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Game Piracy Results in Lower Prices?
meejahor writes "The BBC reports that Sony will soon launch the PlayStation 2 in China, following Nintendo's lead with the GameCube. Most interesting about the story is the news that, because of widespread piracy in China, PS2 games 'will cost far less than they do in the US or the UK, but still be slightly more than pirated discs.' We've always been told that pirate games push prices up, but doesn't this news suggest that piracy in China has in fact pushed prices down? The story also notes that 'only two or three games will be available at launch' which seems crazy considering the likelihood that people will pirate imported games instead of waiting for them to be released officially." While the Chinese launch of PS2 has been known for a while, the pricing of Chinese games is pretty interesting, given their long history of piracy. I imagine this sort of thing would be considered in the U.S. and other countries were pirated games as widespread as they are in China.
come from competition, not piracy.
When anger rises, think of the consequences.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
They are pusing down the price to combat the pirated games that's available cheaply, thus puttinng on the cost elsewhere ie. the western world, buy yourself some clue
and uncontrollable here in the US, it would push the prices down. Most piracy here in the US is of PC games...not exactly the same can of worms, or political situation. Clif
clifgriffin > blog
I imagine this sort of thing would be considered in the US and other countries were pirated games as widespread as they are in China.
Or you might just end up with a situation like the one in the music industry. Some sort of video game RIAA that is formed and then proceeds to try to regain control via lawsuits.
~gb
and only capitalism details that IP and copyright are capital goods. Sure, they might make some concessions to attract investment but ultimately if it suits China they'll tear up any agreement to recognise Western-derived copyright. This is how it's always been.
Piracy effectively becomes "exercise of the People's right to pool and share resources".
"It's not your information. It's information about you" - John Ford, Vice President, Equifax
The thing is, if a game costs $2, you just might want to pay for the legal right to play the game, instead of loading it from a warez site. If it costs $40, you probably can't afford to try if the game is worth buying, and once you've already got the game, why bother to buy it anymore..
Software should be free as in speech, but if we also get some free beer, all the better.
China is still a Socialist Nation. Any mention to US companies to lower prices, and they will automaticaly point out that China is not a capitalist nation. Which is pretty far from the truth when you look at their economy. But the argument will still stand, and will stand for a while since the opponents will have less media exposure due to lack of funding. And our prices stay just as they are, most consumers will never even hear about the prices in China if the capitalistic companies here can help it.
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The publishers make good money if the game sells appropriately .. the content creators, true to western economy form, get fleeced.
.. thats right .. Copyright law! (Probably the best way to prove that copyright law has long stopped serving the people it was meant to benifit - the content authors.)
AS usual, control over the distribution channels is where the money's at. It's the 1600's in England all over again. Guess what law they created to break the monopoly that the distributors had over the profits from publishing
"Old man yells at systemd"
More importantly, think how much more expensive nike's will be without all that cheap chinese labor.. do you know what war with China would do to many of america's current businesses? There's a reason we haven't gone to war with china, and 'freedom' has nothing to do with it. -- vranash
Shortly after capitalism was introduced in Poland, many software companies emerged, producing games for most common computers - primarily 8-bit Atari. I was a lucky owner of one at that time, and I recall that times with some nostalgy.
Multitude of games was written. Some of them really exceptional. Spy Master, platform game with built-in 'DOS' in which you could launch mini-games from floppies you found thorough the game. Viki, a game with over 1000 rooms (on 64K RAM!), Barahir, really exceptional graphics, 'Dwie Wieze', gfx imported from Amiga, many, many more.
And the companies were pretty successful, despite the fact piracy was widespread and legal. How?
The games always did have some copy-protection scheme, but not uncrackable one. More skilled pirates did circumvent it. BUT the games were released at prices very comparable to the pirates. Usually one game costed the same as one disk (with 5 or so games) from a pirate. And people were buying them, because they were very available at affordable prices, and every Atari user held it as a point of honour to support the authors... Well, with exception: games that sucked
Time passed, Atari died and even best Atari games couldn't compete with Amigas and PCs. No local 'scene' for games for such appeared - all was either import or pirates.
