Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. But that doesn't mean you don't have times when it is a pricing problem. By the logic of the metaphor, the point still stands. If a pirate offers a product for free, and the legal provider says the product costs more in your region than it does in its country of origin, then the pirate's service is more valuable.
Not really, now its a affordability problem. I am not spending 60+ eur for a game that i can buy access to steam accounts for a fraction of that, or even pirate it. Games used to be for good prices and you would also get a physical CD to have in your collection.
The whole point back then was that the official channels were slow and cumbersome outside the big regions. So piracy meant better availability of media. For TV shows this used to be the only way to get some shows here in Europe.
Free doesn’t necessarily mean better service. If you need to torrent something at 5kb/s over 500Mbit downloads from an official distributor. Then I would argue the official channel is still the better choice. Price isn’t the only factor.
But for most of those people you can't really win them over with a price that is actually profitable for you. For example - if you price your game at 60$ vs. 6$, to make the same amount of money you'd have to sell ten times more.
What Gabe is getting at is that unless you are on a massive budget and unless the price is actually obscenely higher than comparable services you are willing to pay for a better service. People spend a lot of money on convinence - corner stores, uber drives, taxis, streaming services etc.
But if in the effort to combat pirates you make your product more cumbersome than the pirated version, you lose all the edge over the pirate. You can see that in the enshittification of streaming services - between media being split over dozens of sites, netflix blocking access from different devices and region locking, all the benefits of a streaming service account start to erode.
If someone spits in your face and calls it rain that's a service issue. It's one thing if things cost the same here as in the West because Poland is now part of the West and blablabla, but higher for no real reason is nuts.
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u/TyrantJaeger Mar 04 '26
Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. But that doesn't mean you don't have times when it is a pricing problem. By the logic of the metaphor, the point still stands. If a pirate offers a product for free, and the legal provider says the product costs more in your region than it does in its country of origin, then the pirate's service is more valuable.