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My Own Experience With Video Game Piracy
Video Game piracy was huge, and to some extent it still is, in the Middle East. Growing up, everyone used to pirate games. It was the norm and essentially everyone just accepted it. There were several reasons as to why that happened. Prime among them were limited availability in legitimate retail copies & completely absurd pricing for the titles available.
If you were lucky enough to find a retail copy of a game you wanted to buy, then its usually ridiculously overpriced. Sometimes triple the original price it's supposed to be sold at. That discouraged most people from picking up legitimate retail copies of games.
In recent years however, especially since the launch of the Playstation 3, piracy decreased dramatically. Shops around the region started selling games at their proper prices and that slowly pushed more people away from piracy. Add to that how essential Online play has become, and you've got a move that shifted the Video Game completely within the region.
Since I was born and raised in the tiny Middle Eastern country of Bahrain, I wanted to share my own experience with Video Game Piracy.So I put up a video talking about why Piracy was so prevalent in the region, how Piracy negatively affected us, and what happened since that led to a move away from Video Game Piracy.
What's your experience like with Piracy?
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Everyone here pirates. And I mean everyone. Out of all the people I've known throughout the years very few of them bought anything on the computer, and those were 'the rich kids'
I still remember the days when we didn't really know how to make bootable CD's with windows on them and when one smart guy made one, all his friends wanted to borrow the CD.
Though, in recent times I've noticed that more and more people are inclined to buy something they think is worth it. Maybe that has come with age.
Still, no one I know (except older people) has ever bought music.
I do come from a very poor region of a poor country, so there's that, but piracy is rampant everywhere, to a lesser degree
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My people are descendents of pirates and we all still kling to the ancient ways.
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Pirates nowadays are alot different. I can be considered a pirate. The reason is because I torrent games and whatnot before I buy it so I can see if I will like it. I hate buying something and really disliking it because... well, it sucks. I pirated Starcraft II and played campaign to see if I would like it, and now I have 4 accounts. I did the same with games like Black ops, GoW3, etc.. In the end, I end up buying them. If I pirate it and dont like it, i just toss it because there really is no need to have it. I am very poor as well btw., if that makes a difference.
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Yeah software piracy is pretty much built into the market assumptions of most large "consumer software" companies. Enterprise software is a different story, though
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Bulgaria:
I don't know a single person who doesn't pirate all the time. As a matter of fact I can only think of a single person who once bought an original game (sc2 ^^). Software is generally not being bought in Bulgaria. People do buy original music sometimes, though. However, considering that an original game costs about 10%-15% of the average monthly salary it is easy to see why people rarely spend money on anything digital. 5 years ago the situation was even worse and as far as I remember 15 years ago it was actually impossible to find legal software/games anywhere.
Germany:
Most of the people I know stopped pirating by the time they started earning money. I still know a bunch of people with several terabytes of movies/music/software/games, but they are rare.
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yep, 'central europe' is incredibly bad at software piracy. I have some Czech and Slovak friends, and they download everything, crack everything and trade everything, no conscience in the matter whatsoever.
One of them - as a kid, like 12 years old - created a software piracy syndicate, with various people for acquiring and distributing the copies, ads running in magazines and stuff like that. He made more money with it than what his parents were earning in their jobs.
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Everyone I know has pirated at least once in their life. Most of the time music, a couple did games and some movies.
In general I pirated a couple games/movies and obviously music. Once I got a job though I haven't pirated. I just look at gameplay videos on youtube from players to see if the game mechanics would fit me (obviously some games would be excluded from this list).
Music same thing I just youtube it if I like it I buy it.
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