I don’t.
I was a frequent PC game buyer in the 90s, in the sense that I purchased one or two games every single year from 1993 (Space Hulk and Doom) to 2004. Since then I haven’t purchased any “new” games at all, and though I’ve purchased quite a few “classic” and “gold” editions. The reason for that is twofold.
Mostly it’s because I have difficulty finding anywhere to buy games. In the 90s every electronics store and games shop had a wide selection of games well displayed. I could wander in on a weekend morning, buy new software and wander out. The same shops also often sold hardware and non-gaming software that I also frequently purchased. Today in a town of 100, 00 people there are two dedicated gaming stores, and 95% of their shelf space is devoted to console games and hardware. A small selection of PC games and zero PC hardware. The electronic stores have an even worse selection of software, and hardware is also severely limited.
Why the change? I have friends who work or worked in this sector, and they all tell me the same thing. In the 90s they could afford to stock games because, although they weren’t big money spinners, they had a high enough turnover to be profitable and they served a valuable function of getting people like me in to browse and buy the more profitable hardware. The introduction of internet shopping reduced the sales dramatically. People would still browse in the stores, but when they found something they likes they went away and purchased it online where it was 20% cheaper. And it was 20% cheaper because there was no store to maintain.
So the stores stopped stocking “speculative” items like software and cheap hardware. Today they only stock items that people will come in specifically to buy and where they can be competitive with online sources because of bulk freight. So they are full of printers and photo paper and MP3 players and so forth.
This has also made it less appealing for me to buy games online. Without the sales staff selecting for good games it’s hard to know what to buy. The industry was always 99% crap, but the stuff sold in stores seemed to be 99% good. I purchased games like Deus Ex and Starcraft brand new based on the box alone because I basically knew that I could trust the quality if it was still on the shelf after a week. Shithouse games would get bad reviews from customers and the staff would cull them. The few times I purchased games online in the early 2000s I have been sorely disappointed.
So for myself and many people I know it’s a spiral to oblivion. We abandoned the stores for the cheaper prices online, so the stores stopped stocking games, so we can’t find them to buy online any more.
The second problem is related. The last game I bought online was Medal of Honor in, IIRC, 2002. It was a second rate FPS ported directly from some platform system. It was a badly plotted system that used technology from 10 years earlier. A friend also gave me a copy of some Turok game that he had purchased and was throwing out. It was the same. And this sort of thing has swamped the PC games market, where games from platforms to PC swamp the market and generate sale simply because they have been ported. And this make sit hard to find genuinely good PC games because it make sales figures misleading. Prior to 2000 it was a rarity to find a console game ported to PC. Sometime after 2000 it became the norm, and it seemed that most PC games were console games.
So I certainly wouldn’t blame this on cracked copies . At least I know for myself and the people I know it isn’t true. We will still happily pay money for an official copy of a game if we have a better than average chance of not getting a Turok or a Medal of Honor.
Huh? Your graph seems to show that CD sales maxed out at ~820 units. Digital singles alone are currently at ~1000 units and digital + CD is ~1380 units. The total sales only appear to have dropped below the all time CD record for the years 2001 and 2002; by 2003 combined CD and digital single sales once again topped 820 units.
I’d also add that the internet has fundamentally changed the music industry with or without illegal sales. Music companies no longer have any ability to dictate what music people are exposed to or what music they can buy. As a result it’s harder to develop true pop music that appeals to a wide base. It’s all become either “niche marketing” or “appeal to the lowest common denominator” (ie 14 year olds).
As a result adult pop music has all but died. Spending by young teens (our LCD) has remained unaffected by the internet. In contrast young adults have stopped buying music. Now you can blame this on illegal downloads if you wish, but the fundamental changes in music industry seem a much more likely culprit. Adults simply cannot find music they they like because the popular music they are exposed to is LCD garbage and they have trouble finding the niche stuff they would like.
And again I speak from experience here. I have a hard time finding music I would purchase on commercial radio and TV, I have to subscribe to specific niche websites to do that. That’s an suboptimal solution for the industry because most people have fairly broad tastes and we’ll buy “different” music we like if we are exposed to it, but by definition these niche sites don’t expose us to it. At best I get exposed to novel stuff through “Other people who bought this also purchased these songs from our sister sites”. That’s much less effective than top 40 programming where we could hear what the majority of the population thought was appealing, not just the population under 18. (And yes, some of this can be attributed to age, but you’ll hear similar comments from 25 year olds who remember the good old days of 2000.
Additionally we have the competitive effects DVDs and computer games, where the increase in their sales almost precisely mirrors the the loss of music sales.
Let’s just say that it’s highly debatable that unauthorised copying of music has had any measurable effect on the music industry. So using that highly contentious fact to support the equally contentious claim that illegal copies have had any effect on the games industry is, well, highly contentious.