Once originals prices suddenly rose from like, 3 zl (our prices) to 100 zl (western prices), sales suddenly died. Despite introduced anti-piracy law, piracy was more widespread than ever before. It just wasn't legal, small firms that made profit on it, just mafia sindicates. Hardly anybody buys originals nowadays. "We suffer from low sales because of piracy" claim the releasers and increase the prices more to increase profit from the few games they sell even more. And users, just pissed off, "How DARE they to demand such money for that", just buy pirated games instead.
And almost nobody remembers that selling and buying original games in Poland at one time was not only very comon, but quite profitable - and the key was LOW PRICES.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I really wish some of you pro-piracy folks would work really hard on something that you care about for a long time and then have it stolen by thousands of people. Maybe then you'd wake up and smell what you're shoveling.
_/\ - Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crud.
High prices creat piracy. It can be plotted on a cartesian coord plane. The price on the y axis, and the number of people buying on the x axis. As the price goes down, more people will be able to afford and therefore, buy stuff. This is what the idea of a sale is; you normally sell your pants at $100, if you sell them for $90 demand will increase and if it's during a busy season, you'll move more merchandise and therefore, creat a higher profit than you could before.
When prices are high, piracy/theft/ect are going to be high aswell. When prices are low, the same things are going to be low. Why do you think the p2p networks are so huge? Because people's opinions differ from buisnesses and the goverments , just about every one of them infact.
The really sad part about this is that if the trend continues with people thinking that piracy is ok, xyz gaming corp will creat an awesome game and nobody will buy it, and they'll go out of buisness instead of making new games. After the RIAA and MPAA are deceased, cd's are cheaply baught at $2 and $3 a cd with extra's and a movie is around $5 opening night. Will piracy decrease or will it continue to rise?
As for software, I'll agree as much with the next guy that when I go into a store and buy a software package and it sucks, I'm pissed and can't return it. As for games, there's a lot of cookie-cutting going on as there always has been in the computer industry. Doom came out, and then you got blake stone, duke nukem, etc. BF1942 came out, and now we've got mohaa and it's expansions, ET, call of duty. All of them are based off of the same engine (afaik) and all of them have similar gameplay.
My worries aren't the monumental failures when corperations spend millions building a cookie cutter game and loose millions. My worries are when xyz corp creats the super ultra neato game and puts it out and the overall reputation and respect for gaming softare is so low that nobody will buy it for fear that, even though there's hype in the magazines, hype in the stores, hype in the forums and hype in the news and even a good playable demo (which everyone knows is bribed because they'v been burned before) will xyz corp be able to make any money for making a truely excellent game? Will xyz corp go out of buisness?
Cartels like the riaa make a bad name for companies like xyz corp. The major reason people go out and buy anything is because they think it is good, well, if they're a thinking consumer.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
I fail to see how the DMCA means freedom, along with corrupt senators and elections. But yah, you go ahead and think you have all the freedom you can get....
sheep
This sig is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.
The game Sony is probably releasing over there are really old games. Games where the developer has already made back their development costs and profited. Games where the publisher has already made back their marketing cost and profited. The only costs of selling these old hits will be manufacturing and distribution. All revenue greater than that cost will be pure profit because the US, Japan and Europe have already paid for all of those other 1 time costs. Because of this they can afford to drop the prices like a rock.
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Game Manufacturers don't seem to be following a business model for Mass Marketing... They seem to prefer to use a model where they are priced as high as possible to maximize profit per copy rather than a model where profit comes from mass copies.
Its this business model that fuels the majority of piracy in North America.. If a game were 25$ and I could walk and pick it up in 15 mins at the game store near by.. Or spend 1-2 days downloading it... I would rather pay the 25$ if the company/game had a good rep for playability.
Its hard to shell out 40-80$ for a game that may only have 2-3 days of playibility to it. That also fuels piracy... So they have a few obstices to overcome in that reguard.
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Personally, I think the single most effective "leverage" game makers have found in recent years to combat piracy is the creation of multiplayer titles that require a server-verified key in order to allow online play.
To be perfectly honest about it, that's what made me go out and purchase both Warcraft 3 and the Frozen Throne expansion. I really have a problem with Blizzard's legal attack on people creating freeware alternatives to their "Battle.net" servers, yet I was really looking forward to playing WC3. If it was as easy as just downloading a "warez" copy, I probably would have done so (justifying it in my mind as better than the alternative of contributing more funds to Blizzard). But alas, the "key generators" don't seem to make keys that their Battle.net server thinks are real, valid key codes. So to ensure I could play it against other people online, I had to go buy it.
