TheyCallMeBruce

I've seen it run DC games.

So how do you think the industry should work? Companies should make games, and the consumers should just pay whatever they want to pay for them?

OK, then it's piracy, not theft. Whatever. You obviously know what we mean. They get to make money when their products are sold. You don't get to pirate their games so you can play them for free.

First of all, how do they not have a right to their intellectual property? If Nintendo creates something, they have a right to that thing. What are you talking about? Obviously there is a difference between free market competition and piracy. You already knew that, so please try to be a little less dishonest in your points. Stealing games you don't own is illegal. No matter how hard you want to try to justify your theft, it's still theft. It clearly hurts the bottom line of the creative forces behind these games, so you clearly have no legal right to do it. Instead, I hear the same bullshit I've heard from game thieves since I was a kid and people were making copies of PC games. If you want to play abandoned software, that's one thing. But to try to justify people making illegal copies of games being sold for retail is pretty ludicrous.

You're still taking something that you have no rights to. It hurts their revenue, so there really is no difference. Piracy is taking something that you don't want to pay for, and perhaps some number of those people wouldn't have bought the product if piracy wasn't an option, but it's naive to think that none of them would. Here's the thing: fewer DS games are being released right now because it's harder to make profits when people know how to pirate those games. So you're not just stealing from Nintendo. You're stealing from me, too.

It looks like these are all sold out everywhere. Rats.

The XBOX controller is also screwed up like that.

If I had to guess, claims about piracy increasing the cost of software are used just to try to convince people not to pirate software. However, as I said, the likely result of piracy is less software, rather than more expensive software.

I'm with you. I strongly doubt that Sega is ever going to produce new hardware again.

They can say what they want, but it is a simple matter of economics. They charge the number that will result in the greatest profit. If that's $50, then they charge $50. If it's $10, then they charge $10. They get hurt by piracy, but it doesn't affect what they charge. Your PS3 example illustrates this. And this is your right. No one is requiring you to pay those prices. What you cannot do, however, is demand a product at the price you want to pay, and then steal it when you don't get it. Right. Because they were the first company to bring a desirable product to the market, the supply was very low relative to demand, and they were able to charge $6500. As the supply of 42" LED TVs has increased, the price has gone down. They surely do have the same principles. The gaming companies charge a price that they think maximizes their profits. If a game doesn't sell, the price drops. If it does sell, the price stays the same. I remember when the Wii was announced at $250, and everyone bitched about the high price, but then they couldn't keep stock in stores for months while completely dominating the market in total sales. Obviously, the price was too low, and not too high. You're absolutely correct. If people stopped spending the prices being asked and instead chose not to play those games or systems, the prices would come down. In the past, you've seen products fail because the price was based on production cost rather than the supply/demand curve (the 3DO, for instance), and people weren't willing to spend that kind of money. Piracy doesn't change the prices, but it does increase the cost of production relative to revenue. So rather than increasing costs for everyone, what pirates are doing is likely preventing some games from being produced, which is far worse.

Didn't that come out last year? I'd still cut a man for one.

Software cost is a function of supply and demand. You aren't entitled to pay whatever price you want for games, and if you are in the business of piracy, it's not greedy for the company whose business you're stealing to respond with litigation. If the guy down the street wants your television, is he entitled to steal it because you won't sell it to him for far less that it is worth?

The Genesis had such awful sound capabilities, but I think that really added to its charm.

We got an NES on Christmas of '86. First console I bought myself was an SNES with the money I got for my ninth birthday in June of 1992.

Consoles: ColecoVision, Atari 2600, NES, SMS, SNES, Genesis, N64, Dreamcast, Gamecube Handhelds, Game Boy, Game Gear, GBA (three of them), DS, DS Lite