Companies like MS and Adobe know this. They have to perform regular anti pitacy charades, but they vastly prefer someone pirating -a potential future buy- to someone buying an alternative - an actual lost sale.
Same dynamic in hollywood: Pirating a film is vastly better for them than finding alternative hobbies and not buying the series merchandise.
Adobe was in the same situation years ago. It provided products generating thousands of dollars in value a year for professionals and the corporate world. Photoshop CS6 cost $700, the version of it for "students" $250. This put it well out of the budget range of most ordinary people. Photoshop was built for a relatively small target audience. You might argue that piracy was the normal, expected solution to this. The "real" customers were supposed to pay for it. Either way, this generated a lot of ill will toward Adobe and turned pirating Photoshop into a bit of a meme.
That changed when Adobe realized you could nickle and dime people out of the same amount of money in the long run. The photography subscription (Photoshop + Lightroom) costs $720 over six years. Given that Adobe offered upgrade promotions (e.g. CS5 to CS6) for about half off, it's roughly the same price as it was before. This approach makes it much more palatable to the average consumer (for the same reason that people are willing to buy sofas on payment plans). The only people this pisses off are a handful of hardcore users who expect to "own" all the software they use, but probably not the corporate world which is used to paying subscriptions. It almost certainly makes them far more money through making the software available to those who can't (or won't) pay the one-time price.
> The only people this pisses off are a handful of hardcore users who expect to "own" all the software they use
Also the people that want to be able to access their files forever. Not only when people chose to stop paying, Adobe won't even let people pay for some of the old versions of their subscription software. Hope it imports into the new version correctly!
Very interesting analysis. I was inclined to doubt it so I checked and you are absolutely right: Adobe does indeed have a Photoshop + Lightroom bundle [0] that costs ~$10/month or $119.88/yr, such that it comes to $720 over a six-year period.
[0] https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop-lightroom/pricing-i...
Now as far as I know, there aren't any -good- film editing alternatives that are free. I have tried a fair few open source alternatives and they are pitiful compared to adobe premiere. So while I can't recommend pirating, if you're a film student... I can understand it. It's how the industry is, sadly.
I've only used it for fairly basic work, but DaVinci Resolve[1] seems pretty good. Not open source, but the free version is licenced for commercial use and AFAICT it seems to have a fairly complete feature set. I suspect it would be sufficient for many use cases.
[1] https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/uk/products/davinciresolve/...
Resolve is probably one of the software packages with the most intelligent free / paid feature split out there. The free version is really, really good and has almost no limitations, but professionals will want the paid version to get the last few percent out of it.
There's a little bit of a learning curve to Resolve for casual use, but since Resolve 16 has gotten the "cut" page the learning curve has been flattened quite a lot I'd say. Overall it's fantastic software.
I don't think it's an overstatement to say that hundreds of millions of people can't afford an 80 EUR/USD game.
Right now, I can't afford to buy a classic '60s gibson guitar. That doesn't give me the license to go out and steal one, -because I want one-.
If modern AAA games are too much at $80, then don't buy them. There are significantly cheaper alternatives on PC, as well as the possibility of waiting for deals or buying used. High prices don't justify pirating.
Regardless, merely desiring something is not a justification to pirate things.
People also use sci-hub do avoid paying to publishers. Where do you draw a line?
Steam has it mostly figured out, though. Look at SteamDB at international prices and you'll discover that prices in Brazil or Russia are often a fraction of the US/EU price. Turns out selling the game for dirt cheap makes more money than not selling it.
I would say it's still unethical and wrong, regardless if we can't point to a specific entity being hurt. It is entitlement to want something for free when one can't afford it. There are -so- many games nowadays, and many of them are not even close to $60. And as mentioned, steam is generally aware of regional currency discrepancies.
And I would argue accepting or condoning pro-piracy attitudes is harmful in the long run versus accepting that one can't just take things that one wants, and paying for things when able.
Top AAA makers also get incredibly high profits while underpaying their employees. And the prices on their games go up simply because they can.
Pirating software you can afford is a different equation (still not as bad as the theft of a physical item) but not what is being discussed.
The same rich people trying to sell predatory subscriptions and vendor lock-in are the same ones trying to raise my rent and food bill every year, so I have no incentive to give them money for pointless entertainment on top of that.
I feel I'm reading Deepak Chopra - individual words are fine and you'd swear sentence should make sense... But it doesn't, no matter how many times you read it.
Not paying for something makes it unproductive? And you don't feel there are easy trivial immediate counter-examples for your axiom with big-boy words?
People should be paid for their work. Pirating doesn't pay them for their work. Work includes art and media. I'm not sure how I can state this more simply.
I'm not sure why this is even a complicated topic. With literally everything else, if you want something, you need to pay to acquire it because it took time and resources to make. That doesn't go away just because the end product is digital.
The thing is that making a copy of something digital is really really cheap compared to something physical. The difference between the cost of producing one copy of a software or music and a million is way lower than for a physical object.
It's also funny that you're upset about the guy pirating software (lifetime economic impact in 10s of thousands of dollars) but not the games publishers themselves who regularly dodge taxes - in some cases paying effectively negative tax rates[1] (lifetime impacts in the 10ss of millions of dollars if not more).
[1] https://www.fanbyte.com/news/americans-paid-activision-blizz...
Where did I say I support publishers not paying their taxes or treating employees unfairly? Those are separate issues completely unrelated to the one we're discussing. (Obviously, I think everyone should pay taxes fairly and treat their employees fairly.)
Company A doing bad thing B does not mean we morally justify crime C. Either pay for the thing you -want, not need-, or don't if you don't support various actions or stances from the company. This also is based on the premise that all media comes from bad corporations, which is not true. Many artists these days can be supported directly, self publish, etc.
Also, I'm not "upset", nor am I looking at one singular individual. I am looking at this from a societal and long-term perspective of the long-term effects of people pirating media.
But I still find it intriguing when I see rambling half baked internally self-contradictory attempts at moral justification - do you believe what you said there? Do you even know what you said there? Cause I'm having a hard time following - Food has inflation therefore I'll pirate movies even though they're pointless, and this is just and right?
It takes minimal amount of empathy and observation to notice hard work talented creative people put into "pointless entertainment", so just like I don't buy the notion that every pirate is evil sociopathic villain, so I don't buy notion that watching entertainment for free is inherent right and creators don't deserve any compensation ever. If anything, this type of incoherence and self righteousness feeds exactly the stereotype mpaa / riaa try to portray...