That said, though, lowering game prices would certainly help improve sales and fight piracy. The people "cheap" enough to keep wasting time downloading programs they could buy for $10 or less aren't really the "target customer base" to begin with. Eventually, they'll go out and get jobs - and start realizing that "time is money". Then, they'll become customers for the reasonably priced game titles too.
So Sony is raising the price of PlayStation 2 in China and lowering the price of the games.
I'll restate this for the reasoning impaired: They're taking their money upfront on the console, rather than later on the games.
No electrons were harmed creating this post, though some may have been subjected to electrical and/or magnetic fields.
That's absurd. The market for movies is huge, compared to the market for PC games. Actually the game and movie market are compareable. Do your research or shut the hell up. Game development shops, for the most part, run small, low margin businesses. Your calculation is absurd, because the game that sells a million copies returns about 2 million to the developer, 3-4 million to the publisher, 3 million to retailers, and the rest to assorted other folks. I said a game which costs 3 million dollars to make. This includes publishing and everything else. Games usually cost between 3-5 million dollars total, which means this is how much money the game company needs to make to break even. That includes paying for everything including marketing and publishing. As for whether publishers and distributers take a bigger cut in the gaming business than the movie business, that's a toughie - I don't know enough to say for sure. But a successful movie might take in 50-100 million dollars so there is more to go around. A successful game such as Final Fantasy, or an EA sports game like Madden can easily take in 50-100 million dollars. PC games like Starcraft which were very cheap to make, take in hundreds of millions of dollars. Starcraft is one of the best selling PC games of all time, sold well over 5 million copies, and at the time under 5 million to make. When each copy sells for $20, thats 100 million dollars from 5 million sold. Try writing a 3D game, which has to run on EVERYBODY'S PC and compare to doing some animations in Maya, which just have to look good from one angle and get rendered once. Not dissing on the Matrix or other heavy-FX movies, but it's really a hell of a lot of work to support and distribute a modern 3D PC game. What if I told you I have? Listen you do not know shit about the game industry. Game companies do not write 3d engines they license them from other companies, or use open source engines and add onto them. Sega was one of the few companies which did not do this and they went bankrupt after making games like Shenmue. Most smart and profitable game companies however use the same engine over and over again for all their games. This, of course, is why nobody really wants to develop for the flooded PC market and why the console market exists, if you are well capitalized and can afford to hire the right people, get all the SDKs and negotiate good terms. The problem with the PC market is the hardware keeps changing, and its the most competitive market. People do develop for the PC market, where do you think new companies start? The PC market is where you make your first couple of hits and then you move on to the console market, its rare for a company to start in the console market because you have to pay Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo a fee just to make games for their system. The fee is not small. Please do some research before you comment again. 1 Games cost around 3 - 5 million to make, except for the rare Sega game like Shenmue which costs 50-80 million to make and 50 million more to market. 2 Game companies license 3d engines from other companies and rarely develop their own. This is done to save money, you cannot do this in the movie industry. 3 Game companies make sequels which require almost no new code, with added levels, a new musical score, and some new marketing, its basically repackaging the same game over and over and profiting off of it. Check out Tomb Raider and Madden. 4 The PC market is the only market you can start in because the console market is for big compaines only. You will pay so much in license fees that you'd be better off making your game for the PC.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
Okay, doesn't look like this is being applied to the right entertainment market. I don't have a problem with game prices at all. There is generally a lot of creativity and work that goes into them, and the prices do fall after the item has been on the market for a while, even if it's still popular. That doesn't seem to happen with music or movies (or Microsoft software).
Still, it's backwards. High prices encourage "piracy". And lowering the prices enough will make casual users of illegally copied material say, "hey, it's more convenient to just buy it." Of course, there still has to be some enforcement of copyright for this to work. I see hints of this happening in the music biz, but I've yet to see real price competition between labels. Thank heavens we are seeing a real-world example of this, and hopefully it will give the anti-entertainment-cartel crowd some ammunition.
