D'oh a mod.  I guess I should have been nicer.

No I didn' t miss that, but you probably missed a couple of my arguments on making up for the reduced price on volume.

Fair enough

Low profile graphics only work for the wii and the digital distribution networks. Disc based games with crappy graphics get lambasted by reviews and end up hurting in sales. Up to a certain point it's a better investment (on the HD twins) to bank on graphics and a high price rather than low-fi and budget prices.

Frankly, it's appaling how some of you are pretending to tell them how to run their business just to justify stealing. If you think the vast majority of people hooked on the .25c / game torrented piñata are gonna start buying in droves at 40$, you are sorely mistaken. Only people who BUY games have their decisions impacted by price of the product. People who STEAL don't care about the price sticker. It's been proven over and over.

If someone was stealing your product and had the balls to go tell you how to run your business, what would your reaction be? So far there is NO argument at all justifying piracy that can't be broken down into basically "I am doing it, I like doing it and I want to keep doing it".

Maybe my point got overlooked, but one of the targets of the anti-piracy bandwagon is also the used game market. Companies need to protect their products, but implementing things like restrictive DRM under the veil of piracy prevention is unacceptable.

This is slightly different for consoles because piracy prevention should be up to the console manufacturer and as a most part the 2 of the big 3 have been doing a pretty good job to target video game pirates.

You might want to read this one: http://www.ninjapirate.com/content.php?f=spore.html

Pretty funny if you ask me.

Pretty boring I thought gazz.

And if you are going to reduce price on a game, you need to sell a lot more copies of the game to make the same amount of money. Think about gta san andreas. If they had released that game at half price from the begining, they would have needed to sell 30 million copies to get the same amount of money. Do you really think 30 million people would have wanted to play that game? I sure as hell don't, especially since it has been at $20 for forever now and it didn't get a huge sales boost.

I think someone has been learning how to paraphrase and is doing it wrong.  Listen, this is not a pro-piracy thread.  Are you still sore from our argument the other day?  Anyway I just had to butt in because I would like to point out that MMORPGs are mostly flourishing from oh a couple of bucks here and there.  Nothing much.  And you're still missing the point, piracy will always be present but the people who support it will consider something legal if it's affordable.  Why are you so damn adamant on keeping the regular folks away from HD content?  Are you one of those guys who thinks just because you can afford the high price on a regular basis it means you're special?  That's quite sad.

Anyway to close this, the Publishers are reacting incorrectly to piracy and used-game-afficionados.  Many people go to stores and scoff at the prices of HD games, these guys are like you and me only they just don't like paying too much for something that they think is over-priced.  While it may or may not be overpriced seems to still be a matter of opinion (some people just don't have anything better to buy with extra cash I guess) it still remains that the general market does not think that the current pricing of games is a reasonable expense.  And if it's true that Sony and Microsoft are selling their systems at a loss and is making up for it in terms of software sales, boost of their software sales would also boost the popularity of their system.  It's a vicious cycle you see.  It's not really that new.

Close it my ass. You pretend to be all savvy and talking about things should be done leveraging the fact that the whole industry is subject to a massive stealing, everyday, through the net. This is akin as telling someone how he should do things just because you are clubbing him to death and using the fact that you are allowed to maul him as a justification for your arguments.

Piracy hurts and it hurts the most the small guy. Big exes always will have a job managing content libraries and shareholders will always profit from that but it's the small guys who make a living out of content creation who get the worst deal. Piracy deincentivates investment into new content because profitability has gone way down.

Your arguments crash because as time goes by people are dropping alltogether their spending on pirateable products and replacing it with stacks of fresh DVD's. To most people it's not about "hey, I used to buy 5 movies a year, now I'll still buy 5 and pirate 100". They eventually switch to 100% free-for-all p2p action.

Your whole argument boils to "hey, people can get games for free! if the companies do what I tell them to do, they'll stop doing it". But that's bollocks. HD games cost that much because all it's left for the companies is milking the people that still buy games. Viva Piñata released at 40$, where are the massive sales? Banjo will debut at 40$, you think it'll sell to the torrent crowd? The 360 has a large library of discounted games, how come those aren't hitting the top of the lists? Here's a hint: because once you get used to paying 0.25c for a game, you aren't gonna pay 10$. The music industry has been dealing with this ever since the 90's. And sure, iTunes works well - but it's nowhere near making up for the differences in revenue from before the p2p days.

And frankly, tell me since when stealing something you can't afford is kosher. Everyone wants a porsche or a ferrari, how come there aren't people assaulting the vendors? because jacking a car gets you in the jail. This just about consecuence-free stealing - that's the only reason this thing got big. Everything else is just chatter.

The day someone breaks into your house and get your flat tv stolen I hope the thief later phones you to tell you how it was his right to steal your TV because he can't buy one.

Yes and clearly you're the king of excitement.  There will be games that deserve the $60 price tag, but as you should know a lot of the games today don't and those are the games that should not cost as much.  There seems to be a market for partial games, as there is for Music Singles.  For games just look at GT5 Prologue.  They can also pursue that avenue, release a lower cost version that has only 30% of the content for the full version.  There are lots of stuff they can try and perhaps they have started trying just look at the popularity of the downloadable games from all three platforms.

Yeah DRM is a barbed wire designed to irritate their paying customers, whoever thought of it should be hanged.  If you look closely all attempts at DRM have backfired, people see it as an anti-feature one that they can live without.  It may actually be promoting the tech savy folks to turn to piracy to get a better version.  Score one more point for the marketing geniuses and executives, good job assholes!