I was just thinking, last time I've downloaded some razor, reloaded or similar "cracked" game is many years ago. Thinking about this, I see many reasons:
- digital resale platforms, like steam etc.
- game prices reduce relatively quicker when games are no longer "new"
- respect to gamedev studios
- more selective which games to play, not just wanting to have all new games just for "having"

Is this just me or do you also see a trend over the last years?
(improved DRM btw is no reason for me)

A more accurate figure would be given by a developer rather than as a player. I am sure there are some here actively trying to sell games who can give you metrics on if it is declining or not but my guess would be that it is actually increasing in line with Internet speeds.

A more accurate figure would be given by a developer rather than as a player.

I'm not convinced of that. it wouldn't exactly be an unbiased figure.

Usage of DRM is still pretty high. Anything you buy on a console, iOS device, most Android software, and anything bought on Steam or Origin is under some form on DRM. You just may not notice it because companies have gotten pretty good about hiding it from the "average user" and you only run into it when doing something "weird" (play offline, make backups, etc).

Some companies (like Ubisoft and EA) slap even more DRM on top of the distribution platform which is usually exposed more often because it breaks much more frequently or prohibits more common user actions (multiple installations, lost online connection while playing, etc).

GoG is the only digital platform I know of that doesn't DRM the things it sells.

A more accurate figure would be given by a developer rather than as a player.

I'm not convinced of that. it wouldn't exactly be an unbiased figure.

And yet they're the only ones with real numbers. Players have little to no actual real information.

Few indie developers have been around prior to Steam and digital distribution. You'd have to ask someone like Jeff Vogel, who's been selling indie games since the late 1980's.

And he'd have to have had piracy metrics in his software to measure how many copies have actually been pirated, rather than how many have been purchased - since the market as a whole has grown dramatically, if the market has grown at a rate greater than piracy has grown, it would slant the numbers if you're only going off of 'purchase' counts.

An interesting measurement would be the average age of pirates, more specifically focused on:

- Is the media easily available for a legit channel?

- Does the consumer actually have disposable income or is he unemployed or a child?

- Is the media at a "reasonable" price (varying per individual), even if available and even if the consumer has disposable income?

Never the less, I think hearing the personal experience of individual consumers about their past/present piracy motivations is very beneficial.

Most people will probably tell you they pirate less than they used to, but everyone is older than they used to be, too. For most people, as they get older, their disposable income increases. As your disposable income increases, the perceived value of that money decreases. Ergo, games are "cheaper".

Whether there's a systemic change in piracy rates outside of that, I don't know. However, simply surveying people on their past and present habits isn't a very good indicator.

Y'all are forgetting Free to Play, which has taken over many segments of the game market.

Piracy is a non-issue for games that are intentionally put up as free downloads and where all the monetization relies on a digital goods that only really exist on a server.

Also, when you're looking at F2P or mobile games where the amount you spend is somewhere from $1 to $5, users aren't quite so eager to jump hoops to avoid paying. Done well, you even make more money from your paying customers (a gamer who might balk at a $60 new AAA title might easily pay thousands of dollars on League of Legends or the like over a span of several years).

For non F2P titles, the stores do help. It's just like how iTunes and its ilk helped deal with music piracy: if you maker it easier to just legally buy something than it is to illegally download it - and if the price isn't too insane - people go the path of least resistance and just buy it.

The $60 price for games can still be an issue, but many gamers wait for Steam sales or the like. Which has an added benefit. If you _say_ a game is worth $60 but then sell it for $45, there are many people who will buy it because it's a good deal. If you say the game is just worth $45, those people very well might not buy the game; it's not a "good deal" yet, and they'll just wait until it's dropped to $30. Worse, drop the list price of something and it is perceived as "cheap" to the point that a certain class of games would sell fewer copies if their list price were dropped! A good deal on a premium product is a better buy than just buying a mediocre product, in many people's minds.

Sales and artificial price hiking are an age old marketing tactic. Mark up the price then have a sale that drops the product down to a reasonable value, and people gobble it up. This is one of many, many "people hacks" that marketing uses to sell products.

The digital stores make all this possible in ways that retail stores don't due to the ability to have Steam like "12 hour flash sales" all under the control of the publisher, which is why the tactic is so prevalent now when it wasn't a few short years ago.

TL;DR: free-to-play, micro-transactions, and digital store sales.

I would assume that you are talking about DRMed PC games, not console. I have been buying less PC games. PC games that I do buy are from Steam, when they are at discounted price. I have been playing console and mobile games. Console games that I have bought are <$5, online or from the discounted bin. Mobile games I downloaded are free, or cost me $3.

The fact that most game distribution have shifted to online, this makes DRM more managable from the company perspective. No more CDs you can rip and burn. So less draconian methods?

Well I would definitely say that *hehem* if I were to have pirated in the past, I certainly don't now. ;) Steam has made a big difference to me. I've always had difficulty with the standard AAA price point, but there just isn't much reason for me not to buy a game for $10-$20 on sale on Steam. And I like that I'm buying more indie games and not 100% big budget titles.

Honestly, I think one of the biggest reasons I haven't downloaded a cracked game in years is that I can generally find any title I want on one of the digital services. Years ago, that wasn't necessarily true, and I remember a considerable dark period around the XBox era where the game stores were starting to go under, and those that remained ditched carrying any inventory of PC games in favor of all console stuff. At that time, torrent sites were sometimes the only option.

Now, if I want to play a game, even something less well-known or older, I search in Steam, and I can usually buy it for $5-$10, which is, when you think about it, the cost of a lunch at McDonald's. I have 180 games in my Steam library, and most of those are because of flash sales or holiday sales, where my brain goes, "$20 for this entire publisher bundle of 12-15 games? It's too cheap not to pick it up..."

I used to be really into playing "abandonware" games from the early-mid 90s also, but GoG has pretty much shut down that scene, which is just as well, some of the curation/download sites were a little on the sketchy side.