Completely agree with that.
There will be piracy as long as the marketed price doesn't reflect the real value of the tittle. Who has not seen himself with the feeling of being stolen by an editor with a poor quality game just released with no real content (WoP comes into my mind).**
When the industry will understand that they do have to regulate itself then the user will trust what comes out of the box. Instead of that, we have critics (online or n magazine) that acts like marketing agents.
With high prices and such poor experience, I can understand that Piracy is the fastest way to test a title. And then when your pirated copy works, why bother to buy a boxed one?
Cinema have the press. And it's amazing how many people use to read the comments before actually going to see a movie.
It's time for the industry to come out into the bright light.
Why not a 3 weeks full time/100% access for all instead of surfing on paying to get the best weapon/ride/bonus what is the mirrored face of the F2P (RoF comes into my mind now). You know why ? because most of the games can be "ended" in this laps of time.
But it's always easier to found a short term solution and point by the finger some obscure and hardly quantifiable data.
~S
PS: I am not a gamer. Only got FlightSims on my PC. All bought at their time of release. But since 3 or 4 years I can see a marked trend to lower the quality of the content and spend high bucks on marketing. So, for who are the dev working you think ?
**In the 70's a new marketing trend surfaced in the appliance industry: the break time. Products were build by the leaders of this segments with special parts designed to suffer from a mechanical failure within a carefully studied laps of time in order to raise the number of unit sold. before that you could keep your refrigerator, you washing machine or your toaster for years until you decided to buy a new one more fashionable or with improved capacity etc.. What came next ? The unit price went down lower and lower until new low cost leaders surfaced out on this market (Low cost labor countries like China at the time) .
Now, most of this product are only branded by those historic leaders (but not actually built or designed by them) that have now lost most of their market share . You can buy a toaster for such a low price that you don't bother to buy a new one if that one made it's time FAIRLY.
That what has happen here, the game industry sale toaster with no lifetime with the same marketing vision. The only problem is that it's hard for most of the individuals to stole a toaster from the manufacturer. Same vision but a different problems and poor (short term) management. That's all the recipe for another disaster.