Hmm. I can't think about that the way you seem to be. DRM is more like a dam than a nic patch. It's a mechanism to keep pirates out, not remove them; in contrast, a nicotine patch removes its consumers from the river, so to speak.

Effective, 'proper' DRM won't make people want to stop pirating, it would be acting as a dam to keep the pirates out. DRM that worked would actually have more publishers signing on to it. The problem with DRM that works is that DRM sucks and the non-pirates get screwed, and hate it. Any game that DIDN'T have the fabled DRM-that-works would be cracked in no time, as we see so often.

It doesn't matter what the publishers do. Pirating is part a cultural problem. The only thing the publishers can do at this point is make things worse and push some customers into pirating who normally wouldn't which is what pretty much all DRM measures tend to do.

The other group, well some of them don't even realize what they are doing is stealing. I talked to a young man the other day, one of my cousins, who talked excitedly about how one of his friends is getting all these 500 dollar apps for free once he jailbroke his phone. Well first I asked why he wanted this app supposedly worth 500 dollars, and he didn't know what it even did. Then I asked him if he realized that these apps aren't free, that they're not coming out of itunes directly because you pay for itunes, and he didn't seem to know that either. His friend is getting them somewhere else, and he wanted to know if i would jailbreak his phone for him. He's a smart kid, just not into tech stuff, but I said know. I said I didn't have a problem with jailbreaking these things because I think it's pretty silly they're limited as they are, but if he wanted it jailbroken, he'd have to have his dad's permission, still a teen here, and a better reason than pirating a bunch of apps he doesn't need or want but can get because someone tells him its 500 dollars. That or he can figure it out himself of course.

Ignore the pirates. Most games out there have a 90% something pirate rate. So what. The good games still get paid for, and the really good ones still get a lot of money. MW2 had a lot of piracy but it still raked in a lot too.

I have absolutely no pirated software at all. If I can't afford a particular game, then I will either go without it, or wait until one of the game download companies (Impulse, GamersGate, Good Old Games, etc.) or Amazon has a sale. And I use OpenOffice for business (word processing, spreadsheets, etc.) applications.

Personally, when I was younger, I simply did not have the funds to buy games.  Piracy was the only option if I wanted to have access to any games at all.  I guess I could have taken the high road and simply not played any games at all but clearly the high road is not as entertaining as the low road of piracy.

Now that I am working, I have a slightly different take to this.  I will generally buy any game developed by Paradox Interactive and Stardock (although the former only after the 3rd or 4th patches).  Both companies are, in my mind anyway, excellent examples of developers we should all support.  Great games with great patch / support records.  For all other developers, I will only buy games if I spend anything more than 5 hours on it which necessarily reults in a pirate first approach.  With this approach in mind, my purchases this year were Tropico 3, Football Manager 10, Eschalon Book 2 and The Guild 2 Renaissance.  I intend to get Victoria 2 and Elemental in short order with Civilization 5 on the horizon.

A consumer's role in this is to speak with their money.  If you like Elemental, buy it.  Fretting over what other people are doing is just an exercise in futile frustration.  "Rar pirates bad!" is an admirable sentiment and all, but that isn't putting food on the tables of the folks who made the game.  There are enough honest people in the world to support makers of good games, so pay your share, show it to your friends, and the developers will be taken care of.

It sounds to me like he's in that phase where it's "the cool thing to do" to be rebellious. We've all went through that stage at one point or another in our younger lives, I know I did. For different generations it's different things. Back in my day it was smoking weed in the woods or throwing rocks at semis and other stupid crap like that. With today's generation it's internet piracy. The thing that scares me about it is some people just never grow out of that stage later in life and they don't develop the same sense of moral values about it that most people would have. Stealing is stealing but it's not seen as stealing because the people being hurt are "faceless" corporations that make millions. Most pirates think they're sticking it the true evil people in the industry like Bobby Nodick..er I mean Bobby Kotick, from Activision. They don't see though that they're hurting Indie guys like Brad too and that it's companies like Stardock that are the only thing that stands in the way of Good Games being made or a bunch of mass produced crap spit out just to make a quick buck.

