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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.
Piracy is competition.
i think that piracy will actually help to sell more. i prefer to have a original boxed game with manuals and stuff than a pirated cd... only if the price is too high.. i'll get the pirated version.
maybe, just maybe, the games are way overpriced to begin with?
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One is born into aristocracy, but mediocrity can only be achieved through hard work.
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
It's a bit of a smack in the face to the rest of the world though. Play by the rules, stay legitmate, get shafted (price-wise). Pirate to your heart's content, get discounts. Nice.
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
Not really. The problem is gamers expecting motion capture animations, life-life textures, life-like physics etc - without wanting to pay for the amount of person-time that has to be put into such a project.
It's easy to do the math. The only way out if you want cheaper games is to accept simpler games. Look at toonshading on the Gamecube - or games as simple and fun as ZooCube, Super Monkey Ball etc.
If you want a life-like Star Wars : KotOR - expect to pay a _lot_ for that pleasure. Development takes time, and costs a lot of money.
it's in my head
A pirate has come to mean something too cuddly and innocuous. In fact, the loose use of the term to describe otherwise ordinary people engaging in distribution of material copyrighted by others has done much to diminish the proud tradition of "pirate".
From now on, all official BSA pronouncements will obide by a new naming scheme. Opponents of BSA will be referred to as "digital terrorists", "hackers", and "pedophiles", preferably in the same sentence
Open Source isn't more efficient, it's just cheaper, because (almost) no one is being paid.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
pirated games (and other software) are widely spread here. even with punishments from fines to 5years of jail, pirates continue to support us in cheap copies. typical prices in poland:
:). dont judge people who live in much poorer parts of the world, ok? maybe at the end of century China will be richest part of the world, and we'll be pirating from them :).
1 cd (game, productivity, OS - no difference): 2-3 euro.
1 cd (movies, mp3) - 1 euro.
licensed copy of windows XP - 100 euro.
licensed, localised, new PC game from upper shelf - 30 euro.
licensed game from bottom shelf - 12-15 euro.
ticket to the new hollywood movie - 3 euro.
new SF book - 8 euro
cost of hiring a room for student - 60 euro.
most people earn here about 250 euro monthly. (like math teacher, policemen, nurse...); best untergraduates can get 80-100 euro.
I suppose reality in China is much closer to ours, than yours
[sorry for my bad english]
Some gamers might jizz their pants over the eye candy, but I think a lot of people would much rather good gameplay to life-like graphics. I know most of the people at LAN parties turn down the graphics options to get smoother gameplay, even the ones with high end video cards.
The graphics might be what sells a game, but it's not what keeps people playing it.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
>Is there any way openness could be less efficient than closed?
Set timelines. (Closed: I can set a deadline and everyone will work towards that goal. Open: Its done when its done.)
Definite commitment to the project. (Closed: people have alot invested to make sure that the project is a sucess. Open: I can leave the project at a drop of a hat and have very little repercussions)
Startup (closed: I just have to convince upper management that people should be working on my project. Open: I have to convince everyone that they should work on it)
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
So suppose you have a store which sells TV's. On the nearest street corner, a guy sells stolen TV's from the back of his car for half the price of yours. He's committing a crime, does that mean he's not competition?
What the original poster meant was that piracy is competition, not that the competition commits piracy (there's a difference). Just the basic fact games in china will sell for less is proof that piracy IS competition.
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.
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I live in China. If you go to the electronics market, people practically drag you into their stores to buy DVDs and VCDs. All software you can possibly imagine, and movies usually 3 days out of the theater. Average price: USD$1 for a movie, up to $10 for a really big software set. And the chinese only sell things when they make money on them, of course. Don't give me that "communist" nonsense. Sure, the substructure of the country is commie, but at the street level and more it's free-wheeling capitalism. The reason it's so cheap is they are paying production costs ONLY, obviously. That's what pirates do. And absolutely NO-ONE in China will buy legit games if they are not only marginally more expensive than copies (like 10-15%)
Not sure where I'm going with this, but thought it might be interesting.