discostu1337

You people all say piracy raises prices....games gave been about $50 for years, not getting any higher are they?

The Cow

Mod chip that allows me to play any region DVDs on my PS2 =

jw2299

I'm not trying to argue with anyone here.

I'm of the opinon that when I pay $99, $199, or even $299 for a machine and take it home, it then belongs to me. After that I can do anything I damn_well want with it, including installing a mod chip if I so desire.

Just my opinion, don't know or care to know about any legal or piracy issues.

Gallant Pig

Isn't there a region X disc you can insert and does the same thing?

The Cow

Not that I know of... There are many modchips, but I haven't seen a boot-type disc that allows this... yet....

EDIT: You are correct and Amazon in the UK sells them . Nice.

Gallant Pig

So what happens when DVDRs become prevelant and PS2 releases a new version incompatible with your mod chip? Can you just take it out?

Darknight

Sure, why wouldn't you be able to just take out the chip?

Aghama

Yep, I have a Malata so I already have my region free fix. There is nothing at all wrong with console companies trying to make the hardware hackproof, by releasing new versions and what not. But outlawing the mod chips is bogus in my mind. You buy the hardware, you should be able to do anything you want to it.

Gallant Pig

The only thing I would want to use a Mod chip for is to play VCDs when I burn home movies from the DV camcorder, but I'm not even sure it does this. I'll probably just get a DVDR and burn the home videos on onto those instead.

Kumar J

I would like to get the best price that I can for a game, if I can get DOA cheaper in Japan I would wanna buy it, if not the US.So with no mod chip, I am stuck into buying from US only.Beside Region Free dvd playback is very important for me.To buy 6 different dvd player just to play each region of dvd is not a good idea.
I would like to see VCD's in a X-box.All dvd player can play a VCD and X-box has the capabilities to play dvd's but not vcd's?
Piracy is very big and I do not support it.
Like jw2299 said when I buy it I have every right to do whatever I want with my console, I am just going to lose my warranty only!

V-ism

Lik-Sang rules!! I hope they really aren't shut down. I also agree on not making mod chips illegal. You should be able to do what you wish with what you purchase. I was going to buy the xbox mod chip the week lik-sang went down. I wanted to be able to make it play other region dvds, vcds, mp3s, divx and other video files, and other stuff like that .

ipkevin

Says you. When I heard about the mod chip, only one thing came to mind: Multi-region DVD player. Specifically, an inexpensive yet high quality multi-region DVD player with perfect simultaneous PAL-to-NTSC conversion and anamophic downconversion. Plus, it lets you play games! That is HUGE.

The funky homebrew stuff was a later realization for me, but have become a big attraction as well. Media players, homebrew games, game add-ons, etc. All cool.

I can see how piracy would be the main attraction of a PS2 mod chip, though. Multiregion that can't handle PAL->NTSC is a lot less attractive and of course, all of the homebrew and addon stuff isn't easily applicable if at all.

Outlaw

I have heard that a lot of new PC games that have come out are now $60+ new. But you are right, console games seemed fixed.
My Gamecube has a switch in the back that switches between US and Japanese games . Its a pretty sweet mod and doesn't promote piracy. Plus when you switch to japanese mode the red LED on the gamecube lights up as blue .

mljones99

Same here basically. In JPN mode mine lights up green and in US mode it is supposed to light up blue but I think one of the connections came undone because it doens't light up at all in US mode now, but does in JPN. Just been to lazy to fix it (plus I can't find my gamebit)

Keyser Soze

I'm all foe modchips... but have stopped using them.

Nowadays I just buy 'debug units', which play everything.

-k
###

Darknight

Debug XBox won't let you swap your HDD nor play multi-region DVDs. Debug PS2 won't let you play multi-region DVDs and in some cases, DVDs.

Keyser Soze

And that's why I own region free dvd players.

BTW... email me re: xbox debugs, I have a question for you.

-k
###

Trigger

Software piracy is suck. Microsoft is going after the wrong people though - Lik Sang is just a distributor, not the manufacturer. Stop it at the source, yo.

As for MP3s - The only MP3s I ever downloaded were songs that I would never buy in a million years. Everything I wanted to buy, I bought. I don't listen to music they play on the radio that's put out by major record labels though. Record sales never dropped once during the whole MP3/Napster thing - in fact, they went up. This would indicate that MP3s had a positive effect on record sales. People download songs they don't like enough to buy or that they just haven't heard before and then they grow to like em more and they go buy the CD. It's alot different with games... people download games and play em and finish them and never buy. Games are 50 bucks and CDs are 10 - 15. Big difference.

Flay

You must have missed this part of the article.

duy37

The video game industry is a $10 billion dollar industry. more than movies. Of course people, mostly teens, are going to pay for one movie and movie-hop and watch 2 or 3. The argument for "i wouldnt have paid for it anyways" seems very valid.

