You admitted it, and the case is obviously there.

I absolutely will, and by the way I LOVE my middle-class privileged life.  I earned it and worked hard to achieve that status, things which you obviously know little about.

That's pretty funny though, you said that like I should be ashamed for my success lol.

You got things backwards, dude.

I dont care for stupid legal mumbo jumbo, made by lawyers that get paid to say and represent anything you pay them for. I really dont.

They are stealing time i spent to create something; something i wanted to make a living off. With stealing my work and giving it away for free, with every sale lost (how few that might be), they diminish the value of my time spent.

Think about it long and hard: What is more precious to a human being then its time.

You can rave and whine about it all you want, but you won't stop it that way. Not without any arguments. Learn to live with the fact of piracy, or don't. I don't care what nonsensical moralizing you use to feel outrage along with the rest of your privileged buddies. Doesn't affect pirates in the slightest who will just laugh at your self-inflicted anger.

CNN's interview with Brad about Elemental and DRM: http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/gaming.gadgets/08/24/digital.rights.games/#fbid=FXiNSwVemw1&wom=false

It's a shame the pirates will have access to everything anyways.  And in a sense that model is a form of DRM in the first place.  DRM is nothing more than a deterrent.

I admire Brad's intentions though (focusing on the customer), and I think it's a good model for the consumer.  That is until DRM evolves to a point where pirating is more effective, which I doubt will ever happen.  I think it's going to take legislative action, you start catching these guys en mass and start laying fines on them most people will stop.  Of course people will find ways around it, but if you make it difficult enough where casual people can't do it, I think that will have a good effect.

Very true...but if you read the laws around copyright they are based on some of the same legal reasoning.  I think that's where the moral part comes into play, it's the intent and reasoning of why it's illegal in the first place.

But again, I do agree with you it's not synonymous with theft and that we should discuss it on the correct terms.

It was bound to happen, but at least the people who paid for it weren't punished by the DRM. Of course it's going to be up early: there's nothing to crack

At least we know it's an anticipated title! All of stardocks other games have been pirated and they're still making cash right? I don't think it matters. It's like saying, "Hey, it rained! I knew it would happen but I wanted to let everyone know!"

Industry claims and reality are somewhat different unfortunately. Though yes,  piracy does harm the industry even if in no other way than ensuring a free copy is available. It's like a burglar who goes around opening people's windows and not taking anything - he himself might not be doing anything harmful, but he's leaving the way open for people who will. How much damage is always going to be unquantifiable.

 A lot of the industry statements regarding piracy tend to be more of an excuse than bearing any resemblance to reality. The PC in fact has more exclusive developers than any other format once you take into account the indies and smaller studios, if they can turn a profit then why can't the bigger studios? In fact many can - note EA regularly returns record profits, and record figures for numbers of pirated games, even on PC exclusive titles like the Sims and Spore. Part of it is simple misdirection; the publisher would like to lock the PC down in the same way as a console so they can control things like DLC, microtransactions and other profit maximising methods, but saying "we're removing modding because we don't want it to compete with our own releases" won't win many friends, while "We can't implement modding due to the stringent DRM we had to implement against pirates" at least sounds justifiable. The other part is simple denial - when a developer or publisher has confidence in a game which doesn't sell, they're more likely to blame external factors. It's simple human nature, when you've spent five years working on a game you believe in and then see it tank at retail it's only natural to blame external factors rather than find fault with your baby.

As for Iron Lore, before accepting their claim piracy ruined the studio it should be noted people were saying well before the actual release of Titan Quest they were being a little too optimistic with their expected sales. I'm sure the negative word of mouth and bad reviews did them no favours, but nor did banking everything on a game which was fairly typical for it's genre, and in a genre which was already overcrowded.

I don't support piracy, nor is this an attempt to justify it (and no, I've no pirated software on my PC funnily enough, but then I can afford to pay for pretty much any game that takes my fancy too), but I am sick of seeing it used as an excuse for foisting ridiculous restrictions and plain old bad customer service on gamers.

Well I have the day off from work today...lol.  I think what needed to be said has been said though, thinking of playing some Laura Croft and the Guardians of Light in a bit

Well said man. 

Living in an imperialist nation (i.e. a nation with armed forces all over the world to control its interests and extract wealth) = Privilege

Living in a first world nation which provides anough social safety net to allow some of the lower classes to move upwards = Privilege

Having a job where you're able to not only makes enough money to pay off a house, but also allows you enough time to build said house yourself = privilege

Getting (free) education = Privilege

Having some awesome job that gives you so much money to have 2 new vehicles and waste time online arguing about game piracy = privilege

Being able bodied (and I assume male and white) = Privilege

Yep. Pretty good privilege there bub. Sorry to burst your bubble, but 90% of the world is not as lucky as you were in your life, and all their hard work and effort doesn't amount to even 10% of what you got.

To me downloading a game from a torrent is just like going to the video store and renting a game to see if its worth purchasing. Ive done that with countless games. I did that with Sins of the solar empire, fallout 3, red faction: guerilla and bought em all after trying them out on a torrent. I was gonna download Elemental as well but when i saw Brad Wardell talk about the game in the 6min vid and how awesome it all looked, i pre-ordered, also on the strenght of other stardock games (That i had discovered through torrents).

And that also lets me try shitty games like Spore for a couple of hours and then erase them from my computer and throw those horrors down the memory hole.

What do you mean by effective? I mean, a pirated copy vs a DRM'd copy with some insane garbage like Ubisoft's constant monitoring will -clearly- affect performance. Now, we all know that those of us who scrimp and save our pennies up so that we can upgrade our machines sometimes let them get a bit older than we would like and are forced to deal with the games we want to play not performing as well as we might like them to. In a very real way a pirate has a more effective copy than I do, if his copy performs better because it's not performing disc checks.

And it's not like the industry hasn't already seen a few debacles as far as that's concerned. Awhile back a company released a crack for it's own game - a crack they apparently lifted right off of the net, right down to the signature of a pirate in the file. And I can't tell you how many times I got tired of hearing some game disc whirring in my CD RW which is full of moving parts and anything with moving parts will break down eventually and is more likely to do so the more it's in use. Thankfully now that a DVD RW isn't much more than a CD ROM drive that is a moot point but it wasn't many years ago it was a real concern for me. I know that I saved a couple hundred bucks for a nice Plextor and I wanted it to last. It's a shame when you have to crack your own game to get it to perform the way you want it to. The only people who are negatively affected by DRM tactics are the consumers who purchase the software, the DRM is circumvented to get a pirated copy in the first place.

Personally I prefer the "value added" approach that Valve and Stardock take for their products, offering free updates that vastly improve the game. And the instant someone writes a check to Sec-U-Rom an angel's wings are lit on fire and then beat out with a mallet.

I misspoke...I meant until DRM evolves to a point where pirating is LESS effective.