I've lived and worked in multiple countries, and I sympathise with, say, the stupidity of regional pricing.
But when you "pirate so many shit i have no time to play them anyway", that's got nothing to do with anything you said. It's just a way of life that you have chosen for yourself.
No. It has everything to do with the obsolete gaming pricing model. Stop trying to play the corporate lawyer, these tactics were tried 20 years ago when MP3 was all the rage, and they failed. You are asking people to pay outrageous prices, you are not providing any DEMOs and those few who do provide DEMOs often offer misleading DEMOs not representative of the final product, and there is no guarantee that the player will have fun yet he is still expected to pay the full sum for a video game.
Any look at Steam stats will convince even the worst retard on the Codex, that most people don't even reach 10% completion in video games, yet they pay 100% price for the games regardless. This is a garbage game payment model.
It is like saying to someone in a restaurant "hey, you should pay for the whole buffet even if you only want to eat a small burger, we only sell whole buffets here, no individual dishes".
I have pirated almost every single major vidya game in existence. If you can name it, i can probably say i have pirated it. Do you know how many of those i have actually played for more than 5 minutes? Not even 1%. I just fire them up, see how they perform, get a feel for the UI and gameplay, and if i feel like playing, i play some more, if not, insta-delete. If i play for more than a couple of hours and enjoy it and feel like it is a game i should buy, i buy it. There is this retarded myth that pirates don't buy games, this is stupid. Pirates always buy the games they truly enjoy, they even bought games when there was no DRM at all in the 80s and early 90s. The whole industry was founded in piracy, yet they exploded in profits. Because newsflash: People buy the stuff they actually enjoy. Piracy is essentially advertisement.
Actually, if the companies added a proper pricing model based on usage stats, there would be no piracy at all on the market. Imagine if steam, allowed you to install any game, play it for 30 minutes for free, then begin cutting away money from your account per 30 minutes played relative to total amount of playtime content, for example 0.25$ per 30 minutes of DOS2 (for the sake of argument let's pretend it has 120 hours of content and it costs 60$). This is extremely easy to implement because modern clients can easily calculate how much you play. No one would pirate games anymore. I wouldn't need to pirate, because as i said, the extreme majority of the games i torrent i don't play for more than 5 or 10 minutes tops. So i wouldn't need to pay for anything anyway, i would just demo the game see if it is for me and delete it. If i wanted to play a little more to decide if it is for me but i grew bored later on, i would have paid let's say 3.5$ for 4 hours of playtime of DOS2. Which i think is fair. If i actually enjoyed it to the end and even replayed it and reached 120 or 150 hours, i would have paid the full amount of an AAA game. Doesn't this seem fair to you? In fact, this would lead to better designed video games because today almost all games are front-loaded, the best content is during the first hours to make an impression and then they drop like a motherfucker in quality and the game becomes a chore. DOS2 is a good example. Time-based payment would give incentives to those idiots to make sure you actually want to keep playing to the end, or else they wouldn't see their 60$.
Why companies aren't doing this? Because they KNOW that only a tiny minority of players actually play games for more than a few hours, and many don't even START the games they buy. Yet those companies keep getting the full amount of dollars per game. Is this fair to the customers? No. But for companies, it is better because they make much more profits on much lower sales.
The music industry once thought the same, that customers were evil for downloading mp3s online, and insisted on people buying whole albums even if they liked only 1 song. See how that panned out in the end for them....
So don't give me the crap about "my way of life", peasant. I won't willingly sit and take the corporate dick up my ass when i have an alternative. When companies begin respecting their customers more, like the music industry did eventually and embraced mp3 and selling individual songs, then everything will be better for everyone. Till then, i will keep pirating like there is no tomorrow and will keep buying stuff i actually enjoyed because i am a developer myself and like to reward quality work.
