Videogames piracy - Why so much hate?

[Dystopia]

I personally think all piracy cases should be dealt with individually because of how varied the spectrum of severity is.

Legally that's not a wise decision - Laws should be general and abstract, you can't threat every case individually. We would have to classify different types of piracy and attribute a penalty to each one of them. I personally think jail should be reserved for dangerous people and not for some guy who decided to download a pirated version of Half Life 2 because he was feeling nostalgic.

The last time I bought pirated games was when I was 14 and everyone was buying chipped playstations that could play copied games.

Curiously I have never chipped or hacked a console and I've never played a pirated game on console. It used to be rare and very difficult, not to mention my friends who used that method frequently got burned copies with graphical glitches, frame drops and lots of other problems.

I don't feel guilty at all about it. Games went from being something I could only afford 2 or 3 of at my birthday if I spent all my money on games, which I did used to do (around £60 each) to something I could save up my school dinner money to buy (£5 each, sometimes £10 if I remember right) from a little corner shop.

I don't feel guilty either. The case for PC gaming is not 5€ each, it's free... Except for the hardware you need to run the game, of course.

I don't think piracy is something to be proud of, but not everything we do is moral and perfect, I just don't understand why so much hate - I don't pirate a lot and even if I did stop pirating completely I wouldn't hate other people for pirating or consider them less fans of a specific videogame series because they have a pirated version.

I really laughed when someone said piracy is the reason for bad PC ports - It's not, the only reason is shitty developers who though having a game unable to boot running at 20FPS would be a great idea.

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There are a number of reasons for piracy, but essentially in Australia the market is rorted by the anticompetitive nature of domestic targeting. Essentially, parallel importing while legal for most other goods is still not legal for video games or even home video in Australia. It is legal for books and CD's. Thus the price for a game here is about twice as expensive as in the USA or the UK. Australian customers don't like to be rorted, so they resort either to purchasing online through Amazon or Ebay or through pirating. If the industry wants less piracy they need to embrace open market competition.

And what would that price be Aractus? If possible, you could tell me how much it is worth compared to dollars/euros.