>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.
It'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.
I 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.
Perhaps 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.
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.