Report: Brazil is a 'haven' for video game piracy

by Griffin McElroy on May 13th 2009 7:30PM

The Escapist's Pedro Franco recently wrote up an interesting article about Brazil's recent transformation into a "pirated goods heaven," particularly for illicitly acquired video games. According to Franco, Brazil was once a thriving market for games, until the mid-1990s brought about outrageously high taxes on gaming software (45 percent of the price of PC titles consisted of taxes), diminished per capita income and the transition from cartridge to disc-based games. Now, it's estimated that 94 percent of Brazil's gaming market is composed of pirated merchandise.

Check out Franco's full article to find out the social and industrial implications of a nation that finds gaming piracy permissible. (Spoiler alert: It leads to bad things.)

[Via GamePolitics]

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Tags: babypirates, brazil, escapist, illegal, piracy, pirates, report

Reader Comments (55)

Good pic. I can see my house in there (and yeah, we do get lot`s of baby pirates).

Oh, and just to make an analysis, here are some compared prices, all in US dollars to make for an easier reading:

A Wii/PS3/XBox360 game (at launch): In US: 60 - In Brazil: 150
A Wii/PS3/Xbox360 not so good game after a price drop: in US: 20 or 30 - In Brazil: 150 (Price drop? Nintendo 64 games still cost 50 dollars if original)
DS games: In US: 30 or 40 - In Brazil: 90

PC games: 2 to 40 dollars (looking at Steam prices) - In Brazil: 50 (pc games are cheaper then consoles because they are manufactured here, and hence don`t pay the malicious import tax)

Eh, PC games are only cheaper when they're made by EA. But 100 reais is still out of reach most of the time.

I found the article a good read, although I was hoping it'd go more in the direction of "here is what we could do to stop piracy in Brazil" and not "this is what could happen to America if we're not cautious". But considering it's a north-american website, that is to be expected.

Then again, as the 5th largest country in the world, there should be a PROMISING market that developers are certainly overlooking. Although I really don't see much hope at this point. The PS3 has no piracy options as far as I know, but the PS2, the 360 and the Wii simply sell more.

Even though DVD movies can also be pirated, movie rental outlets are still quite common and most of the time people prefer renting over pirating. I don't know if the answer could lie there, but then again, when gaming rental outlets used to be common it was the primary form of playing games. (Though to be honest those were the cartrige media days in which kids couldn't just torrent and burn a game themselves)

When I was a kid we'd rent two SNES game each weekend. My SNES was manufactured in Brazil too. Good times.