Buying a third party publisher, forcing a microphone and camera as well as always online DRM and no game trading. Those were all anti consumer. Whos idea was that? Not playstation. Maybe the $10 price increase was to continue paying their employees through the inflation were in because of bad political policies and the increase in quality game creation. Idk maybe that's good consumer practices.

Piracy creates anti-consumer practices. It's not the only source of it, but it's one of the main drivers.

Edit: As to the question of "what anti-consumer practices?"

- DRM
- Digital-focused games and content
- MTX/Season Passes
- Annual releases without much change as the cost to innovate is affected by piracy (see tons of Indie games as an example of this)

Why should you have to choose between evil and evil?

To be honest, this is a redundant debate that's been waging for decades with 0 effect on the reality. Games are selling better than ever before, and yet there still is piracy.

What's been proven is overwhelming majority of people would rather buy games at affordable prices than go through the trouble of pirating. Just look at the continued success of Steam, GOG and the consoles over several generations. Generally MS and Sony try to keep prices reasonable but 3rd party publishers like Activision always plot to artificially trying to inflate game prices.

@Magog

"Please don't say raising game prices because calculated for inflation $70 is cheaper than $60 was when $60 games became the standard."

What a pathetic excuse. This same company makes millions daily from their own store, and unlike other companies, they bank 100% of the profits from their own games whilst every other company that sells their games on the Playstation store are losing 30% of the profit to Sony.

They are one of the companies that never need to raise the prices of their games, they are making almost double the amount of money any other company is making per sale.

Anybody that defends this is a mug.

Neither is worse than the other per say, they are both bad.

@Magog Gamer companies are making more money off games that ever, With their dlc, live services, and microtransaction and season pass crap.

I'm more concerned about online cheating. I hope this does not affect multiplayer games.

Depends who you are asking..
The lowest percentage of pirated software in the existence of pc in a single year has been 45% ..just think how astronomical that number is in real world currency?
Why do you think cloud computing, subscriptions etc are the goal?

"Christopher17h ago(Edited 17h ago)
Piracy creates anti-consumer practices. It's not the only source of it, but it's one of the main drivers.

Edit: As to the question of "what anti-consumer practices?"

- DRM
- Digital-focused games and content
- MTX/Season Passes
- Annual releases without much change as the cost to innovate is affected by piracy (see tons of Indie games as an example of this)"

-DRM is a direct result of Piracy. That doesn't really count as anticonsumer when it's the consumers pirating that caused this move.
-Digital focused content... really? I'm a fan of physical media. I always buy games I love Physical if it exists. But this is more so a preference over everything. It's just going to the digital age. More and more are buying digital as much as I hate to say and most of my friends barely go in stores anymore for titles. That's not anticonsumer tbh.
-MTX/Season Passes. I'd have gave you this if you said MTX, though it's not necessarily bad. Just the popular ways of implementing it. BUT why I won't agree is season passes. Sure some games have BS and garbage cash grab season passes. But Season passes for alot of games are ultimately great. Especially when the content is actually made later for it. Like Getting Ni No Kuni 2's gets you a good amount of extra to do. As well as the free DLC they give you. Spiderman has a good one. While people cry about it, I think Fighting games have good ones. They benefit the most from them. That stops them from needed to release multiple versions of games and such. There's benefits to season passes when they're implemented right and generally I'm not dumb and can see where they're good. A Hat in Time was fantastic DLC as well
-Last one, tbh I don't even know what you're talking about. This I'd have agreed with as I hate that sports games give things that are free updates as entire new games every year etc. But once you mentioned indies, I became lost

I hate anti consumer practices. But not everything is a anticonsumer practice lol

@jonny897 Resorting to insults is the sign of someone who doesn't know what they're talking about.

1. My beloved Microsoft? Where did I mention Microsoft? I play on PS5 and have no XSX. The only Microsoft 'platform' I actively game on is PC.
2. Where did I say bug bounty programs are a bad thing? They are not, and are standard nowadays.

The difference is XSX (and AFAIK XB1) were not hacked, where as Switch, PS4 and now PS5 have been - and seemingly within the first year for the latter.

So while nothing is impenetrable, the amount you invest in security can obviously help.

The good thing is, beyond piracy, this probably won't have any impact on us legit gamers because I'd expect Sony to be able to detect & ban anyone with a custom firmware from PSN so we shouldn't encounter cheaters etc.