I also think in the long run the companies are going to lobby and make it so the government locks down the internet in the United States just like it is in other countries like China or with bandwidth caps like Australia. For some countries out there that's the way they've always had internet service but it's not the same way here. I'd be really pissed off if my connection ends up with caps on it or the government wants my ISP to watch every little thing I do online just so some Hollywood movie maker gets his 8$ per person and people can't watch his crap for free.

Someone earlier in the thread said piracy keeps the DRM companies in business and that if they wanted to they could end piracy. That would be true in the sense of "Game" piracy maybe, but not with a lot of other kinds of piracy. We notice it most in gaming because we're gamers, but it's also just as big a problem for the music and movie industries as well. It's our entire "Entertainment" culture that they're going to end up locking down. No one will have access to anything without a constant online connection, at least two credit cards, and all the companies involved getting a constant stream of money right out of your bank account. I think eventually there will come a time when the American people are either going to have to stand up and demand that the internet remain open and "free" or the whole "online experience" , including games, tv, movies, music, is going to be drastically altered for the worse. The customers are going to end up getting screwed over big time and we're going to loose what little bit of anonymity we have left.

Of course that's a worst case scenario and probably not something we're close to any time soon, but if enough money is involved it could definitely go that way as technology changes. Imagine what it would be like if the ONLY way you could ever get a PC game was to belong to a service like "OnLive" because they didn't make games people could buy in stores anymore. Why won't they make them? Because people can take them home and rip the files off it and put those on the internet. If Everything was set up like OnLive, the consumer would never have the actual game files on their hard-drive, and hence never have anything to "Copy". Sounds like hell to me. I'd never feel like I actually own any of my games, and I don't like that thought, not at all.

Yes, they are trying. Just remember that "Net Neutrality" is double-speak, and it's not what you would actually get. People who think a "Net Neutrality" bill would be a good idea need to do some research.

Yeah..probably. Either way, these sorry ass pirates won't be able to update their pirated copies at least.

Let's say for the sake of argument that every piece of software on my machine was pirated.  So what?  Piracy is still wrong, and it's still hurting the industry.

In a way, this is bad for the game's reputation. I'm still downloading my copy from Impulse, but from what I've read here, it seems that the game will not shine before it's gotten updates. Considering the state that many PC games are released in these days, I wouldn't doubt that there are plenty of people who pirate games not because they want it for free, but because they want to evaluate the "real" game (demos are usually optimized or simply don't exist). Unlike most other things you buy, you cannot usually take back games to store if they don't meet your expectations or don't work for you. That puts 100% of the risk on the customer.

If I look at how much money I've spent on duds over the past 25 years of buying games (with my own money -- in the years before that I did "trade" games with school friends, though I had still bought some titles, like "Kaiser", for 129 German Marks, what a game it was!), I can even understand why people may decide to do that. The quality of first-day PC releases has gone down. I still buy all my games and deal with the duds, but I have a "budget" for game purchases and I tend to be interested in games that have a longer life-span and a relatively decent chance of getting patched regularly (certainly true for Stardock's offerings), but not everyone is in the position to be able, or willing, to waste 50 bucks on a game that will last them for a couple hours only.

One consequence is that I buy fewer games than I used to, or I wait until they have been discounted by a large percentage. Elemental is a "no brainer" for me, just like any of the King's Bounty games, or Civ5 next month, or Blizzard's stuff; I'll buy or pre-order all of those without delay -- but as I said, I don't think this can be applied to everyone, and not everyone "pirate" is a freeloader. It may well be a potential customer.

(This isn't meant to advocate piracy, I work in the gaming/online/software industry, I just don't think the issue is really black and white.)

I don't know, but one thing is for sure: I would never ever try to get any pirated games or softwares. It's against my principles.

Iron Lore was a "fool" for making one the best Diablo clones and not having the resources or the foresight to add a closed server for online play (or any other form of "secure" online gaming). Diablo 2 was heavily pirated, certainly more so than Titan Quest, but that didn't stop it from being a huge commercial success. (Iron Lore also did not release a patch for the stability and bug issues for the expansion, though I understand that this was THQ's decision.)

Yarrrrrr!