Re:Xbox Architecture
by bananamerica on Friday June 26, 2020 @10:26PM
(#23659038)
When the currency of your third world country is worth less than 1/5 of the US dollar and a single game amount to a quarter of many people’s incomes, piracy don’t register as something even remotely wrong.
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| on HN ]
I don't think MS is hugely concerned about piracy that doesn't affect sales.
In fact, if they're smart, they'll be fine with it, because it's a form of 'perfect price discrimination'.
That said, the question is to what extent piracy from other areas bleeds into the higher value markets. Which I believe does happens, ergo 'a crack is a crack is a crack' probably.
It's funny because if the cost of getting a 'hack' of a game literally entails buying a 'CD-ROM' and going through the pain of copying it like in the 'old days', which is a small pain but more than many want to bear, it puts a natural bound on the copying/hacking: it will happen a lot in poor countries, less so in rich countries.
But if a hack is 'discovered once', wherever, and then easily exploited everywhere ... not so good.