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
You'd hire your own programmers, write your own 3d engine, spend millions of dollars writing it, and release a piece of crap game which has good graphics. Look, people can license a good 3d engine, and theres many to choose from. There is no reason to write your own realtime 3d engine when theres a million companies trying to license them to you. Turbine licenses 3d engines, pay them and you can use their state of the art engine. Basically, you need the eye candy to sell the game, but the eye candy support in the API layer is shitty and nonstandard. It's tough, so you try to make tradeoffs that will let you sell well to the high end gamer market without losing too much of the casual gamer market, and deal with undiscovered hardware dependencies though patches. Eye candy alone does not sell games. Quake does not sell because of eye candy, the game looks ugly, its in a closed in area, its dark, it sells because its a shooting game that people like. Look I could find an open source 3d engine, and hire programmers to make a game out of that. I admit the engine wouldnt be as good as an expensive licensed engine but i'm proving to you there are ways to save money. If you are doing a big budget 3D game you can afford a horde of testers with a sufficiently broad variety of test hardware to detect _most_ of the major issues up front, but this requires a substantial budget. You pay one or two testers, then you offer a demo or announce on your website you are looking for beta testers and let the world test it for free. You do not have to pay alot of beta testers.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
This would make sense if China were poor, but it's not. It's poorer than Japan, the US, or Western Europe, but it's not a particularly poor country. There is an enormous middle class with as much disposible income as your average middle-class American (as measured by the exchange rate, not compared to the cost of living). The absolute salary of a middle-class wage earner in China is lower, but the cost of living is incredibly low, so there's a lot left over. China is the second largest economy in the world, with a GDP of $5.7 trillion. A lot of that is due to the enormous population, true, but compare with India, which has nearly as many people, but a GDP of only $2.66 trillion. Africa and China are not even remotely comparable. You are correct that a US-like price will lead to few sales, but incorrect about the cause. It's not because nobody can afford it, plenty of Chinese people can. But buying a shiny round piece of plastic for $50 is looked on as total insanity. You can buy a nice DVD for $1 on the street, and games are priced similarly. Nobody will buy real games with pirated versions available at those prices, no matter how rich they are.
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You can divide the costs of a game into two pieces; one-time costs and per-unit costs. One-time costs include things like paying your programmers to code, electricity for the building they work in, marketing, etc. Per-unit costs are things like printing the manuals/booklets, making the cases, stamping the CDs. A pirate doesn't really have any one-time costs, he only has to pay per-unit costs.
The problem comes in when you see how the costs are divided. A modern game will cost millions of dollars in one-time costs, but it costs maybe fifty cents per unit to actually duplicate the disc and produce the packaging. This means that, unless the game is popular beyond all belief, the one-time costs dominate, and so the game's price has to be set much higher than the per-unit cost in order to make money overall.
The thing is, once your one-time costs are paid for, they're done. No more worries. Introducing games into, say, China, comes with nearly no one-time costs. They have a bit of marketing to do, and they'll probably want to do a translation, but these are very cheap compared to the original production costs of the game. Since those have already been paid for by customers in Japan, the US, and Europe, you can sell the game at a much lower price, the per-unit cost plus a markup.
Pricing is a fundamental difficulty in industries like this, including software, music, film, and drugs, because in all of these industries the one-time costs are way higher than the per-unit costs. But the market doesn't like paying a large markup. People know that the $12 CD they just bought only cost 25 cents to make, and they don't like that.
All of these industries see pricing structures like this. You spend a lot of money to create a product, then sell it at a very large markup in your primary market, which consists of people used to paying higher prices. Once your one-time costs are paid off, you can sell the same product for a much lower price in your secondary markets, and continue to make a profit. This happens with software, drugs, and media.
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1) Routine torture of prisoners.
2) No chance of a fair trial - ever.
3) Government imposed murder of the unborn children.
4) Crackdown on Christians.
Sounds like you are describing that freedom loving Guantanamo bay not China
torture of prisoners ? check
no chance of a fair trial ever ? check
Crackdown on Christians ? s/Christian/Islam/ check
Government imposed murder of the unborn children ? check
yeah sounds like you are living in a great free country, maybe a mirror is whats needed before condemming other countries political systems
The best way to make money has always been to make a whole lot of something. The somethings get cheaper over time, if for no reasons other than that technology marches along, and that the research costs will eventually taper off to virtual nothingness alongside the cost (and benefit) of production. Only a few people will save up their pennies and buy one thing that will last them a long time. They're distracted by loud noises and flashing lights, and they'll buy the cheap crap. Besides, if you're poor you probably live somewhere where nice shit is in serious danger of being jacked when you're gone for the weekend. I don't even have anything particularly nice (Just a bunch of medium-nice things) and a whole bunch of not worth stealing items that a junkie would probably run off with anyway, and I'm concerned about my belongings. Don't give me that look when I say Junkie, this is a town that both makes and takes an awful lot of speed.
