I agree with a lot of what you said, but point b) of #4 is bogus. Piracy has never Cannibalized games, and never will. It's a farce to think that piracy is a lossy destructive mechanism for the publishers of games.
1) Your average pirate would not have purchased the game they pirated anyways.
2) A lack of good game play centric demo's, shareware versions of games, expensive pricing, and Draconian DRM measures has pushed a lot of people to pirate, just so they can “TEST” the game (primarily on the PC, but to some extent on Consoles as well), before buying it. Nobody wants to spend $60+ on a piece of crap game that is locked to them as soon as they use it, and find out it was crap. Ergo, pirate, test and decide if it's worth the purchase.
Gamers definitely are a lot more willing to spend $.99-$5 for a game to play on their Smartphone or tablet then the $60 as mentioned above for an AAA PC title. (Hence the trend in the article for mobile devices being the favourite of the people surveyed. Notice handheld game devices were lower on the scales....probably because the games are still a lot higher in price.) This is why I feel the indie game space has surged so much in the last couple years, people are tired of paying all that money for games that do not satisfy even with their bigger than movie budgets. But pay a Starbucks coffee to get a game...even if you only play it for a couple days, the reward vs. value is so much higher.
As much as I’d love to have gaming become a purely digital environment as far as distribution, it has a long way to go. Primarily....we need better bandwidth allocation if we are to remove the physical distribution model. My steam account currently has over 280GB of downloadable content in it. As it sits it takes me 4-5 months to download all my steam games while staying within the 60GB/month limit of my ISP. I've stopped buying larger titles on steam and continue to purchase the physical versions so that my family can continue to browse the internet, watch Netflix and stream video via Skype to the grandparents.
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I agree with a lot of what you said, but point b) of #4 is bogus. Piracy has never Cannibalized games, and never will. It's a farce to think that piracy is a lossy destructive mechanism for the publishers of games.
1) Your average pirate would not have purchased the game they pirated anyways. 2) A lack of good game play centric demo's, shareware versions of games, expensive pricing, and Draconian DRM measures has pushed a lot of people to pirate, just so they can “TEST” the game (primarily on the PC, but to some extent on Consoles as well), before buying it. Nobody wants to spend $60+ on a piece of crap game that is locked to them as soon as they use it, and find out it was crap. Ergo, pirate, test and decide if it's worth the purchase.
Gamers definitely are a lot more willing to spend $.99-$5 for a game to play on their Smartphone or tablet then the $60 as mentioned above for an AAA PC title. (Hence the trend in the article for mobile devices being the favourite of the people surveyed. Notice handheld game devices were lower on the scales....probably because the games are still a lot higher in price.) This is why I feel the indie game space has surged so much in the last couple years, people are tired of paying all that money for games that do not satisfy even with their bigger than movie budgets. But pay a Starbucks coffee to get a game...even if you only play it for a couple days, the reward vs. value is so much higher.
As much as I’d love to have gaming become a purely digital environment as far as distribution, it has a long way to go. Primarily....we need better bandwidth allocation if we are to remove the physical distribution model. My steam account currently has over 280GB of downloadable content in it. As it sits it takes me 4-5 months to download all my steam games while staying within the 60GB/month limit of my ISP. I've stopped buying larger titles on steam and continue to purchase the physical versions so that my family can continue to browse the internet, watch Netflix and stream video via Skype to the grandparents.
O.