The "General Games Chat" forum, which includes Retro Game Reviews, has been archived and is now read-only. You cannot post here or create a new thread or review on this forum.
Will or have they done this on the new PSone, the PS2 or the gamecube?
I don't think that lowering games prices will cut piracy completely. There are still a lot of pirates out there that refuse to pay more than the cost of a disc for their games. These people will not just start paying three to ten times that amount because games have come down. Don't get me wrong, I think it is a good idea to reduce the price of games and some games companies are already doing this, but there are those pirates out there that don't care how much their games cost.
As some people have already explained, the games companies already pay a lot of money out for advertising and general PR, plus distribution costs and staff wages. They have to charge a certain amount to get their games out in the first place.
And yes, I have had copied games in the past (on the Spectrum!) but haven't bothered from then on as I think it does harm the game companies.
I worked in a game shop while the original debate for the same software came out on the SNES and Megadrive (by the same company) and nintendo famously lost a court battle to have the software/hardware banned, since then everyone has made them for each new console. The Playstation and Nintendo 64 have the same cheat cartridge and both let you play import games. It's a side effect of the way the hardware works rather than a desired effect, so they aren't selling them to play import games, just to cheat.
The disc is a demo of a new cheat cartridge called the Action Replay CDX, for sale by Special Reserve for £34.99 and I recommend the cartridge to anyone, it can also be used to save game data and new cheats as they are printed or from the internet.
Import and copied games are two different things. Import games are not illegal in this country and in fact are neccessary when you wish to play a game that hasn't come out in this country and is not ever going to. There are literally hundreds of Japanese games that get made and sold in japan, some of them really good, that don't make it to these shores. I agree with SR not selling import games, as it is a tricky business explaining them to customers and they often cost a lot more to sell in another country due to tax etc. Lots of other companies specialise in selling legal imports for PSX, N64, Dreamcast, Saturn and SNES (even now) and they are very popular.
On the other side, copied games are illegal and can, allegedly, hurt games companies. However, they can help hardware companies shift consoles. But this is another topic and one that I would have to explain in depth. Anyway, I do not condone copied games as most people who copy them do not have enough time to play them all and get carried away copying them, plus at least half of them could probably afford the games in the first place.