iDevGames has posted an article penned by Aaron Fothergill of Strange Flavour. Titled "Software Theft is Killing Competition," the writeup takes a different tack on the usual discussions concerning software piracy, pointing out that the usual competition that takes place between businesses can also be affected by the illegal practice.

One of the factors Fothergill points out is one of pricing competition. While pricing their products lower than the competition is one way vendors can compete with each other, having the option to pirate software cuts into that formula and can prevent lower pricing as a result:

This effect of people choosing to steal the popular software rather than consider all the competing products has several effects on the market. The big developer tends to stay big as they are still getting more sales than their competitors from having the app that 'everyone uses'. They should be making even more sales than they're actually getting based on the actual number of users they have, but their product is becoming more and more entrenched as the standard app. Because they don't have any effective competition, they can set the price of their app as high as they want to cover these lost sales.

Software Theft is Killing Competition

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