[danielsoneg]

I think it's worth bringing up a factor mentioned here a while ago - Piracy serves as a useful market signal. The fact that people are pirating content means there's demand - if they're pirating it, but nobody's paying for it, that means the rights holders are creating a product people want, but the price & delivery mechanism aren't right yet. That's an awful lot better information than just that people aren't buying something - and I'd argue it's one of the signals that got the record industry to actually start taking DRM-free music sales seriously.

Obviously it's not a great signal on price - piracy's always going to have the lowest price - but knowing there's demand means you can start to adjust your strategy to try to capture some genuinely lost sales.

[nlawalker]

Price and delivery mechanism are an important part of the product. In fact, with digital piracy, they're arguably more important than the content: there's always demand for free stuff that can be stored indefinitely without any loss in quality or functionality, doesn't take up any physical space and doesn't require any effort to obtain. See the hundreds of posts on Reddit with screenshots of Steam sale aftermaths and the admission that they'll never be able to play most of it.

Free is magic. It's place on the supply/demand curve is far away from "one cent."

That said, I think that in general you are right. We just need more publishers to get brave and try experimenting with pennies-on-the-dollar sales and other stuff.