quote:(ignoring the 100 or so that people may be using to try and hack together dev systems or the like).
A more serious problem are the people who just buy a PS2 to watch DVDs. Sony was complaining about that in some article a while ago.
Why would they complain about it? That is being narrow minded. Instead, why not exploit that into a full market of GASP interactive DVD game machines.
Silly Sony, PS2 is for games!
Personally, if I had a job that I made enough money that I could not only survive but also afford things, I would purchase this stuff too, if you got money enjoy it, that''s all I can say.
You may think that piracy isn't that bad, until you release a program and it happens to you. Then it's hard cash lost out of your pocket. At my university, Visual Studio .NET learning edition was about 10 dollars. Eclipse is free, and it's one of the best Java IDE's out there (it does more to make Java coding easy than Visual Studio does with C++/C#). GNU tools are not bad either.
Development costs aren''t actually the biggest cost. Marketing and other publishing costs can equal the cost of development and the license fee paid to the console maker can amount to more than the development cost (if a game sells millions of units). At the end of the day the price depends on what the publishers believe the market will pay.
Actually, that''s mostly not true. Most people couldn''t even pirate their DC games for a good year after the console''s release. And it didn''t take long for it to die.
What killed the Dreamcast was a combination of three things:
1. Timing The system was released in ''99 in the US which was one year before the PS2 was to be launched. Expectations were really high for the PS2, so most people skipped on the DC.
2. Lack of DVD With the PS2 on the horizon, most people saw the lack of a DVD player as being an attribute of an inferior system.
3. Developer Support(read: games) Sega had hardly any dev support from the get-go. Eventually, some ports from PS1 games were released for the system, but they were few and far between and most people didn''t want to buy a game twice that only had slightly crisper graphics. Even a year after the release, most devs were working on either PS2 or X-Box games.
Anyways, as to piracy:
Copying Abandonware that hasn''t been released by the publisher for free is piracy. However, that''s because lawmakers are old folks who know nothing of technology and who''s idea of nostalgia is buying an ice cream cone every two years or so. Someday, if we aren''t blown to hell, our laws will change for the better. But most people, oddly, haven''t learned their lesson yet.
Piracy for non-abandonware... Eh...I know it''s wrong. Some people don''t like to shell out $50 on a gamble, some people do. Those that don''t would never have been a sale anyways and some of them DO buy the software eventually. I hunt the bargain-bin. I don''t play games online. I do play occasionally at LAN parties and freely give people the bargain-bin software so we can all play.
If the world were perfect, we could buy a game for material cost and donate some money to the developers and publishers after we''ve played the game and determined it''s value. Until then, some people will feel they have to violate outdated copyrights.
