Gaming

It sucks that skinflints in the west region hopping to save a few bob made companies wary of regional pricing in the digital age.

That's just it. First off, I rarely am interested in Capcom games, think the last one I bought was in maybe 2016? (RE7). So this person you are responding to really is going off the handle over a nothing burger, I assure you.

But you've hit on an important point, that's important to discuss. These price hikes are disproportionate to the growth of household earnings, and more importantly, digital media was supposed to drive costs down, and not up for the end consumer. We don't actually own these games, we more or less lease them. There's nothing physical anymore. Which is a problem. Not that I don't like the ease of digital purchases, it's the fact that at any moment I can be stripped of access to the product. Which makes it a lease or rental, not full ownership. Yet they keep wanting to drive the costs up up up, in light of that fact. It's getting to be gross behaviour. The products are declining in quality, the costs keep going up, actual ownership of the end product comes into question, and the profits keep going to a smaller and smaller circle of people, some of whom are among the most vile of people alive today.

Enough is enough.

That person just said in another comment that they have the money. Before you even get to piracy, there's also the option of purchasing and playing the games that you feel are priced fairly, because that incentivizes more of that to be made at those prices, and those games typically need your money more anyway. As for adjusting prices for different territories, I'm no expert on it, but I understand it might be related to people in stronger economies buying games from cheaper regions with something as simple as a VPN to get a game for a fraction of the price, which at any kind of scale means that that game needs to sell substantially more copies to break even.

You were morally outraged enough to decide that this justifies piracy, but this is Capcom we're talking about, not EA. From what I can see, they're not making their money off of gambling mechanics like Ultimate Team. They're talking about raising prices on products that are generally seen as quality and charging what they believe those products to be worth, even saying that this will allow them to raise staff salaries to retain talent. I don't condone piracy, but I was asking you what line you believed they crossed when price increases are just inevitable for anything that costs money, and I personally don't really see any scummy business practices attached to this. Beyond that, I'd also argue that you have a greater effect on the market when you just don't pirate or play those games that offend you at all and instead direct your time and money to a game that could use it more. That means they make more of the latter and the former is less successful for doing something you didn't like. Word of mouth of the games you played and the lack of word of mouth for the ones you didn't has an effect on the market as well.

I agree you don't have to justify it, but I also feel like you don't need to glorify it either. I'm not morally opposed to it and jah knows I've don't some piracy in my day, but people who have to make a big statement about it as you've done above invite the arguments from people who are morally opposed.

They're all trying to have enough to watch to keep you subscribed all the time, which means they have an incentive to keep making more good shows. But there's no world where 5 streaming services will have something I'll want to watch every month, so it's pretty easy to just cancel until you've got a handful of shows to go through on that service. Then you subscribe for a month or two and come back later. That's way, way better than a local television monopoly like cable typically had, with channels you couldn't opt out of for a cheaper bill, that still forced commercials on you regardless of your exorbitant bill.

You're free to do as you please, but if the game wasn't worth it enough to pay for, pirating it still does them more of a solid than if you had bought and played something else. Let's say the game is Starfield. Sure, they didn't get your $90 if you pirated it, but if you're contributing to discussions about it, it keeps people thinking about it, and especially if you have positive things to say about it, you end up encouraging other people to buy it, which means that their business strategy of selling the game at $90 CAD (or any other strategy you decided justified piracy) is still that much more effective, and they'll do it again, because the game sold at that price. But maybe Broken Roads comes out for cheaper and you get your RPG fix there instead. They could use your dollar more, and each sale counts way more toward a future where that team gets to make another game after this one. If your word of mouth instead convinces someone to pick up Broken Roads (which you also hypothetically paid for), you're contributing toward encouraging more games to come out at that price point. Both games are going to take up your finite time, so both your time and your money influence what survives in the market.