Piracy & Used Games

The great piracy debate has been around for years. I was forwarded an interesting link to a blog where a developer had questioned a bunch of pirates as to what makes them do it:

http://www.positech.co.uk/talkingtopirates.html

Personally I used to pirate the odd game on the Amiga when I was a wee lad. I wouldn't ever pirate a game now - the biggest reason being that it's pissing in my own pond. Being a game developer you have to set a good example to your audience.

The reason why I pirated was simply price and it was so easy to do - like making a copy of a tape. When I were a lad I didn't have much money, so copying off your friend was an easy thing to do - all it required was a (pirated) copy of XCopy (how ironic). These days it's a little trickier (for consoles at least). It requires dedicated hardware to create discs, chip modifications or weird work arounds to get things running. The business of piracy makes some serious money for those involved. It certainly doesn't have the same "romantic" vision of the bedroom copying days.

As a member of the industry I do find it hard to justify the price of modern console games. Even I struggle to be able to afford them. If they were cheaper then I would most certainly buy more of them - it's as simple as that. When a game costs £50 a pop, you have to be damn sure that you are going to get your money's worth out of it (and I don't just mean in terms of number of hours - I mean quality of experience).

The excuse for these high prices is often the level of piracy that occurs forces them to hike costs, but this is a vicious circle. This ends up pushing more people to pirate games.

This has also caused the rapid growth of the second hand market, to the point where you can only make a £5 saving on a used game. This is ridiculous - and extremely bad for the whole industry. Developers and publishers are quick to blame retailers for this problem, but does it actually lie with publishers pushing for such high retail prices? It certainly fosters a market. If you only made a saving of £1 or £2 on a second hand game, then why would I buy the used copy over the new one?

Perhaps the industry needs to look hard at pricing and think about ways to get the costs of the products down (without increasing shovelware). I truly believe if we managed to get a game to the cost of a DVD - maybe a blueray (about £20), we'd get a lot more customers that pirate or buy second hand to "opt in" and buy the brand new copy, in the end giving us the developers and the publishers more profit.

Who jumps first?