The most pirated video game of 2009 - it's Modern Warfare 2 in a landslide

and why would they be delusional? If they dropped the price in one place, people would either import the game like canadian prescriptions, or they would bitch and complain that someone else has it cheaper...

rule of thumb... if you cant afford a game, you shouldnt be playing it...

Actually they couldn't at least not on the 360 as all 360 games are regional locked. Also, its stupid because we are talking relative purchasing power. Economies work differently across the world. Also, they can afford to sell it cheaper. Distribution costs are actually incredibly cheaper in 3rd world countries compared to western counterparts because of cheap labor. Also, its a piece of software, the cost of reproducing it is incredibly minor to producing the original one. If they really want to dent pirates then they have to compete with them on price. Most pirated games are actually bought in 3rd world countries and not downloaded because of high costs of internet & bandwidth costs. Also, I clearly mentioned the relative rates they face. Its very very expensive for an Indian or Chinese person to buy an original game than for an American. If they want original game prevalance make them cheaper. There are no significant additional costs they face when selling additional copies. They can easily recover costs and a tidy profit just from selling in western markets. They should be selling at prices to create a market & not as an additional source of money. People will pay money as long as its reasonable. This can be attributed to the fact that online games are so popular in these countries. They allow the player to get in at a very reasonable sum and allow them to for a small monthly fee enjoy a good game. Also, I believe publishers should get together and sell a service like Netflix for games in 3rd world countries to better counter pirates. Consider relative purchasing power of your audience before setting a price. That is all I ask of game developers and publishers.

I'm wondering the exact same thing. However, I've heard that the number of cheats available for this game is ridiculously high so my guess is that it is somewhat like Battlefield 2 in its vulnerability and a "hack" to make the game work is readily available.

they'll blame poor sales on piracy a million times before poor decision making

I read a lot of what Cory puts out. His rants can be almost as good as Molly Woods. But I don't think you can compare writing a book to making a AAA game. One costs millions of dollars to create, the other costs somewhere between funding coffee and sandwiches for a few months to supporting the author full time.

"Anyone here ever heard of Cory Doctorow? He writes books and sells them in stores but he also releases them for free on his website. People still buy his books even though they can get them for free because they are worth the money."

There are a couple problems with generalizing Doctorow's situation to other media.

The first problem is that people like reading books in print form rather than a computer screen. You can't generalize from books (which are best-read on paper) to software, video, or music (where having a physical copy adds nothing to the experience of the media). Essentially, he's giving away a digitial (lower value) version of his books to increase sales of the higher-quality print versions. Doctorow maintains a monopoly over the print sales of his books.

Second, Doctorow is a huge ideologue. He spends a lot of time preaching about 'free media', the legalization of piracy, and how everyone who tries to stop piracy is evil. This makes a small hardcore group of people love him. This means people want to give him money to 'support the cause'. This places him in a very different category than people who are making digitial media simply for the sake of entertainment. Sometimes, I see him as degrading the entire digitial media space because he earns a few bucks (through fame-based sales) by devaluing everyone else's work (by promoting piracy). I mean, if he earns $1 but causes $10 worth of damage to other people's businesses, then it's really a parasitic business model he's using. It's unsustainable for everyone to act like a parasite.

Third, he's just one person. Books are a particular type of media that is created by just one person (or two, if you count an editor). This makes the economics a little easier (because sales have to support just one or two people), and it means it more intimate (people are more willing to give money to someone that they have a 'relationship' with). Contrast that with something like movies or software, which tend to be created by whole teams of people and can easily cost tens of millions of dollars.

Fourth, Doctorow is notoriously evasive about how he earns his money. In one article he wrote, he says that book authors simply cannot expect to earn a living anymore. Doctorow makes a lot of money writing magazine articles and doing speeches. I sometimes think that he earns barely anything at all from writing books, but he uses his books to earn him fame and build hardcore fans of his ideology, then, turns around and earns big speaking fees based on that fame and rabid fanbase. It's unrealistic to say that teams programmers can earn a giving away software and then earning a living by giving speeches. Heck, if book authors all did it Doctorow's way, the market for speaking fees would collapse because there would be too many authors and too few conferences.

I don't see Doctorow's situation as being generalizable.