Let's see, major reasons to pirate games:

1) Demo. There is no demo. The demo is so short that it's an insult.

2) Rental. There is no local rental store. The rent stores suck. It's rare that a pirated game lasts more than a few days before it gets tossed out. But rental stores are too good an opportunity for piracy.

3) No cheap access to a play center, I.E. an arcade. There are none with any decent library for 100 miles. No place to try out games other than on your own.

4) Internet access. There is no way to shop online. The online stores suck. Piracy is still the #1 way to download games! This is changing with Steam, Impulse, and the like.

5) Hatred for local superbusiness. Some people refuse to buy games at Walmart, Best Buy, etc. Probably from a bad past experience, or simply because they feel the games suffer from a severe case of PRICE FIXING. $50 may not seem like much, but there are hundreds of games out there.

6) Waiting for the bargain bin. An extension of price fixing, it's just SO easy to wait a month or two for the unsustainable prices to drop. It's not as though there's a shortage of games on the market, there's plenty to keep your interest for a long time. Only the FEW quality games can keep their prices over time.

7) Waiting for the upgrade. An extension of bargain bin, this user can't play any high end games, and is saving up for a new PC. He's also likely broke. He tells himself he's just "testing the specs", but in no time he's hooked.

8) The teenage bum. The kind with no job, few friends, and no allowance, but a shiny home PC and nothing to do. He may want to buy games, but is either too poor or too lazy to leave the house.

9) The hardcore dedicated pirate. For some reason the DRM nuts will tell you that the market is FULL of these guys. Bullshit, it's just buzzword marketing to sell their DRM product. However there is a real, dedicated community that simply looooves crypto, so DRM only buys time.

10) The OCD archiver. These guys download EVERYTHING because they can. They may focus heavily on niche markets, but these "pirates" usually archive other stuff as well.

11) The DRM rebel. These people know that DRM ruins games. They pirate out of spite, saying that there IS a demand for games, but will refuse to pay for DRM. They were probably burned too many times by failing installs, or scared by the dangerous hidden software that gets unearthed. But in the end they're voting with their dollar.

AI in game are not real AI... it is simply a software ( hardware AI will change nothing ) who follow some basic rules... these rules are created by Human...

A real AI is a AI who have a base rules set but who is able to create new rules or modify existing one in function of experience... at a local computer, it is great to have so AI... you become better and the AI become better... on a remote server, with all the gamers, very fast, AI will become to much hard and beat every player...

For game, it is better speak of SI ( simulated intelligence ) that AI...

Speaking like this, I think you mean "I love myself"

I had to read through seven whole pages of this to find someone else making the basic point that IE7 is not any kind of requirement for Impulse. I have never had IE7 on this machine, and Impulse works fine for me (though I do wish that it would let you decide where you want to install a game, rather than just going ahead and putting the game wherever it feels like it). I have IE6, which I only ever use for Windows Update itself; for all of my real browsing, I use FF3 (or Flock, or any one of several other niche browsers that aren't Internet Exploder).

And yes, my machine is secure, 100% legal, and patched; I just run Windows Update on my own terms, manually selecting which files I want to download (security patches) and which files I don't (IE7, WMP11, Windows Spyware Removal Tool).

As for Chrome, I tried it out for a while, and liked some of its features; but it's just not there yet, and I also refuse to have yet another permanently resident auto-updater program hanging around trying to phone home for updates all the time, like GoogleChromeUpdater.exe (or AdobeUpdater.exe, or any other such programs). Nothing on my computer calls out to the internet without my initiating the procedure; programs which don't let me control the use of my own machine get uninstalled in a hurry.

After all, no one in their right mind would ever refuse to pay for a bad game, right? They just meant to pay full price for a 3 day rental, before throwing it out and never touching it again.

I haven't yet met a prirate that never bought a game.

Blue Stardock orb in the upper left:

Preferences -> Folders -> Install Locatios (click the drop down and choose Games). Change to whatever location you wish.

You can't steal something that has no tangible Value, nor can you be robbed of something that can't take Value away from nothing.

I love how Companies big or small try and make outragoues claims about them losing money to an industry of pirates when there was nothing lost.

Did you lose a CD/DVD??? no, did you lose any form of material(something you can touch not Virtual). is your online service being overrun by pirates, nope didn't think so.

Now if you go to a store and Steal a CD/Game then yes there is a lose because of packaging/Marketing materials and having to take a hit, because the company won't make any money from a product they bought from a Distributor.

That is a Tangible lose, Not a Virtual implied lose.

Now d/l from a torrent Has non of these effects. And as mention in teh DRM Article by Ironclad this is the same thing. People don't want DRM, people don't want Online Systems such as Steam and Impluse. They are a joke regradless of how well they might think they work. If i Buy a Product i damn well better Have something Tangible in my hand especially since "These industries" whine and bitch and complain about Material and ramp the price up.

Now you can agrue about online software other then games, however Say Nero($75), Intermapper($750/skies the limit) or other such software has way more Virtual Value and can be used for longer periods of time and has more function and use. You don't see companies like that bitch and complain. People will pay for something when it has Value and meaning. and gets the job done.

