Part of it has to do with pressure from Financiers, that's usually the case with EA and Ubisoft. Ubisoft claims that they are losing 95% of their revenue due to piracy, how they come up with these numbers is anyone's guess.
But, rather than ask why are people pirating our games, they're looking at ways to come up with DRM to stop it cold which in the case of SH5 makes the game almost unplayable due to long load times caused by the game "checking in". EA also found out that making every single game have to play off the servers cripples the game and pisses everyone off.
So let's look at the other side of the coin. Why do people pirate games? Sometimes it has to do with gamers just being flat out broke or unwilling to pay $60 for a game. Which speaking of, when Super Mario Brothers came out it sold at $60 a lot of that price came from the cartridge manufacture. Today most games are released from cloud storage which is significantly cheaper in bulk, and I believe most people are catching on to that fact. That's how Steam is able to sell games at a cheaper price than anyone else and the do so in large numbers.
The second reason is games are being rushed, they aren't being polished or only a portion of the game is being released and the rest comes out through DLC. It wouldn't be so bad if the original game was $40 and the DLC was $10 a piece. No, the game will cost you $60, the DLC runs anywhere from $20-full retail and its usually lackluster. The Sims games are notorious for this.
The big companies are starting to loose their edge and its giving rise to a load of indie developers which is really good news for us as long as we can keep them out of the hands of the publishers.
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