The other day I saw a bunch of USB sticks for sale at a gas station with greatest hits of various artists and music genres and it got me thinking of physical piracy again. It's something I haven't consumed for over 15 years, but with the fall of prices of USB sticks it is completely viable economically if you do the math, and I hope it can even help game piracy.
A 64GB stick costs about 5 US dollars today, and it can carry most AAA games with a few exceptions. That's 1/12 of the full price, and if you consider the pirate will charge you another 5 dollars for his work, you will still get the game for 1/6 of the release price. But you will obviously think: why would I pay 10 bucks for a game I can download for free? Here is the catch.
There are many games that haven't been cracked lately because crackers don't have any incentive to do so other than their own self-satisfaction. If they got paid by some pirate group to do so, then things would be different. I can imagine someone in Russia making a group and paying crackers to crack a game so they can sell it for Russian gamers in the black market. If they come up with some way to make it as hard as possible for the buyers to share these cracked games among them, they could make a lot of money with this.
And here is where the anti-piracy organizations might help the organized crime. With their cat-and-mouse hunt to close online piracy groups, they will make it harder for people to share it online, making the offline piracy more attractive. Would you mind paying 10 bucks for an USB stick or 5 bucks just to copy something to it instead of paying some VPN that might not be enough to hide your traffic?
For old games this wouldn't work, because they are already very cheap on Steam, but for new releases, I can see this working, and everybody, buyers and sellers, would very happy with the money they're making and saving.
Maybe I was a little radical in the OP. The fact is most people don't need to agree 100% with what I said for Hollywood to be in trouble. If 50% of movie fans decide that 20% of the movies they'll watch will be free old movies, the demand for paid movies will already fall 10%. If these numbers keep increasing little by little over the years, it's easy to imagine a scenario where half of the movies consumed are public domain. I don't know how much of the total number of books read every year are public domain books, but I would guess it would be at least 25%. I will try to find some research about this.
Other thing is people don't look for historical accuracy and political lessons on movies. The vast majority of them just want entertainment. For each movie made about the holocaust, you will find a dozen generic thriller movies that are very similar to what people have been producing for the last 90 years. So you can find escapism in 1930's Hitchcock classics easily. And you can watch your new stuff later, but your screen time with paid movies would already have been reduced, and Hollywood won't like it.