Demos are stupid, theyre just crippled games.
If anything, playing a demo will want me to not pay for the full game.

You make a very valid point, but none the less it is fundamentally flawed - all we have to do is change our own mindset as to resource and what it actually is - for example - our atmosphere will continue to be a swirling vortex for as long as the earth turns, and from this vortex we can harness energy - alternatively, the great nuclear reactor in the sky we all like to call the sun. Granted, both of these are finite, but on an intergalactic scale - meaning in your and my lifetimes we will see no significant degradation in quality of the resource, nor our children, nor our childrens children, etc ad nauseum.

But I won't get bogged down in semantics.

Truth be told, demos suck on the basis that you are (usually) given a finite amount of time to indulge yourself in the gameplay of a specific, lower skilled and ultimately boring level. It's the time limitation that gets to me the most. If demos were constructed around the principle of being able to play that level an infinite amount of times then eventually the developers would get around to persuading more people to buy the game itself. This is all part of wooing the consumer into wanting to own such a game - try, get used to the control systems, get bored of the one level, buy game, enjoy the remainder.

Applications on the other hand - some are simply vastly overpriced, and I don't know whether you could ever truly justify a statement like this but here goes - they deserve to be pirated..... There, I said it. It's out there now, on the table. I cannot physically see how any vast corporate standpoint could possible be, other than the potential return of investment for its major shareholders, that their application is "worth" in excess of €1500 per license. Unless, of course, its customer base is so specific and niche that they are expecting significantly lower ROI than if they had a mass marketable product.

Ultimately the solution would be to lower the overall price of applications and the like to tempt potential customers into buying them - but as Texrat said, this agian is another very Utopian viewpoint, full of self indulgence, and one that is unlikely to come true.

As long as software, media and similar items have a price tag associated with them, there will always be piracy. Marxist? Maybe. True though.

my prend..
piracy is when the pirates of the caribian come and steal ur cookies..
do u want them to steal ur cookies?
i didnt think so..

You're free to not buy the product if you think the demo/trailers/marketing material suck.
Then the market will take care of itself. The product will not sell well, then the maker will have to rethink their sales strategy... whether to reduce the asking price, release a bigger and more comprehensive demo, etc.

When you see a trailer of a movie on your tv set, do you complain that the trailer does not play with the same audio & visual intensity as they do in a full blown movie theater?

In a sense, you're negotiating because there is now an option to steal that product without paying (pirate it):

YOU: I want ways to try out your product to see if it's the absolute best, before I pay.

THEM: We'll give you demos, pass our products to reviewers, etc, so you can make your judgement.

YOU: Not enough. I will take a copy of your final product and test it before I pay.

....

Except that I think 99% of people who go through this line of thought wouldn't pay anyway since they already have a free copy of the final product.

Thus, it's just an excuse/justification for an action that was done out of spite/limitation of means/lack of self control.


So in practice, you'd think that particular application is 'worth' the asking price until they get enough customers to return their investment and some profit margin that you think is reasonable; and then they're free to pirate?

So it's a semi socialist society where distribution of wealth should 'auto-level to fairness' at some point?

Damn, and I was hoping for a meaningful counterpoint.

Sorry, Im not so good at meaningful counterpoints, I just voice my opinion/view/whatnot.

Pirate it pirate it pirate it, then if you like it keep pirating it.

Fixed. And yes, we kind of understood that. Your opinion isn't very meaningful.

Why is it that your viewpoint doesn't surprise me?

This has been a very useful thread for flushing out the morally bankrupt people. I'm happy it's still going.