Soulfein,
For developing countries with middle level economies--like South Africa and Kenya--high technology and electronics begin to take on new importance as these countries attempt to integrate themselves as more equal partners in the arena of global trade. Electronic games are one of these important commodities, and once countries start importing them it shows that the population feels less like they have to focus all their time on surviving; a hallmark of a developing polity. So games, along with other electronic commodities, are important to developing countries--a goal, if you will--and they should be made available, preferably legally for the benefit of international trade, but we must accept the reality of piracy. Of course, the logic follows that more legal copies will be made available anyway the more developed a country is and so piracy becomes less of a concern--given that sufficient legal copies are available for import.
More importantly, piracy doesn't increase the price of games; developers, publishers, and retailers increase the price of games. Games that cost millions upon millions of dollars to make are going to cost more to consume if anybody in the games business is hoping to make money off of it, and so long as there are still huge swaths of people willing to dole out the extra money for a game, production and retail prices will continue to go up. If piracy were really impacting the sales of games as much as some claim, the price of games would be more likely to decrease than increase. It is only once the price of a game becomes marginally prohibitive that piracy will increase to an equally prohibitive amount, and the price of games will then fall back to an equilibrium between legitimate and illegitimate distribution. Internationally, the laws and precedents of world economics and currency exchange rates do more to inflate the price of a game than piracy ever will. The price of games cannot continue to rise significantly past the buying power of the average gamer, because then no one will buy them. So, game developers, publishers and retailers have to find out how to innovate more with the same amount of money or risk going out of business. Since retail-based markets rarely react quickly--especially not unwieldy global ones--because of consumers that remain uninformed and therefore cannot anticipate and shape trends, there will often be a reactionary period where everybody wonders aloud why they are paying so much for games. And then they will continue to pay so much for games, while the rest of us get them for free.