I had a same train of thought up until a year or two ago. It is pretty much unrealistic and too optimistic to think of piracy as undeveloped opportunities. I lived last year, for half a year, in Thailand due to the nature of my job (I am an animation director by training and it is my day job) and was introduced to the wonders of SE Asia - and Asia in general, since I had more time to explore it than several day trips. What struck me as obvious is that people there behave regarding piracy in more open ways then we do - in western world - however, it is pretty much the same way most of the people think. For example, you can openly buy a pirate copy of whatever in the malls in Bangkok and get a receipt for it. There are shops with pirate stuff as well as shops next to it with legal stuff.

I've noticed that there are games, for example from EA, that are price-tailored to Thailand, so that games are really affordable to Thai people. However, I've talked to the sales people and everybody confirmed that pretty much everyone buys pirate stuff next to the legal stuff, even when price is close to it. For example pirate copy is around 90-100 Baht and Thai legal version is around 200-250. Only games immune to piracy there are MMO's.

Now, consider that Thai model to other cultures. I live in SE Europe and I can vouch the train of thought is the same. Why would I pay if I can have it for less or free. There just isn't way around that, people do not like to pay if they don't need to - does not matter if it is legal or not.

There are, luckily, people that _GET_ the consequences of this and pay up for stuff - so that they can get new games, more stuff in the future etc... if not moral satisfaction only.

Business-wise I don't think you can rely only on that kind of people. If you read up some of the post-mortems on gamasutra and gasp at A title budgets, you can clearly see that in order to make any money out of this is that you have to have atleast 3 games in production in parallel and to break 200K+ units push to the market. That goes for A titles, of course, but model is scalable.

I would just like to state that _the game_ I am doing is purely out of love for games and my secret life as a programmer. If it makes any money when/if it will be out, good - I can do that stuff then all the time with ramen on the table, if not I don't care because I have other "stuff" I do. However, think about it for a second if it where your full time job and people steal stuff, ludicrous. No good demo, trial or whatever can compensate for the idea that you can get something for free if you are average joe who cares only about that game and dozens or so hours he will have fun with it. He doesn't care about future of it, about you, about moral issues... No. Same goes with movies/music. Only thing you can possibly monetize on is that if you have advertising tie ins, online fee, collector/special editions where you actually sell toys/package more than a game itself, and stuff like that - everything but the game itself. Sad, because if at least 30-40% of people payed up, instead of sub 10%, it would open up larger budgets for greater games, and not only for run-of-the-mill sequels that take less budget because return is not great.

sorry for the long rant, I just feel angry about all of this - not because of piracy per se. Piracy is and always will be around, everybody pirated something sooner or later, but not always damnit. Looks like both software and entertainment industries are shifting towards some future model of business that is still not on a horizon. Alternative would be that people who do both software and entertainment will shift to other stuff, which will not happen. I guess we are all in a twitter stasis now - great and all, but need a new way to make money.