I don’t know how I feel about it, but it always intrigued me.
There is also an interesting sidebar on the overhead of doing a transaction for any non-zero amount vs giving something away for free. The gist is that if you could do a (micro)transaction for $0.01 cheaply enough, you would be able to capture more of that market by lowering your overhead for offering the good.
This is also related to the idea that the optimal amount of fraud is not zero [1].
Everyone I know who used to pirate music, now just subscribes to Spotify or whatever. So definitely not the case there.
On the other hand, not one person I know who used to pirate Photoshop, has ever then personally paid for it once they started making money. (Their employer often did, though.)
Movies/TV are somewhere in the middle. I think a lot of people pirate because the content they want to watch is spread out among so many services that need separate subscriptions. You can't pay for all of them all the time when you go for months without touching some of them, but constantly canceling and resubscribing is madness.
Also dealing with the nonsense that Netflix won't display high-quality resolution on all external displays, etc.
Hi! Nice to meet you. With the much derided (on HN) monthly plan, I have been paying for Photoshop (and its cohorts) for my own personal use without an employer paying for it. I even have a paid for version of Office. In fact, I no longer have any software illicitly obtained. It's either a fully paid version or something offered for free. Why? Because I can afford it in direct counter to your argument.
The only practical way for a high school student to get photoshop was to pirate it when I was a kid. My parents weren't going to shell out thousands of dollars for something like photoshop or autocad.
Sure, people can ascend through income classes, but there’s always a new cohort of broke young people. I imagine young adults today are pirating plenty as well.
They might save up to buy one $60 game. Or wait for it to go on sale and buy it for $30
On flip side, seeing some DRM-ridden game often just makes me throw it on wishlist and buy in a year or two when they remove it and game is now half the price.... not like I have time to play all the games I want anyway
If you wouldn't prohibit piracy, it would become normal and the people who could pay stop paying too.
As Gabe Newell said the best way to combat video game piracy is by offering consumers better service than what they might receive from pirates. Piracy is not a pricing issue, but rather a service problem.