Monday 20 February 2012

Rant 944 / I Have No Idea What I Am Doing

COD: MW 3 free-to-play for this weekend on Steam.



Didn't even bother to click on the game's store page.

















Played Reckoning all the way till the siege, then stopped. Game got boring after I broke the siege. Don't feel like going back to doing sidequests and stuff anymore.

Battles during the siege were interesting but... those loopholes or whatever they're called disappointed me.

Mainly it was the one in the second fight with the Balor. If I just stand as close to it as I could, I'd be able to take minimal damage as long as I hold Shift to block. My skeleton heals me with its attack, and it gives me back more than enough HP to compensate for the injuries I receive from blocking the claw attacks.

















I've long heard of similar stories like that.

That makes piracy largely a supply problem of pricing and access rather than a criminal conspiracy.

It's kinda similar to animes in Singapore until recent years. The pirates/subbers had far better and faster subtitles hardcoded into the animes than legitimate stores, if they had them at all, so why would we want to buy them?

Of course now there are multiple legal websites showing animes for free and surviving on the ads' revenue so this is no longer an issue.

Still, game prices do not make much sense in a lot of countries.


It found that while a DVD of "The Dark Knight" cost $24 in the United States, that was the equivalent of $75 in Russia, and $641 in India when compared to local purchasing power.
The price of pirated DVDs in those countries were $25 and $54, still more expensive on a purchasing power basis than a legal copy in the United States.

While I wasn't aware of these specific differences, I can imagine how gamers in Malaysia would be turned off by game prices offered by foreign companies because they're often lumped together with Singaporean gamers despite the difference in income levels in the two countries.

In other words, prices are often not adjusted according to the exchange rates nor to the local income levels/purchasing power.

To us consumers, this doesn't make sense at all.

So for those who find the prices too unreasonable, they simply pirate.

Hence the rampant piracy in Asia.

And this isn't just about games!

Why else would China make such good money by counterfeiting everything, to the point where they have some sort of ratings system for counterfeit qualities?

If you really want to stop piracy, first have your prices make sense.

Games are NOT luxury products, and hence should not be priced as such.


Despite their efforts to portray online pirates as thieves who only want free stuff, it isn't true for the more affluent among them. They can and are perfectly willing to buy the products - they just don't see how they're worth their prices.


















For some reason I just can't get this image out of my mind and it's making me laugh during inconvenient moments.

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