Oh and stop bringing up Hitler. No one's getting out the Zyklon B. Commercial copyright violation surely deprives people of money and devalues their product, but the only reason they're upset about the latter is that it typically has little intrinsic value to begin with. They simply hype it up until it has spin value. Then they spin up the next thing and send it our way. They're treating us like pigs out for slop, and that's what we get, because we'll eat it... certainly this relationship works both ways.
There are basically two ways you can go to fight them. You can go both ways at once, too. One way is to produce or promote (either with effort or money) independent media. You can buy shareware games, you can buy indie CDs, etc etc. And you can be a "pirate". One way is legal, one way isn't. One way is clearly moral, one way is murkier, but there's really no proof that anyone's getting hurt. It seems to usually be a good thing for artists; there are exceptions I'm sure but they seem to be in the minority.
I think we can all agree that the saying about how people wouldn't buy the software anyway is about fifty percent bullshit. It's just easier to download music and not pay for it than it is to go to the store and find out your chosen music is out of fashion this week and they'd have to order it for you. The music industry has been promising us custom CDs for ages but they never have been able to agree on how to cooperate. Piracy has simply forced them to start selling music online, or be left behind. In this case it has driven progress; the technology has been there for some time, in fact it's a cheaper way to distribute music than making CDs in some central location and shipping them.
Assorted businesses are now having to come up with new things to charge for, new items to market. Technology does that. People want information to be free, and conciously or subconsciously, they work toward that end. There are notable exceptions who have discovered ways to make money off making it not free.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There are some major misconceptions spread on this site in the name of basic economics. Often, the arguments are a partial application of economics, creating misleading conclusions.
.. but the cost does not differ for 100,001 compared to 100,000). Marginal cost is the pure production cost, the incremental cost of pressing and retailing an additional copy of the game.
... this is the famous P=MC result.
... this is what people usually refer when they say that they need to earn a reasonable rate of return on their capital ... they need to earn enough to cover the f ixed cost and the opportunity cost associated with sinking the fixed cost in this endeavor as opposed to another.
... although it does happen to a much lesser extent in the form of generics).
For this article, the misleading economic argument is that piracy has lead to lower prices and that this is a justifiable result of piracy as competition.
First off, there are two basic types of costs driving the gaming industry: fixed and marginal. Fixed cost is the development and marketing cost incurred by Sony and the developers whose value roughly does not vary with the number of sales they make (obviously, the fixed cost differs if you plan to sell 1 million copies as opposed to 100
For most console games (if successful), the fixed cost are recovered during the initial sales in fully developed countries with defined property rights, namely U.S., Japan, and Western Europe. Economics shows that once fixed costs are recovered, competition can drive prices such that they reflect only marginal cost
However, at P=MC, fixed costs cannot be recovered. While P=MC may be a competitive outcome in the short-run, with the fixed costs of existing games already sunk, it is not a long-run equilibrium as no firm would continue to operate under the prospect of not fully recovering it's fixed cost. Note: the fixed cost is often referred to as "capital cost" in some popular press
Of course, this applies to other published products such as movies, books, CDs. This is why we see reduced prices for these items later on, after their initial release (bargain bin books/paperbacks, "budget price CDs," and second-run films): the idea here is that firms can charge closer to marginal price now because they had already largely recovered their fixed costs earlier with the more expensive first-run products.
So the lesson for console games and China? Sony and Nintendo are willing to charge lower prices in China precisely because they were able to charge higher prices in the U.S., Japan, Europe earlier. This is also the same reason why pharmaceuticals are (sometimes) willing to offer drugs to Africa at a much reduced price (they're much less worried about drug "piracy"
That said, are prices in these traditional publishing industries "too high" ? Absolutely. But let's use the right arguments instead of simply trying to legitimize piracy.
