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> They are also the type of person more likely to complain about minute details in games. I don't understand how this can possibly be true. You didn't give any

> They are also the type of person more likely to complain about minute details in games. I don't understand how this can possibly be true. You didn't give any reasoning, so I assume it must be related to the first paragraph. Wealthy people are the least picky because there's less risk to purchases they make. A $60 video game for a person who makes 2k a month leaves them closer to poverty than a $120 video game for a person who makes 4k. The latter can drop to the first's living conditions and still be relatively well, while the former's next step in cutting costs is moving to a shitty neighborhood or living in their car. Even if my reasoning isn't bulletproof (I admit I haven't given it extensive thought), I'm not sure it applies to piracy in video games. From my (admittedly anecdotal) experience growing up in a developing country, the thought of paying for video games was ridiculous, not only because of how rare they were to find, but also because everyone was worried about actually getting food on the table. II've always played a lot of video games (with my first console being a hand-me-down SNES), and the first game I got my parents to spend money on was Diablo 2 at the age of 12. Since things were so inaccessible back then, we were also far from picky customers. Especially being in a country where English is not the primary language, half the time we wouldn't even understand the words on screen, and that didn't stop us from playing the same few games we had for hours and hours on end. And interestingly, with video games becoming much more affordable compared to back then, the focus on piracy has also changed. People still do it, but the taboo of spending money on things you like seems to be gone. It's jarring seeing my younger brother have no qualms in asking our parents for money to buy a video game and seeing them actually consider it, compared to laughing him off like what used to happen to me. This leads me to believe piracy is fully a "problem" of accessibility, and I don't believe we gain anything from restricting access to people who literally cannot afford the product in the first place.

Bakary 6y ago
It was not my intention to imply negative things about people in the developing world. It indeed does make perfect sense to pirate in such conditions. In any case, I was not making a moral argument, more of a strategic one from the POV of a dev. I also made the comment mostly in reference to the West and to the demographics likely to pirate there, although I obviously should have made this more clear. >This leads me to believe piracy is fully a "problem" of accessibility, and I don't believe we gain anything from restricting access to people who literally cannot afford the product in the first place. I completely agree, and that is the point I wanted to make: there are many reasons not to obsess over piracy. Most people who do pirate will not be a lucrative market in any case, therefore little effort should be expended on anti-piracy measures. It is more lucrative to focus on the people likely to casually dump money on your product once you meet a certain standard of accessibility and quality.

Bakary 6y ago

It was not my intention to imply negative things about people in the developing world. It indeed does make perfect sense to pirate in such conditions. In any case, I was not making a moral argument, more of a strategic one from the POV of a dev. I also made the comment mostly in reference to the West and to the demographics likely to pirate there, although I obviously should have made this more clear. >This leads me to believe piracy is fully a "problem" of accessibility, and I don't believe we gain anything from restricting access to people who literally cannot afford the product in the first place. I completely agree, and that is the point I wanted to make: there are many reasons not to obsess over piracy. Most people who do pirate will not be a lucrative market in any case, therefore little effort should be expended on anti-piracy measures. It is more lucrative to focus on the people likely to casually dump money on your product once you meet a certain standard of accessibility and quality.