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"'illegal gaming'"

All of us know of the chipping of sony playstations. Although this is illegal it has not stopped many of the population of playstation owners carrying the action out. It means that people with the chip can copy games at a tenth of the shops rate and therefore rip all of us law obiding people off. It means that people can start black market buisnesses and also rip sony off. A better solution for sony would be to resolve to cartiges or invent a chip to prevent copied games being played.
Will or have they done this on the new PSone, the PS2 or the gamecube?

Those cheat packs were not by the same people, I think they were by Codemasters as I seem to remember the celebrations at the time. I mean, what harm can it do to get import games? I can't play them on my consoles at home as my TV won't accept an NTSC signal.

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.

Its true, getting your console chipped is not illegal - for one if it were, you wouldn't find any shops with half a brain advertising prices for doing it in magazines. That'd be like advertising in a mag saying "Pirate games for sale £10 each - most titles can be obtained". BUT Sony did however say that if a playstation malfunctioned due to the owner doing this, that the insurance on the machine would be invalid, therefore it was a risk people had to choose between. If they chipped their machine, Sony washed their hands of anything to do with it. Of course this hasn't stopped it happening, at most it just made people pay out more for a more proffesional job rather than doing it themselves or getting any friends to try it.

Companies could probably stop a lot of this game copying piracy by bringing down the prices of their games. Afterall, people don't buy pirate games because its clever, they do it because they don't want to fork out around £40 a time - especially when the game they are purchasing could be a load of crap. I don't like the piracy stuff and I'm not saying these people are in the right for doing it, I'm just stating facts. If you saw a game you wanted in one shop for like £40 then saw the same game in the next shop for £30 would you buy it for £40 ? Of course not ! We all want the cheapest price, its just that some are willing to go further (into the illegal zone) than others to get that cheaper price.

I don't know.

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.