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>Another reason is that people don't pay for something when they can get it for free I would like to say this is wrong, but I have no evidence to support my cl
by Morgawr 12y ago
>Another reason is that people don't pay for something when they can get it for free
I would like to say this is wrong, but I have no evidence to support my claims. However what I can say empirically is that myself and many other people I know have stopped pirating games and/or music ever since easy-to-use services like Steam and Google Music came out.
Personally, nowadays I find myself with so many legit games on Steam that my first thought when a new game comes out is "meh, I don't have time to play that, I'll buy it later when it goes on sale". Years ago it would've been "let's hop on XXXX to see if there's a torrent ready!".
It simply is not worth it, to me, to pirate games, set up cracks, be sure I have all the proper files, set up backups in case I want to replay it later, etc etc. With Steam I can just click "download" and it just works.
I firmly believe that if you make something easy-to-access, cheap enough (steam sales, anyone?) and immediate in delivery, you will soon realize piracy really does not matter. The market just needs to evolve and adapt to newer technologies.
- mattmanser 12y agoIt's going to be a sliding scale isn't it? There will definitely be some sales lost, but not all of them would have bought it. I love how easy it is to get a book on my Kindle from Amazon at the click of a button, but given my voracious reading and the bill it generates it might be that I would consider looking at alternate sources for some of those books. So I might consider buying some and torrenting some. The alternative would be reducing the amount I read. And if I went the torrent route, I might suddenly notice that the volume of bought books might reduce from 5-10 legitimate purchases a month to 1 a month.
- afterburner 12y agoThe automated, practically invisible patching on Steam is what really sold me on it.
- tekromancr 12y agoI have to agree. I think likelyhood of pirating something looks like free_time_available vs free_money_available. When I was a broke college student, I pirated near everything because I had a lot of free time, and no expendable income. Now that I am a startuper, I have no money and no time so I almost never pirate (or purchase) anything. If I ever get to a point where I have lots of money and little free time, I will very likely pay whatever is asked to watch what I want.
- thesteamboat 12y agoPerhaps it's more accurate to say that people acquire things in the cheapest way they can --- but also that they compute the `cost' as some combination of monetary costs, temporal costs, skills they have to use/aquire, social effects of community acceptance, etc.