they didn't make you take a single economics class when you were getting your degree in video games?

Let's look at what's wrong with this post in more detail:

This translates roughly as:
"AROOGA! AROOGA! Normative reasoning ahead! Man the B.S. bilge pumps!"

Your attitude is obvious right out of the gate: you want to blame consumers for not accepting the disadvantageous market conditions you have created through price fixing when there is an inexpensive and widely-available black market alternative to your product.

Similar situation: Nintendo calling their European customers "dildos" for importing North American games rather than paying the hilariously excessive premiums for the local versions. How do you feel about this situation? The underlying issues are identical.

Bahaha. "If you don't want high prices, pay the high prices!"

On what planet does that ever work?

More about this problem below:

If piracy is such a serious problem for the industry it follows that $50 is higher than the equilibrium price; consumers are not willing to pay such high prices for most games. Therefore, reducing the availability of a black market alternative will not substantially increase sales.

It's even worse than you think. If we figure the pirated version of a game is an inferior good (features disabled, no patches, less reliable) it would mean the demand for the pirated copy falls off as wealth increases. That would mean you're really just *****ing about poor people who literally couldn't afford to pay $50 for your ****ty game anyway.

Yeah. Too bad the real reason they don't release PC ports is due to [timed] exclusivity agreements and this excuse is vapid rhetoric.

The item in question was 60 dollar games (CoD2 incoming)

it's not about economics, it's about how PC game sales are abyssmal when compared to their console release. Part of that same agreement you mentioned is because PC sales suck

ohnos, i called you a dildo! :O

I don't know that the equilibrium graph applies to this situation. The pirated version has no price and infinite supply, so it can't really be thought of as a black market. The only reason people don't always pirate it is that because they either don't know how or believe that it is right to support the developer.

You can't reduce the availability of the pirated version, and the number of pirates won't be strongly effected by price. We might as well pretend they don't exist.

There are plenty of people who simply buy only the games they can afford. Judicious sales can bring in money from otherwise uninterested customers.

All digital owns. I love being able to stream movies on to my Xbox and then watch it instantly on my big screen. Same with games. Who wants to go to the store to buy a game whenever you can buy it at home and not have to put the box somewhere and worry about a cd getting scratched? If you plan on selling your media whenever you purchase it, then don't even buy it. Because 10 years from now digital is all its going to be.

In fact, I doubt 20 years from now we'll even have movie theaters or Gamestops anymore. Movie companies are already in talks to have new releases go straight home via on demand type things as well to catch all those people who don't want to go to the movie theater, which is becoming more and more of a large group. Myself included. I don't want to sit in a nasty theater seat for $10 and buy popcorn for $8 and a drink for 4$ just to have some dumbass kids or a crying baby ruin it. Movie companies dont get those cuts and with pirated movies become more prevalent and of higher quality, it's time to get out of the movie theater business.

I am a huge fan of cloud computing, but it's difficult in a week when Sidekick loses all data, Facebook goes down and loses some accounts, and another Twitter outage. And it was only a few weeks ago that GMail went down for a few hours.
This is all while Netflix announces that the DVD will only be the primary delivery format for the next 2 years. While they don't specify what actually will, they're almost certainly refering to streaming media. I read somewhere that Netflix were originally planning just to release another set-top box, but changed the decision at the very last minute to just be a software platform and release it everywhere. Such a clever move, as on demand media content has totally taken off and may well be the the standard content delivery method by 2012 (though of course Netflix possibly doesn't represent the rest of the market, it's certainly an indicator).

But as on demand (essentially 'cloud media') becomes bigger, there will be more outages and if you see the fury of Twitter outages today imagine the fury over Netflix outages in 2 or 3 years. And the fact that cloud services essentially have little to no tech support, especially the free ones, cloud computing still has some way to go.

dont forget that also, the picture quality (saturation, color accuracy) at the theater is usually pretty crappy. thats one reason my dad doesnt go.

i myself usually notice that at the beginning of the film, and dont care by the middle.