Cliff Harris of Positech Games recently posed an open question to pirates: “Why do people pirate my games?” He got a ton of responses and summed them up on his blog.
The results are somewhat surprising, but not wholly unexpected. I’m drawn in particular to the argument that games are too expensive:
A LOT of people cited the cost of games as a major reason for pirating… People talked a lot about impulse buying games if they were much cheaper.
I’ve gone over this before, and I’m not the only one. At $50-$60, games are currently an investment, and too often you’re not provided enough information to make an educated purchasing decision. (Ironically, the market with the best-developed demo program, Xbox Live Arcade, also hosts many of the industry’s lowest-priced titles.)
Read Cliff’s full writeup here.
February 20, 2009 at 12:48 pm
[...] pricing also has implications for piracy, as Cliff Harris noted (and I commented on) last year: A LOT of people cited the cost of games as a major reason for pirating… People [...]
July 6, 2009 at 7:07 am
[...] August, I touched on the issue in response to Cliff Harris’s article, Talking to Pirates: At $50-$60, games are [...]