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.

 I completely agree with this post. Back in PS one era there were a lot of people playing crash games around here, none of them were original copies. When the average salary in your country is about $650 a month, believe me, nobody is going to buy a $60 game no matter the argument. People are willing to pay for consoles they can pirate, not for overpriced games.

Everybody I knew had a PS1, a chipped PS1. Most (if not all) had atleast one Crash Bandicoot game, if not multiple. Piracy probably did ND out of $2000+ at my school...

I don't know if this phenomena was consistent across the lands, though. I remember hearing parents talking about it, and many refused to buy their kids consoles unless they got them chipped (could not justify £30 a game).

Times have certainly changed, though. In fact, I don't know a single person who has chipped a console since.

Emulators were pretty massive, too... though this mainly effected Gameboy and Gameboy Advance, at the time.

They are the most pirated because they have the most appeal, but the point of it all is that more than enough legitimate copies will be sold that the producer shouldn't care about the ones taken by non-customers.

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.

I would just like to say, that there is absolutely no point at all in bringing Uncharted into this. Both co-founders of Naughty Dog left the company before Uncharted was ever thought up. This is clearly about Crash, which is why it was used as an example in the article.

And about this whole thing, I do believe it could be correct. Literally everyone I knew had a chipped Playstation back in the day, and everyone had all four Crash games pirated. My family, my friends, I believe I was just about the only one who didn't pirate, because it's just not in my morals to do so. And anyone who paid to get a Playstation would of course buy Crash for it... Unless they could get the games for free, of course.

I still know tons of people who pirate, someone in my family hasn't bought a single Wii game, but has about one hundred games downloaded on some sort of piracy channel thingy. It's quite amusing.