Does Piracy Force The Price Of Software Up?

[vrykyl]

I personally have also taken the dont buy on day of release stance with video games - £35 for a new release is to much IMO....i cant think of a single video game Iv bought recently for more than £20.....I either wait for prices to fall, or jump on special offers and discount codes to get more recent games. Good multiplayer means a lot to me - and its always rewarded with a purchase - COD4, BF2 (& Special Forces) and BF2142 + northern strike are the most noteable (and most played) examples.

As for OS piracy, thats not been an issue for me - as a student I got freebie software (OS and Office suite) from the Uni ICT department. Where I work now has a staff purchase scheme with Microsoft - that allows me to buy one full copy of every new retail version of Windows at heavily discounted price, and the full office suite for the cost of shipping and handling - so completely legitimately, Vista Ultimate x64 RETAIL AND the complete Office 2007 retail package cost me under £100 combined for both! I can only buy one tho, so if I loose my office 2007 key im out of luck. However if Office 2008 came out, I could buy one copy for the p&p price again......


The reason I havent got any form of console is the stupid price of games. I f I wont pay more than £20 for COD4 on pc, I'll be damned if i'll pay £40+ for it on a console....

[Lucio]

I think that what's most telling about the whole piracy issue, is the number of people who mention that software's percieved value is often below it's asking price, especially when it comes to Office and Operating systems.

That said, I don't think piracy is the sole reason for rising prices on software, there is also the idea that for certain pieces of software, there are no real alternatives, especially for business customers.

For example, Microsoft Office, it faces compition from Open Office, but if you make the switch then you're faced with having to retrain the staff that don't quite understand the system, any Excel based add ons you have for database app's don't work and will need to be re-written, your email system may or may not function and so on. So, once you've established there is no real alternatives, there's no incentive to drop the price, the customer will either buy the new version, or they won't. All piracy really offers is the few customers who are of the mindset they must have the latest version a way to get it. If piracy went away, then those people are very unlikely to be turned into paying customers.

[dangel]

Most likely. But your chances of picking up something nasty from any no-cd patch are also quite high..

That's just scaremongering - i've used them for years without issue. I had more problems with the copy protection

[kalniel]

I wonder if companies submit false positives to anti-virus software companies then? I once did an experiment downloading (without using) some no-cd patches and scanning them for viruses - they checked out clean on first scan but a repeat scan some time later found nasties in at least 50% of the admittedly small sample size.

[dangel]

Well, over the years i'd had to contact some antivirus vendors to get my own software de-blacklisted Heuristic scanning is good when it works!
I'd imagine that a no-cd patch potentially does 'nasty' stuff like modifiying memory to bypass the copy protection which won't help. Although i've never had NOD32 claim any no-cd-patch was evil interestingly and think that's rated quite well.

[Jay]

Some heuristic scanners will pick up on the code in the no CD patch and flag it as a virus.

[chuckskull]

Bumpity Bump.

People who bother to pay for music get screwed again Yahoo music shutting down, taking your music with it

Wonder why piracy is so hard to stop.

[Jay]

that's bloody terrible if you ask me. I would push for a full refund.