If your counting on people who will never pay for a product to begin with you are a moron. and ya you can wallow in your self pitty how omfg all the pirates are stealing our money(wah..... what money to begin with???)

and you can cry about all that work, well umm yea, your on the clock, and yea you only made the game once. It's like any job that requires labor you only get paid for what you do. You made the game you try and sell it thats your pay. and you use that income also fix what's broke otherwise you'll just make a bad name foryourself and hopefully your sales well continue for awhile, and when people stop buying hopefully you have some form of Manangement and put aside a nice portion for the company to use for the next game to pay your workers and maybe upgrades(god knwos companeis spend way to much on crap that just cost up).

now you could also be one of those unfortunate companies that set themselves up thinking hey lets try and make a quick buck or sell to the casual gamer who will stop playing our games in several months that way we can screw the hardcore gamers and fanbase to the point were they will turn on us and we won't make jack because no one bought the game.

And i'm sorry but i don't think when you pay your taxes you can inlcude, "people where pirating our game we didn't make any money" and any Inteligent investor will just see "people are pirating the game thats why we can't pay you back" as an excuss.

I pirate games, and i buy games, Hell i even buy software in upwards of several thousand dollars for my company.

Now the piraters that i do Disagree with are the 10-16yr olds who just do it because it's fun and they can, they have no real understanding as to why people like me or the poster would pirate. Pirtaing is also making a statement.

"If you werent such a d.bag i woulda bought your game but instead you decided to do whatever you did to upset your potential customer."  There fore you won't make any money from me, sorry but your not losing money your just not making it. I wonder if any of these people even understand economics/business.

Demo's is a def, Shabby online systems regardless again of how well the company thinks they are. I hate steam for the life of me, yet i have all of valves titles. However i have no other options. Just as impulse.

I live in a area where Sorry to say internet is not readily available. Now trying to d/l Several gigs of game content on a T1 is not fun. and then u punish me more by making me half to authenticate everytime i wanna play a game offline wtf, who's retarded idea was that??? that college degeree i'm sorry buddy but it's not working for you and umm yea you have no real understanding of business or marketing.

I have several CLients that are on dial-up and or satelite, you make them suffer as well. And major ISP only care to install in places where they will make a huge profit. so cities with less then 25k tend to get shafted and have to relly on Dial-up/Satelite or fixxed providers like me.

Thank you! That is good to know.

The thing is the people with pirated copies of things don't expect the company to support them, provide patches or indeed anything.  I mean every so often you'll get someone with a blatently dubious copy appear and whine but you send them packing. But that is not the norm.

Now supporting legitimate copies, hell yes, but failures in customer support/relations are subjects for a different thread. Same with full patch vs deltas for bandwidth constrained people.

You'd be surprised just how often pirates try to get support or gain access to online play. IC support only started requesting serials with support tickets because there were literally floods of pirates bogging them down.

If any harm follows, then you shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.

-- Exodus 21:23

Not something I would expect any child to have mastered the concept off.  Tit for Tat I would have agreed with.  But there are differences between that and "eye for eye".

Eh, fair enough, but it's mostly subtle semantics. In more modern understanding they're effectively the same; they're both the concept of an injured party taking revenge on the offender--the hebrews just condoned (even required) it legally.

Not to undermine the problems that anyone may be having with Impulse but I've found it very easy to use.  My experience with Steam was not so good - I bought Half Life 2 while I was at Uni and my dorm room only had dialup.  Before I could even play the damn game it had to decrypt or validate every file online.  It took about 4 hours, plus install time.  Not impressed. 

In any case it's very easy to complain about delivery methods for updates and all that, but we're not the people who have to manage the logistics of it.  It's just sometimes devs get it wrong.  In this instance I think Stardock got it right.  I quite like the idea of having a sort of 'portal' only for legitimate users.  I know that it'll be standardized, and we're all getting our updates from the same source. 

As far as copyright and piracy goes, it's a strange one IMO.  The trouble is...the entertainment industry as a whole has shown that it can exist in the face of piracy.  Cassettes and VHS were supposed to destroy the music and film industry, yet companies continued to produce the hardware that would allow people to openly violate copyright and mechanically reproduce and transfer media.  So when people see movie budgets that could feed 3rd world countries for a decade, they probably find it hard to understand how piracy affects the industry.  I think gaming is in the same boat.  I read somewhere that despite the economic downturn, the gaming industry had seen something like 40% growth.  Crazy times!

It's gotten to a point where it's impossible, impractical and nonsensical to apply absolute morality to the situation.  No company or entity has the reach to impose the law to the letter, and ultimately a lot of people know this. If they did, the internet and this whole concept of masses of free flowing information and ideas that we've become so used to, probably wouldn't/couldn't exist.  And a good number of us would hand ourselves in along with every piece of digital media we own that infringes copyright (knowingly or otherwise).

Of course, I'm not saying that this is nessecarily a great thing - it's just a curious state of affairs we've all found ourselves in.  I produce a lot of audio/music related content, and I know it stings like hell to think that someone has just helped themselves to my work. I just have to write them off as people who were never likely to buy in the first place.  Doesn't make it right.  It's just the nature of my work and my industry.

Now, all of this considered?  I completely understand why Stardock/Ironclad have gone the way of Impulse.  It's a major incentive to own the game.  That coupled with the fact that they're so active in improving the software will (hopefully) win them a large number of loyal customers.  I'm definitely one of them anyway I've got my updates, and I've got access to what appears to be a great support network and an active forum.  Can't complain.