When is piracy your only option?

[Grimspoon]

Ok I was thinking about this since Saturday when I visited Look and listen to check out the new games and was totally surprised / irritated / hurt / shocked / annoyed @ the prices of the games now. The cheapest New title I could find I think was Dawn of war II and that was R400. Fear 2 was R530. I MEAN WTF?

Now I buy the games I want to play, but I am now thinking that they are just trying to rape us and pirating them seems like the only option. I am not going to stop gaming, and I am sure as hell not going to pay R530 for a game. Sorry but that is just ridiculous.

All my games are original and I agree in supporting the gaming companies so they can bring us more titles, but this is just getting to the point where they are trying to cash in on us. My opinion has totally changed, I won't be so quick to turn down a copy of this or that from a mate in future.

[Solitude]

I have to agree Grimspoon. I will not pay R530 for a game. It's crazy.

[Voicy]

This thread has covered this same topic quite extensively and it's worrying to see that avid gamers, who take pride in owning the original disks of games are pushed to the verge where piracy is a very real alternative.

http://mygaming.co.za/forum/showthread.php?t=460

The question we need to ask ourselves, have we become spoiled with the quality of games? And do we undervalue the time and work put into games by developers?

[Grimspoon]

Sorry I didn’t search before I posted, my bad.

I agree, I totally am all for buying originals, but at a fair price. What really amazes me is that just recently there was a HUGE sale on games where some of the top titles that first hit shelves at R400 (bioshock) were reduced to a mere R150. Ok I know it is a older game, but still the price shouldn’t change. I mean they can sell games on sale at R99 - R180 that just shows how badly we are ripped off if they can still make a small profit off the R99 games.

I think someone is getting greedy, whether it is the devs or the middle man, not sure. But I refuse to support them.

[mcryan]

Look the only input I can give from my side, is that I do not support any sort of piracy. I buy all my games/dvds/cd's completely original and I buy a lot of them. being a developer myself, I know what goes into sometimes the simplest of things and I'm not just going to copy what a company has invested huge money into.

[Voicy]

Bottomline is this:

There is no justification in my statement: When I couldn't afford games I used to pirate them - however, now that I can afford to purchase my own games I've gone back and purchased the legendary titles I used to play. *hugs his copy of DOTT*

One could try and justify it by saying that any other product/car/whatnot allows you to test it and if you don't like it you don't buy it. Sure games have demo's - but not all.

So in a jaded reconciliation attempt, if you pirate a game and you found the game to be very good - go out and buy it to support those devs!

A borderline case I have refers to cross-platform piracy. I have about 80 Xbox games including Fable 1&2, KOTOR1&2, NFS and so on and so forth...

Now since I have the original xbox disk, I don't see it as a problem to play a pirate copy on my pc. It would be the same as paying for a music CD and then putting those same songs on your mp3 player. - Please tell me if I'm wrong.

[Solitude]

I tend to wait for games to get a bit cheaper before I buy them. For instance Mass Effect which I got for R100 at Incredible Corruption and so forth. A game like Fallout 3 gives you so many hours of gametime that I am prepared to pay more for it. But even then I won't pay R500. I'd rather subscribe to something like EVE Online then and pay per month.

Bioshock is available for R181 now. That's a good price and it makes me buy the game. FEAR 2 for R520 is ridiculous. I won't go anywhere near it. It just makes me angry.

I agree with Grimspoon completely. If we buy games at such high prices then the games will stay at such high prices since they realize that they can get away with it. I will not buy any game that's too expensive. I'd rather wait for it to drop in price.

[Stefan9]

Buy online and pre order, it works out cheaper. Or if you are a patient guy wait for the price to drop with SA retailers that takes quite some time. In the UK they drop the price after 2 weeks for many games here it takes months.

If your a console gamer import the game. It works out cheaper.

I don't see between R350-R400 for pc games being greedy, the price has stayed at R300 for 10 years it was bound to go up at some point. The R500 prices are the exception only Warner Bros and Square Enix games have those prices.

I won't pay R500 for anything but CE's and those I only buy for games I really like and developers I respect. I will be getting the CE for Dragon Age.

[Dan]

It amazes me that people use the apparent greed of games developers as justification for their pirating habits. It's a crime of convenience and laziness, and if you don't have the cash, you shouldn't play the game.

If you were a really adept car thief and you saw a Lamborghini you could easily steal, would you jack it? It's like saying, "Hmmm, that Lambo is R4.3m, I'm not paying that for a car. Let me swipe it instead."

And think about it, how badly are we really being 'ripped off' here? Let's say Dawn of War 2 costs R400. You get around 20 hours of entertainment out of it (assuming single player campaign only, for the sake of argument). That amounts to a whopping R20 an hour. Now chuck in the multiplayer aspect, or a game that has a lot more play time (e.g. Fallout 3), and you're nowhere near being ripped off.

Plus, you can always sell your copy on to someone after. If you sold your Dawn of War 2 to a mate for R200 a couple months later, your gaming experience would deprive you of a gargantuan R10 an hour.

Consider too the number of games you play in a month. Are you really going to clock more than two or three? Even if you fork out R1 200 for three "Dawn of War 2's" you're getting sixty hours of entertainment, and still at only R20 (or even R10) an hour.

However, I do agree that the differences in pricing can be infuriating. If Fear 2 is going for over R500 though, why not wait for a month and pick it up for R400? Or get a secondhand copy from a mate?

The industry loses almost $4 billion every year to hard copy piracy: note that this doesn't include Internet downloads or P2P transfers. Does anyone honestly think that we'd pay anywhere near the prices we're paying now if the developers weren't losing that kind of cash?

Seriously, buy the game and stop complaining. Failing that, be really patient and wait for the abandonware

[Voicy]

Well said, RustBucket