Of course piracy pushes the price down. I guess most corporate leaders haven't thought this through. There is always a black market, and it grows in proportion to the price of the legitimate goods. Any company raising their prices to recoup profits "lost" to the black market is insane.
Seems there are a lot of insane companies out there.
It's funny how easily we buy into their story about evil pirating driving up prices. It's _their_ job to figure out how many people will buy a product at a given price, then spend less than that on developing the product.
Cheers.
Oh? What is this "Free Software" of which you speak? People should have a choice as to whether they want their software to be free. If you choose not to make your software free, piracy takes away both your software and your freedom to choose.
_/\ - Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crud.
games are not a monopoly product. for a product to be a monopoly there must be 1 dominant software producer ie microsft which creates all games. This is not the case. there are westwood, blizzard, microsoft etc.......
piracy comes down to simple economics: if someone can't afford something, they won't buy it. Likewise, if they can get it in another fashion for less (off the street or via download), with a similar enough product to make it worthwhile, they'll do that too.
For instance, if you make a single player game, and sell it in stores for $50, with the CD in a jewel case, no manual or game material (such as the books, maps, etc. that come with Baldur's Gate games), and just a couple pictures on the box, people have absolutely no motivation to purchase the game over pirating it. There's no functional difference, and there's hardly any perceived difference. The cost of finding it online (at most, several hours of searching online and then maybe a couple days downloading it - basically just your time to find it: say, 4 hours), or the cost of getting it from your friend or the guy down the street for a couple dollars, is negligable compared to the 50$ box price.
There are several things that companies can do to increase both revenue and sales. Part of the equation is lowering the price so the investment differential between a pirated copy and a legit copy is less. The other half of the equation is providing game content that doesn't suck.
Let's draw this scenario up in terms of the price of the product. On the 'buying legit' side, I would likely have to download a 200+Mb demo to find out if i like the game, play the demo, (and if I like it) go to the store, buy the game, come home, uninstall the demo, install the game, and (likely) play over the same exact part of the game that was available in the demo - and that's just not cool. I spend $50 of my money and invest (say) 3 hours of my time to get this game. I could also have just gone out and gotten the game and then been disappointed, and returned it, or not gotten the game at all after playing their wretched demo.
On the pirating side of things, I could see an add for a game, read a review or two, and then either ask a friend for the game, or search the web for a little while for the full version - obscenely easy. I might invest a total of 4 hours of active seeking in trying to get the game. I'll install it, and if I like it, I'll keep playing it. At this point, I have no desire to pay for it, since i already have it, and buying it offers me no added benefit (more times than not). If the game sucks (which is much more than likely nowadays) I'll simply remove it and have only lost (say) 5 or so hours of my time. This second approach is the one that seems to be the most common among gamers in my experience: they're a highly social group of folks amongst themselves, and getting an ISO or CD from a friend is much easier and a LOT cheaper than going to the store to buy it, and there's much more benefit.
Neither of these options seem terribly viable for the game producer, in my mind. Here are several options that, too me, seem to be much more viable - either by themselves or in combintion.
1) Sell the games for a lot less money - $15 or $20, or maybe even $10 seems reasonable to me for most of the games out there. I'm much more likely to go to the store and pick out a cheap game for the hell of it on a rainy Saturday than I am ot pick out a $40 or $50 game. I, as well as most gamers aren't diehard gamers, and aren't willing ot spend an arm and a leg for a game unless it warrants it.
2) Provide some sort of positive incentive to purchase the game. Note: the incentive must be positive! This means that throwing in some sort of 'required license key registration' into the installation process would not be a good idea. Instead, go the extra step (it's just a step, when you consider it, compared to the initial mile of actual development) and add some content into the box: maybe a sticker or two, maybe a poster, a nice game manual (whether the game needs it or not, if the game is good, people will read those manuals), and various other "we care about you" gestures. Adding in a license key requirement to get to the more significant part o
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Actually, most of what hte original poster referred to are due to monopolistic practices. I will guarantee you that if a movie, for example, can be released by many companies, you wouldn't get the region encoding thing (which does very little from a fan point of view). Region encoding (in DVDs) is simply a marketing thing to control markets.
Price discrimination is, for example, when a movie theater charges different prices for different ages. This, to me, is different from the above case...
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
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