I won't deny it, I never owned a video game console in my life until Dreamcast. Although I knew people were getting free games with their modchip for the PSX, I was only a casual gamer then. I brought a Dreamcast when I heard that you can download games for it. my friends are hardcore gamers and already had a Dreamcast with several games. Those games were the games that I played alot and the other games i downloaded i just popped it in play for a couple of hours, decided the game sucked and never played again. So then, Blockbuster would of have lost my business. same goes for Ps2. Xbox i dont plan to get at all. I currently only own 1 real DC game (Shenmue, which i never finished) and i own 3 real ps2 games - GTA3, Gran Turismo and Madden 2003. all the other games I that i pirate, I almost never play them simply because i don't have time or the game sucked. For me, a casual gamer who's happy to just go over to a friend's place to play, if modchips/highspeed internet/cdburner didn't exist I wouldn't own any video game console/accessories/or software.

for the MP3 argument, its a little different i can see why people would not pay for it, why should they when one they can listen to the radio for free, young people are more likely to be low on spending money so why spend it on CDs when you can d/l it for free.


one way to combat the piracy is to issue a unique cd-key that must be entered for online play like they do for PC's.

duy37

its cheaper, or the same price, to buy an Apex DVD player since alot of DVD players play VCDs.

Josh H

I never said anything of the sort. The majority of piraters pirate games that the would have bought and ones that they wouldn't have bought. I'm guessing the number of games they burn that they might have bought if they couldn't pirate them is pretty high, maybe even larger than the number of games that they burn that they never would have considered burning. I mean aren't they more likely to burn games that they are interested in and want to play?

Anyway, I'm not wasting any more time arguing this.

Piracy is a big problem, it's illegal, and it's enough that I personally don't care if they crack down and end up pissing off people that just want to play imports, all region DVDs, or run linux.

I think a lot of people in the U.S. just underestimate piracy because, although its bad here, it's no where near as big a problem as it is in asia, especially Hong Kong.

As for the other argument that game prices haven't risen, they also haven't fallen. They've been stuck at $50 since the move from cartridges to CDs with the Playstation. The only reason piracy hasn't caused prices to rise is the companies know they'll lose out on even more sales if they raise prices. However, it's likely that piracy is keeping publishers from dropping the price of games. If they're losing a bunch of money to piracy they're going to be less likely to further cut their profits by dropping games to say $40.

Aghama

If there were no piracy, software companies wouldn't be able to claim on their tax forms that they lost millions due to it. PC games can often be found for $35 or $40 when they're released, and pirating on the PC will always be many times more prevalent than on the consoles. Console games cost what they do because of supply/demand curves, not piracy.

Piracy is illegal, immoral, and a great scapegoat.

Darknight

Josh: You're leaving the argument because you're starting to lose it. When it comes to piracy, the ratio of games that would have been bought vs that wouldn't have been bought is extremely small. The average person only buys a couple games a year, usually no more than about ten during the lifetime of a system. Companies are complaining based on the total amount of piracy, not just the games people would have bought. When you factor in the how few the games would be based on what actually would have been bought, the number of piraters out there, etc, the hit isn't as big as you would think. Even when it comes to around the world. It's even less likely that a person in say Hong Kong would have bought the game than it is in the US. You have to factor in economic scale and so forth. Then you can look at places like Japan where piracy is at a minimum compared to other places and if anything game prices are actually higher there than they are here.

Game prices have fallen, and to say otherwise is wrong. Take an economics course, if you see prices remaining the same over a long period of time, you can say the price has fallen given the factor of inflation. Prices tend to raise with inflation. Games have not. In fact they've gone down even in simple price tag form. The 16 bit days had games at an average of $59.99. 32 bit days games went down for awhile to no more than $49.99 and then eventually the average price was $34.99 to $39.99. Prices only went up this generation due to higher initial development costs, but even then it's starting to fall back down to $39.99 since costs have been paid for. None of this would be true if prices have not fallen over the years. This whole argument about piracy raising prices is simply false. There's only to a certain point that they can drop a price though and it isn't piracy. Development is expensive. Learn about game development and what the breakdown of a game cost is before you blame the price on piracy. The entire price is accounted for. Heck, I'll do it for you. A $39.99 game costs about $30 to $32 wholesale. $7 of that is license fee to say Sony, so that brings you down to $23 to $25. Factor in development costs, profit, advertising and misc costs, and you can see the entire contents of a $39.99 games is easily accounted for. Even a $49.99 game has a wholesale cost of around $34.

It sucks that you want to piss on the legit users by saying, well if there are some bad seeds we should get rid of all of them. You're only saying this because you've made up your mind that mod chips can do nothing but bad so it doesn't effect you. How would you like it if you did something you liked that was perfectly legal and some guy was trying to push for it to be banned simply because of some bad seeds saying who cares, if you're doing it legally, people are doing wrong with it. Why not ban cars? People do illegal driving every day, some use it for robberies, kidnappings, if we got rid of cars, we could stop a lot of crime.

Outlaw

mod chips have never been "perfectly legal," its more of a gray area type of product, the official companies don't support the use of them.