Piracy: Because of Convenience or Price?

Many of you may know that Russia has the highest piracy rate in all of the world. So great is the piracy market that most people don’t even consider the country a market anymore. Last year, in 2010, Central and Eastern Europe have a Piracy rate of %64 percent according to BSA’s (Business Software Alliance) Global Software Piracy Study. Well, why is that?

[Letros]

I believe convenience is a large part of it. Steam makes it much easier to obtain games in a much faster, safer way, that I'd never consider pirating a game.

[Kalowest]

Price, and to demo what i want to buy.

[Tommykrem]

Sort of like a demo then? :P
No, but I see your point.

[Kalowest]

Even though I torrented The Witcher 1&2, I'm still going to BUY IT. They're both awesome game :), I'm going to buy the physical copies.

[bumnut]

The problem for me is a total lack of demos, it makes me suspicious if a game has no demo.

So I 'Try before I buy'

[Ddouble]

They are both reasons for piracy.

I've been following the recent news about how some people got Uncharted 3 and Battlefield 3 playable on PS3's with CFW even though they're buggy.

For example in Uncharted 3, the game freezes when the journal gets opened and it freezes at chapter 11 i think and so what people are doing is getting other people's saved file to carry on the game past that point missing a puzzle in the process.

That is not convenient at all and would ruin the experience for me. That's the equivalent of watching a film recorded in the cinema seeing the back of people's heads, however, because it's free they think it's worth it.

On the otherhand pirating on the PSP was way to easy. All you needed was a large memory card, none of this 2 page tutorials the guys with CFW on the ps3 have to go through. This one was more to do with convenience IMO.

[Cosmit]

Ugh I can't stand those bootlegged movies lol. I don't even bother watching them!

[KingPin]

half those bootlegged movies are in cinema experiences. when you play it with 7.1 surround sound you can hear people talking and coughing and you cant even tell em to STFU.

if thats not bad enough, the camera angle and colour is completely off. istead of puishing myself through that, il just wait till half price day at the movies <every wednesday> and go watch the movie.

[Tachyon_Nova]

I've only ever pirated 2 games (excluding games that are no longer obtainable like PS1 era games or earlier), CoD 4 and Prototype both for PC. my reason for pirating CoD 4 was that I had previously owned the game but gave it to a friend, and I felt like playing the campaign again. It was just easier than getting it back off my friend. Prototype I never even ended up playing so it doesn't even really count.

One problem I have with PS3 games that would potentially lead me to pirate a game, at least in Australia, is that old games never get really cheap, indeed they rarely go below $30 even for mediocre games years after release. On PC though, where pirating is much easier, I would never consider pirating any more.

The reason for this is Steam. The other day on Steam durign the Hallowen sale, I picked up FEAR 1+2, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Borderlands, Dead Space 1+2, L4D2, and Stalker: CoP + Shadow of Chernobyl for a combined $63. That is insane value, and with prices like that I can pick up games I would otherwise never buy if they cost more.

[RickHiggity]

well on PC, I can tell you it's from a lack of demos. I need to know how well my PC will run something before I make a purchase

[Vladplaya]

Piracy - Because today most games don't have demos and have too much hype and false advertising, therefore spending 60 bucks on a game that can turn out to be complete crap is just stupid.

[ScytheX3]

Price, DRM, and a bit of conveniance.

though as of late the last couple years the fact that developers are getting greedy as f and releasing dlc for sometimes ridiculous prices, just an example, MVC3's shadow battles, you have to pay to vs the cpu.... wtf... honestly? that shit is garbage, another is pay to play whats already on your disc -_-

[KingPin]

i think piracy, to a certain extent, comes from all the protection and hoops that a regular legit buyer has to go through as opposed to just installing a crack and viola, good to go.

i remember the whole spore debacle that only allowed gamers to install the game certain amount of times. after that the key didnt work anymore. Dumb things like that would make me pirate a game just to show those devz that when i buy a game, i wanna install it however many times i damn well want to.

[MWH]

i'd say both for a straight forward answer to the question, but there might be more to it.