Dear Future Gamer

Your two parter on piracy finished by telling me (as a chipped PlayStation/pirated game user) to go out and spend £40-45 on games, instead of a fiver, so that the games industry can get its £3 billion back and bring down their prices. Rubbish - what planet are you from? The games industry won't bring down game prices, it'll just get £3 billion more in profits in its big fat wallet. Don't cut me off there with their weak "game development costs" excuse; hear me out.

I don't think game prices have gone up so much because of pirating - it's exactly the reverse. I think game prices have gone up because the companies want bigger profits and pirating has increased because fewer people can afford to pay. Game development costs can hardly be an issue with the non-stop sequels that we see. Eventually, pirating will have made a big enough dent in their profits for the industry to notice, and then game prices will go down and so will pirating.

If some recognition of the little people existed - say Playstation games came down to PC prices (i.e. the price cuts had stayed) - then I'd be straight down to the high street, rather than my mate's mate's mate with the CD burner. As I see it, it's up to the industry to take the lead since they've got a damn sight more cash. They should invest heavily in bringing prices down and putting quality up so no-one will need pirated games. I think eventually there will be plenty of profits, no pirates and happy gamers.

Rich

FG: As we've said time and time again, there are many, many factors determining the cost of games, and one of those is piracy. If a company were to produce a game and know that it wasn't going to end up on the pirate circuit then it could reasonably assume it was going to make more of a profit. It's a real chicken and egg situation though, because if all the pirates stopped, games companies would be making more money and may well consider dropping their prices (because they'd sell more copies and, in theory, make even more money), but until the price of games drops significantly, the pirates are still going to be active. Piracy has always been used by games companies as an argument for keeping games prices high, and while it goes on, it always will be.