I don't think people were unable to buy games at the time of Gothic. Funny thing though, games for PC are about 60 bucks since like 1990 until today. Give or take. Some are bit cheaper, some used to cost around 80 back then, and some start to cost the same today. But anyway, here's the thing; salaries in the latter communistic countries had been steeply rising year after year after the fall of the eastern block. At the time of Gothic's release, a simple IT dude earned around 700 bucks. It was okay to buy one game a month. But it was not that simple, we were used to piracy so much. Just a few years before that, the price for the game was still the same 60 bucks but the salary was around 90! We wouldn't buy games for this price, and we didn't even know that there were originals in the first place.
My first PC, considered a good (not great) rig, was a 286 20Mhz computer with a 15" monitor. We bought it for approx 1200 bucks, with our salary around 100 a month. Again, I didn't eben know what buying games meant. Some time later during the time of the rise of Pentiums and Celerons we already knew, but still, pirating was such a "normal" way of doing things that some pirates even used ads in newspapers. Can you imagine that? We used to have a "cult of originalka" with my friends. We bowed several times to any original game package upon seeing it (even at shops
) or to the owner of an original copy because it was such a rare and precious thing in those days
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