To be honest I can understand some people who can't afford to buy a game, students, etc, pirating it, no it isn't right but it's understandable.

What I can never understand is people who envisage moral outrage at the suggestion that their actions might be considered theft, and have a sense that they are entitled to the results of years of several peoples hard work for free.

Pirates here seem to be shameless and their sense of entitlement to the game, suggests to me they think Stardock & GPG should be their slaves e.g. work for them without getting paid, now if that isn't immoral what is?

So to sum up I can understand some piracy, but not why people are so shameless about it & don't understand why it isn't good.

Saying "sales would have been higher if" is a logical fallacy. There's no way of knowing for sure that if no one pirated the game, sales would be higher. In fact, the opposite is more likely true, as there is no demo for Demigod. Many people, myself included, pirated the game to test it. And I bought it, probably before you did, thanks to GameStop breaking street date.

Honestly, I pirated the game on a whim, and when I found it to be an excellant multiplayer game I went out and bought it for access to online play (lol I hope they fix the connexion issues soon) and future updates. My friend also went out and bought it to play online with me.

Most likely I will buy stardocks next game, when before demigod I had barely heard of them.

I don't feel guilty at all, its a good sales model and everyone is happy. 

Ramza you ignorant bastard, its agaisnt the law to downlaod pirated games, and you say you wont give it out to friends or family but you will still share it even though your intentions aren't to do so

All of these are inadequate to judge the quality of the game.  God knows the amount of money I have wasted on games that receive 10/10 from reviews sites.  They were either paid shills or were such fanboys that they overlooked game crushing bugs.  Demigod is a good case in point.  If I had waited for the reviews, I probably would not have bought the game.  They paint such a poor picture of the game - especially the multiplayer component.  The point is that a good PR machine will make any game the next best thing to sliced bread. 

No one will ever be able to convince me that piracy is killing the video game industry, or the music industry, or the movie industry.  In most cases those are not lost sales.  And further, the industry would be already dead if that were true.  There was widespread piracy of games well before the internet.  I fondly remember BBS boards and a 300 baud modem on my C64. 

Stardock / GPG have adopted the right attitude.  Piracy exists and silly DRM does not to stop it.  Let's focus on the paying customer and let's not devote any resources to fighting an issue that is a lost cause anyway.  Good games will sell, bad games won't, and they all will be pirated.

These rants do nothing to convince pirates and vice versa.  All they do is draw attention to the fact that they game can be easily gotten from the ether.  One area where I wish Stardock would step in is to just lock/delete these threads.  Paradox is another company that releases without DRM (same attitude as Stardock) but they keep their forums clean of the piracy talk.

If there was no torrent for DG, I would not have tried it.  If I had not tried it, 3 people would not have bought copies of DG.  I have posted this a couple of times in threads, because I am tired of rabid moral police chanting on and on how piracy is evil and is destroying the gaming industry.  It isnt.  If DG could not be pirated, I truly believe the sales would be lower.

No, you are the fool for thinking the laws on Internet download and upload are the same in every country in the world and trying to tell people what they can or cannot do with their computer.

And ever heard of upload set to 0 or direct downloads? Don't need to be uploading or sharing anything further than my hard drive.

I buy things worth my money and I pirate the rest. Why? Because I wouldn't even have bothered with it otherwise.

I'm not going to blame people pirating and waiting for Demigod price to drop. It's not worth 40$ and I feel ripped off right now.

Your country is a signatory of all the major international copyright treaties (Berne, WIPO/WCT, etc). So no, you're not immune to the law.

You seem to be under the illusion that pirates buy a game to make their original act of piracy "OK". This is just wrong. I pirate games because I'm a student with almost no money. If I pirate a game and it successfully holds my attention for more than two days I'll buy it. End of story. I've pirated every Total War and bought every one, same with the Fallout series and the same with The Elder Scrolls series and countless more. I see no reason why I should pay $40 for a game that's going to keep my attention for less than two days. Because the developers put effort into it? This is a fallacy. If you bought a candy bar from the store and found out that when you bit into the seemingly delicious chocolate it was in fact filled with puss would you think, "Hey! Someone put effort into making this so therefore they deserve my cash!" No, obviously you would not.

To counter your point on demos we'll use the same analogy. If you went into a store and they had a sales rep allowing people to sample a brand of candy for free, you did so and it was stunning, you then went and bought the candy and found it had been severely misrepresented and it was actually full of puss would you say, "Hey! Someone put effort into making this so therefore they deserve my cash!" No, obviously you would not.

And herein lies the problem: the games industry pumps out several frankly terrible games for every one Sins of a Solar Empire, Demigod or Total War. The vast majority of this tripe is then released in demo format, but the demo so massively misrepresents the actual quality of the game that its just not worth playing (and this is on the presumption that there's a demo at all!) Piracy gives the consumer a recourse: now we can try the genuine game and see if it's worth buying. Yes, it's very very, oh so very sad for companies that produce inferior products but they've been screwing us with their terrible goods for years and now it's time they got screwed.

This is just plain incoherent, no two ways about it. It's like saying "You stole $20 from me then gave it back but I'm still at a loss!" it's just literally illogical.

There are two options here:

1) You pre-emptively posted before you'd read my whole post/you were trying to appeal to one specific part of the quoted text whilst inconsistenly ignoring the other half which negates your point.

2) You're mindblowingly thick to the degree that you simply couldn't understand me when I typed "I pirate games because I'm a student with almost no money. If I pirate a game and it successfully holds my attention for more than two days I'll buy it. End of story. I've pirated every Total War and bought every one, same with the Fallout series and the same with The Elder Scrolls series and countless more. I see no reason why I should pay $40 for a game that's going to keep my attention for less than two days."

Let's be charitable and assume A.

Yes it's true that I'm a poor student. I'm currently taking a crouse in philosophy with a focus on epistemology, ethics and political philosophy. I have a stipend of £110 a month with which to buy clothing, educational materials and anything else which I need (my parents pay food and lodgings: they're astronomically rich but they think it'll grow my character to 'forge my own path' i.e. get nowt but essentials from them). Out of that £110 I put aside roughly £50 for non-necessities such as games. So I have, by UK standards, roughly one game's worth of money. So, as my original argument stated, I try games to see if they're going to last before buying them. I just simply don't have the money to make a mistake. If I buy one of EA's spew and find that I'm unsatisfied and bored after a day or two then tough! My cash for that month is gone. My course is incredibly demanding and requires a massive amount of attention, so I simply don't have the time to fritter away as a cashier or some such. I live on what I have. So please don't bring your presumptuous bullshit to my argument.

"I'm currently taking a crouse in philosophy with a focus on epistemology, ethics and political philosophy."

You must have failed that course.

Problem is GPG were nice enough to give them LAN...so they get to play with each other over himachi (or whatever other program) just fine.  the only thing they will miss is updates since I believe they have to come through the client.

Clearly you know nothing about ethics. You believe you are correct in your presumption that "stealing is stealing: it is always wrong". Philosophers call this Deontological ethics. It is widely renowned as simply backwards and inflexible, unable to deal differing scenarios from an enlightened view. Without the God theory to back it up it just folds. Kant made a good stab a trying to create a system of Deontology which relies upon reason instead of the presumption of a God to legitimate one's maxims, but it still doesn't really work because it attempts to create a priori arguments with references to synthetic conclusions.

Oh, and I'm top of my class in all sections of my course. Until you've come up with a more intelligent view than "What I think is wrong is wrong" I'm unwilling to seriously debate piracy with you.

Do you pay for college?  Why?  You can get the classes for free if you just wander in and steal the information being taught.