Ignoring the bad analogy, Piracy doesn't devalue a product any more than the nature of the product itself. The production of the game/movie/music has a fixed initial cost. This cost is almost the entire cost of the product, no matter how many times it is reproduced, unlike physical goods which have a much higher ongoing material and labor cost (and in some cases, this is the same as the initial cost) and is also finite in its reproduction.

Example, A game costs $1 million to produce. To break even, a single copy of the game would need to be sold at a $1 million. To produce a 2nd copy however, costs almost nothing (especially with digital distribution), but now the value which each copy needs to be set at to recover costs is half of the original. As this heads towards infinity, the value of the product heads towards $0, even without piracy being involved.

No not at all and there is no opinion otherwise that can change my opinion. Piracy causes prices in the market to be higher so no.

^ You're wrong piracy is not what's driving prices to go up it's corporations that are looking to make more money who dictates what the price will be.  If the games prices were reasonably low however, there would be lesser pirates.  Imagine $10 games.  Piracy would not disappear but it would significantly lessened, hence the developers would have cash on their pockets.  How many niche PS360 games have you seen floating around in the games bin tagged 60 that clearly will never be bought?  The prices are ridiculous.

Piracy doesn't cause prices to go up.

Think of it this way. People start pirating software, software prices go up, therefore piracy is more appealing, which leads to more piracy, which leads to software prices going up, which leads to more piracy, which leads to higher software prices, which leads to more piracy etc etc etc. In short, you are claiming that piracy causes a never ending price spiral for software.

Piracy is competition for the in store product. Competition lowers prices. Piracy lowers the in store prices.  Raising the in store cost simply makes piracy a more appealing option for gamers. It is as simple as that.

I can imagine $10 games, I can also imagine graphics staying at nes or snes levels because of it.  And with packaging and shipping I can imagine the whole video gaming business being forced to DD or everyone going bankrupt.

Some people seem be talking this one around in circles. Competition is a crap arguement because a company producing games ultimately can not compete with a pirate, because one places value on the contents of the disc/book etc and the other doesn't. Could games be cheaper, i live in Australia so you don't even need to point this out to me. But even in the end if Nintendo sold their games for 40 dollars, cost of the media plus paying their artists, programmers, advertising etc they still can't compete with a pirate who copies the game and has to pay for nothing other than the disc and distribution

People are saying piracy isn't theft because you are not taking the disc. We are not talking about the value of the disc or the paper or whatever medium it happens to be on, that is negligable. There is a value placed on the intellectual property contained therein and if you don't place value on that then you have no business, playing the game, listening to the song or reading the book.

Pirating is not theaft at most it would be unauthorized copy.

Pirating can help the sales a from a little to a lot there are statistics done that show small increases due to piracy in most cases.

It all comes down to how the pirate uses his pirating stuff, me and my friends downlload most stuff game related and play them for 30-40 min then we stop and evaluate the game. 

If the game is good enough we order it and even though i realise that most pirates don´t use this that way there are plenty of people that do.

Like a form of customer service and they buy the games regardles of the posibility of having it for free.

Oh man.  I disagree with twesterm on many things when it comes to anti-piracy measures and the amount of cracking down on piracy that is justified ... but the amount of stupid and ridiculously wrong things being said in this thread makes me a lot more sympathetic to him if he has to deal with this often. 

1.  "If pirating is bad renting is worse."  No.  No no no no no no no.  First off, rental places BUY THE GAME so that's still more copies sold than are sold to pirates.  Secondly, with some exceptions for very short games (hi, Heavenly Sword), most people rent and then buy the game if they really like it.  Well, at least that's how it USED to go; rentals are a lot more expensive than they used to be where I am.  As for Gamefly, again, every copy at someone's house was BOUGHT, by Gamefly if not the customer. 

2.  "If they would just lower the prices then people wouldn't pirate as much."  Well, actually, I don't think that lowered prices are the answer here, at least in most countries.  In some places prices are truly ridiculous, but here in the USA that is not the case.  Anyone who has pirated a game and played it over a period of more than a week should go out and buy it or STFU about pirating just so he doesn't get ripped off for a bad game. 

3.  So you agree that abortion is murder, and yet you are in favor of mass murder in the form of abortion?!  You are a wretched human being indeed.  I can understand why you do put no value on human PROPERTY if you put no value on human LIFE. 

I doubt you do that actually.

Either ignorance is abroad or you simply think you bullshit well.  That makes no sense and if you understood what you were saying you'd see why it makes no sense.  The market has never competed with piracy which alreayd makes that look like heresy.  Not to mention they don't have to.

The FACT of the matter is that piracy causes publishers to up the security either on their disks or within the game which ultimately costs more money.  And they also have to spend more time and money stopping piracy which we ultimately feel in video game prices.  Competition affects prices within the market not from some punk kids who want something for free and then sell it.  That doesn't cause the inflation of prices just the other things I mentioned. 

If piracy wasn't here then they'd spend less money on all those things meaning they can compete with the other publishers and or retailers for lower prices within that medium instead of one with piracy.