This statement, along with the “Beethoven or The Who” paragraph below it almost makes me laugh out of the absurdity of the concept. As PC gamers, we don’t require a company to have an epic track record, or even exclusively create the best game ever made for PC to want to buy their games. All we ask is whatever you crank out of your studio, whether it’s your parent’s basement or a company that makes more money than the GDP of small countries - is that your game doesn’t suck.

The very reason why Valve, Blizzard, Rockstar and in the past id Software, get so much PC gamer love - is because they make great games. It’s not an exclusive club though. If Parent’s Basement Ltd. releases a game, we may pirate that game at first; but if it’s a great game we’ll go out and buy a copy. In return, if they continue making great games, this fictitious company very well might be the next Valve Software. After all, Valve wouldn’t be where it is without Half-Life, which in turn was built off a modified Quake engine, which in turn was built by id.

No, it’s not an exclusive club; however, game companies - no matter how large they are (*cough* EA *cough*) should be held to a standard that does not require them to make “Beethoven or The Who” quality games, but does require them to at least come up with something better than K-Fed.

That’s the issue here. Piracy is the one and only consumer tool to tell which game is worth the $50 they have to spend. Say all you want about demos, and they do help to an extent, but a demo is just an interactive commercial. Some game companies use the demo to give you an accurate feel for the game, while some just show all the “good stuff”, leaving you to experience the bad after they separate you from your money.

No, the number of pirated games will never accurately depict lost sales, because not a single person who pirates a game has any intention at that point to purchase said game. Instead, the game industry should look at those numbers as potential customers who have judged their game and look at their sales figures to determine how many people thought it was worth paying for. Were your sales worse than expected? Then try making a better game.

One last thing I’d like to comment on is this idea that the selection of PC games is less than consoles because console developers don’t want to lose sales to piracy. That’s a great concept, even if it’s logically flawed. Why? Well let’s start off by comparing the number of Xbox 360s or PS3s that were sold to the number of PCs out there that can run games to the quality that those consoles can.

Now, keeping those numbers into consideration, realize that a game created for a console will run exactly the same way and the same speed for everybody that has that console. When you get into PC gaming, not only does a developer have to handle the various hardware/Operating system issues that can come up (i.e Vista, quirky Nvidia drivers), but also create scalable detail levels to handle the wide range of system specs.

If you’re a console developer, and you don’t have money flowing out of every orifice, it is simply cost prohibitive to “port” your game to PC, let alone modify it so it would feel at home on the PC. Sure, piracy may be an additional deterrent, but nowhere near as much as the effort and cost required for a console developer to translate their product to the PC.

If you can’t get enough buyers with your current business model, do like all other media industries will have to do, move to an ad-supported model. Hardly anyone will buy a PC game that they can pirate, but if you provide games for free with ads, only a very small portion of people will be annoyed enough by the ads to block them.

Nobody can arrest me for my OPINIONS as to what laws are right/wrong, so yes I do have that “right”

“and choose to follow that law and refuse to folow another.”

No, I wouldn’t have THAT “right”, which is totally DIFFERENT. I purchase full games, not pirate them off the Internet.

SCAM to make money at several points. if movies just came straight to internet, we wouldnt be lining numerous entities bank accounts with increasingly higher costs to us.

personally i would pay to download a brand new movie to my pc and watch it at home on my 30-something inch monitor. big screen theater is nice, but sitting at home watching, able to pause and go to the bathroom when i want, and eat a STEAK while doing so (or if nostalgic for losing my money, eating 20cent popcorn) is actually preferable to leaving the house.

….waiting for the day i can see a brand new movie at home……………………………… pirating screeners every day till then! im er…saving the environment. less gas used, after all…

ok so to bring this all back to the topic of games….. uh well it takes gas to transport myself to the game store too. but these cable lines we all have can really help us here… Why leave the house for something we call INTELLECTUAL property? i leave the house for what i wear and eat. lets get the industry to change already.

i was being glib a moment ago, but now that i think about it, what if movies did go straight to download? how much gas would be saved? i bet it would be quite significant. even data on disc is becoming antiquated.

i challenge anyone to calculate the carbon footprint left my merely going to buy these sort of things. i alone have hundreds of discs of “gone out and bought” 1’s and 0’s.

we need to modernize. pirates are the only ppl who embrace this change of thinking. well ok radiohead too :)

i remember when a 50dollar game lasted 50-100 hours. next gen your lucky to get 10 hours on a single player. i for one just dont have the money for that kind of pursuit. does that mean i give up my lifelong love of video games? ha. i really believe in karma here. and if i was doing something ethically wrong, i will receive my comeuppance. funny that i havent yet…. know why? where theres smoke there is fire, and possibly someone burning. guess what? no one has seen any smoke…. if smoke rises in a distant wood, but no one sees/smells it, is anything burning down out of control?

nope. doing dandy.

makers will continue to make. the demand with a dollar sign is still more than enough to motivate and employ these ppl. ha we pirates are even making jobs for ppl. without us, many programmers would not have a job!

Another thing, is that a fair number of “pirated” games are ones we are denied– ones that were never shipped to the U.S. market, which we would otherwise have to spend as much as ten times normal price to ship here overseas, and possibly learn another language, to play otherwise.
For example, Nintendo, idiots that they are, after shunting mother 3 to postponement for 13 years, only released it in a limited run gba cart in Japan. That shouldn’t be considered piracy.

Still a good post, and I do see where you’re coming from, but as to DRM, it only impedes paying customers anyway–pirates just look for the cracked versions and avoid the whole fiasco.

Yeah… if only there were some sort of active community where people could share their personal experiences with products and warn/educate potential customers about products. Perhaps some kind of massive electronic bulletin board accessible to anyone and everyone. A forum of a sort, where games and their quality (or lack thereof) could be discussed.

If only such a thing existed. But since there obviously is no such thing, you were forced, yes FORCED, to pirate the game. Otherwise, who knows what nightmares might have ensued. You might have been FORCED to purchase the game.

Idiot.