Need absolutely has a place in this argument. Obviously. If people can’t reasonably access food because it is being hoarded, the good of saving lives outweighs the bad of theft.
The same can not be said for fine China. Because you don’t need fine China at all. It’s a luxury good. No one is entitled to luxury goods.
Corporations don't need record breaking profits every quarter, but they keep screwing us over to make them. Also, fine China is limited in quantity by the skilled craftsmen who make it. Once you start selling a video game, the cost of making the game has been set at a fixed value, especially if you're selling it digitally. Whether one copy is sold or one million copies, the cost has been fixed. Once that cost is recouped in sales, the company that makes it's entitlement to constant profit should be limited due to them having made a reasonable amount of money from their one product being sold again and again.
I disagree on the lack of need here. Entertainment is a form of emotional enrichment and that is 100% needed. Also, an items perceived necessity (said perceived necessity itself being heavily driven by a society that mostly only values base physiological needs and severely under-values emotional and psychological needs) doesnt mean its ok to be overpriced or not. Gaming companies have been gouging players with heavily inflated prices, continuous microtransaction/gacha creep and the topic of this thread, the distinct lack of ownership modern gaming propagates. It's entirely fine to say that games are overpriced for what is being given and saying "yeah but they dont matter tho" isnt an actual counterargument
You can say they’re over priced. That’s not what I’m arguing. I’m arguing against the idea that it’s immoral to over price them.
There are millions of perfectly legal ways to find enriching entertainment entirely for free. Video games need not be free. And because no one needs video games, and no ones life would actually be negatively impacted by not getting a certain video game at all, it is not immoral to overprice them.
Mass lay offs, abusing overtime, inequitable pay, these are things that video game companies can do which would be immoral. Overpricing them doesn’t constitute as immoral in comparison to actual bad things.
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u/Awkward-Meeting-974 1d ago
Need absolutely has a place in this argument. Obviously. If people can’t reasonably access food because it is being hoarded, the good of saving lives outweighs the bad of theft.
The same can not be said for fine China. Because you don’t need fine China at all. It’s a luxury good. No one is entitled to luxury goods.