+1

That is very true.

Overall?

No... it's about Zerosum.

In isolated cases? Yeah, but it's rare...

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. 

You say tomatoe I say tomatoe.  It doesn't really matter whether you think it's stealing or not.  The current verbage is that it is stealing due to the companies loss of the ability to use their IPs in the way they deem fit and the loss of future profits.  Your last sentence is a moot point.  Within 5 years people will be serving time for piracy. 

Thanks for proving my point.  PS2 wasn't easy to mod for three years.  Xbox (easily piratable) and gamecube were dead in the water by then.  I.E.  Piracy does not lead to market domination. 

And honestly, even if they sold Wii mod chips at best buy 99% of the people with a Wii would not open up their Wii and solder this chip to the system.  I.E.  Wii was easy for you to MOD, not easy for the 30 M of the Wii's customer base.  Not the reason the Wii is leading. 

No they won't.  What you'll see is ever increasing invasive DRM until it is impossible to pirate.  Then they'll purchase games like most other people.  I've skipped meals before to save up for games.  Pirates would find a way to play games.  Just not as much as they otherwise would have played.

70% of software loses money at current prices.  Electronic Arts lost $95 M in the second quarter on sales revenue that doubled from the prior year.  You think it's a rediculuos price but nobody is making any money. 

For all you people that do say pirating = used games.

1.  Their is a very big difference.  Regardless if you think they are the same, the law is black and white, buying used games = legal, pirating games = illegal. 

2.  Used games overcome all issues brought up during piracy. 

a.  You can try out a game for a short period of time for a fee.  Thus you don't have to be stuck with a high price dud.

b.  You can pay less for a game than the retail price if you believe the retail price is the market price of that game.

However, people will still not use these things because piracy is free.  Again we see piracy is not competition.

3.  Used games make publishers a ton of money.  Piracy does not.  Blockbuster has over 8,000 stores.  If they buy 3+ copies of a game those sales are huge.  Plus as someone mentioned they pay more than $50 a title and have to buy a special licence to rent.  Obviously their are a ton of other rental places too.  For big releases, it would be easy to grab over 100,000 in sales just to rental places.  Plus it gives your customers a legal way to try the game leading to a full price purchase.  Their is no reason for a pirater to pay full price for a game because they receive all benefits immediately. 

no it can't be a good thing

@cleveland: Your point is most certainly in doubt since you were using lies to try and make your case. why did the post i quoted of yours contain so much BS? either you are intentionally trying to mislead people or are absolutely clueless about modchips/flash cards. Just to reiterate:

- You don't need a multi-thousand dollar device to burn wii games.
- The Wii and DS are both "pirateable".
- The PS2/PS1 aren't "easy" to pirate in comparison to the Wii/DS.
- The "only hardcore gamers pirate games" isn't entirely true. While they may do it more frequently, a user who has some basic knowledge of computers can easily figure out what's required.
- DS Flash cards can be bought in some shopping malls and many legitimate sites based in north america. Using one is about as hard as transferring photos to and from a memory card.

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. 

This is not a site where you will get an ubiased discussion. You would look for people who are philisophical business and theory. Most who do not question will only answer authority answers. The flip side are self justified opinions.

Go self justified opinions! we go FTW!

Well, in Brasil the ps2 dominated due to piracy. I have 10-$20 games at the corner of my house, but I still buy the official copy sometimes( is $60), when I like the game very much and want to retribute to the devs. But the true is that if I were to pay full price I wouldn´t have half of the games I have. I woudn´t have the money for it. A ps2 game was $120 back in 2000-2006 period and the sku was $500-$600 depending on the dollar price. So most people aquired it on trips and then pirated most of the games, buying only a few.
Piracy does help hw, doesn´t help the industry and help customers who otherwise woudn´t be able to enjoy fully the gamming experience. The best way to avoid piracy would be to relesase the game free, but incomplete and then sell a website admission, were you could get the rest of the game and monthly patches adding to the game. This way you would atract quite a lot of people in the first minute and if the game was any good they would buy the admission.