Totally agree. There will always be a core of people who simply want everything for free (try getting free electricity from your supplier - odd how it doesn't work in real life isn't it?)
However, the vast majority are happy to pay for their games and I have no doubt, if a game was priced at a realistic price, then piracy would drop.
The problem is though that games these days cost so much to make, its going to be hard to see how a big publisher would keep their shareholders happy if they chose to chop the price of their games.
Well, yes and no. Lower prices means more people will buy it. Sure, you'll get less income from each sale, but the total could still end up with more money.
Secondly, and I feel this is responsible for a lot, is that the quality of media is generally rather poorly. Most games that come out nowadays for example are a) very quick to finish / very easy to, b) not very fun in general, c) buggy as hell, d) blatant copies of other games / earlier games, e) obviously only released to make a quick buck rather than as a quality game, f) without support, patches, exploit fixes and so on, or g) all of the above.
I have examples of recent games for most of them. Games get increasingly often released with loads of bugs, stability issues, exploits and so on. While this is annoying in single player, this is absolutely devastating in multiplayer, as it's an instant funkiller.
Plus, most games go through massive lengths to "prevent piracy" with all sorts of DRM protections. In the end of the day, it's just a massive annoyance for the customers who bothered to buy the game (Diablo 3 - single player "the server is currently offline" anyone?) while the game still gets pirated in days and generally is a LOT more playable than the unpirated version. This should
never happen. Companies take the moral highground in this, by saying "yes but stealing is bad, and we lose income". While this is true, imagine what would happen if all companies suddenly decided that all drinks would cost $150 (or whatever currency you prefer) for a glass. $250 for a bottle. In addition to this, all the drinks would be watered down to increase the amount of drinks they have for sale and to make more money. Sure, this influences the taste, but the companies justify this being needed due to sales rates suddenly dropping, and probably people dealing in illegal drinks. Which would probably start happening because of the ridiculous pricing, and would probably be better quality as well, as there's no need to water it down.
There's plenty of companies / games / media that do very well with releasing "free" stuff like games, music and so on, and still make money. There's bands that got popular because they released all their music on youtube for free rather than by CD, and it got them loads and loads of fans, and massive sold out concerts through that. And when they finally did start releasing cds, they were sold massively... and they kept releasing songs on youtube just as well. There's free to play games, where you can buy stuff with money to get advantages in some way. There's 0% piracy, but loads of income for those companies. Apparently, it's possible. Companies need to evaluate how things have changed in the last 20 years, realize they no longer hold a free pass for money, and need to decide how to use that to their advantage.
