OnLive is vaporware have fun with a unproven concept as the basis of your arguement.

Then it becomes a simple matter of needs or preference by consumers; market studies & trends are there to HINT about sales potential and yet, developpers must decide what to make or distribute while expecting reasonable returns on that process. The risk is there.

Even Blizzard had to budget manhours and infrastructures to complete StarCraft2 *demo & final game* and most probably are gambling it will payoff if only by previous success.

The money i spent on CivII or Tide of Darkness progressively lost its value with time.

The titles i WILL spend money on already has some value. Unless i decide it doesn't. Anyone has an opinion and a favorite gameplay. There's sooooooo much pubs and pre-release informations available online for any games IN development (now) that i doubt people can't have a fair enough idea before the fact -- aside, from staring at a Boxset in a store. I bought X-Com:UFO-Defense in such a manner, never to regret it. I gambled and won. I can read, a cool Snakeman alien, spaceship in Orbit... ya know.

I prefer predictable quality to cost & probable value or whomever can provide all three by proof or not.

I don't invest in games, i play.

PC games will stop being produced if publishers go bankrupt for more reasons than i can yell against.

I'll go bowling, but i hate the sport.

22Y means '77 to me, btw... MsPacman required arcade quarters to be played in '82 while i was coding X-Basic functions & variable declarations to move sprites on a TI99/4A. For Honeybees! & Chexx, in fact.

So that tells you, how things have changed since.

EQ and WoW are server games...  They can mod the files if I give them permission.  You can check what they send you before playing.

If you're talking citrix then that's comething different.

Doesn't mean I didn't make a point.

From what I have heard crackers are having a hard time with whatever new copy protection Atari has used for the latest Riddick game. From what I have been reading it has been about a month now and still no crack for the game. People have been saying that it usually only takes a week at the MOST for cracks to be made,( Most are ready at release even) Atari or whoever it is that writes the protection code may actually be on to something.....

 Now I know it doesn't keep pirates from downloading it, But what good does it do if they can't play it?

Ok, I read it again after a night of sleep.  It still says the same thing I put there yesterday.

Am I supposed to be shocked at how rude I am or what?  You're being a douche bag, call it what it is.  If copyright infringement doesn't feel wrong, then you obviously agree with the pirate viewpoint.  Persisting in calling it theft just says you doubt the veracity of your claim.

Grow a pair and just admit that you feel cheated because you paid for something that someone else got for free.  It's ok, I wont tell anyone I laughed.

True, but it's equally irrelevant whether they are justified in obtaining by illegal means that which they are not going to purchase.  Unless someone would purchase a game and instead obtains a copy illegally, they haven't done shit to the company.  Every time some dork starts pissing and moaning about how those meany pirates shouldn't be taking stuff just because they can't or wont buy it in the first place, they need to be offered cheese to go with it.

Sinking to the same level of inaccuracy and subjectivism founding your opponents position does not win the argument, all it does is scream hypocrisy.  The target can then dismiss you without leaving an after taste.

Edit:  The PC version of Assualt on Dark Athena is in the 4000's for sales ranking.  The PS3 version on the other hand is ranked around 400, with the Xbox 360 version being even better.  Context is everything, it took a long time to get cracked(I checked, it has) because no one is playing the PC version.  A game that only sells a few thousand copies in the first month should be honored someone bothered to crack it at all.

Was the DRM on that anything special, or unusually difficult to crack?

Just asking, because I read that and my first impression was "why the hell didn't psychoak use this as a demonstration of the positive power of try-before-you-buy piracy?" Because obviously the only reason people didn't buy the PC version is they couldn't try it first, right? [/sarcasm]

In the developed world (I'll conditionally grant that the third world is a separate case), the vast majority of people who "can't afford" to buy games are instead *choosing* not to buy games and spending the money elsewhere on other non-necessities. Buying a game might mean eating out a few times less each month, but that does not put it in the "can't afford" category. A significant number of those people would indeed buy games if free alternatives were not available. Even if that is 10% of the pirates we're discussing, that is a pretty big sum of money the maker is out. To use the numbers being thrown around for Demigod, that would be about $600k that Stardock didn't see (10% of 120k pirated copies at $50 each). And that was just the opening week.

Piracy advocates will (again & possibly) forever claim. that what they don't pay isn't a lost sales.

I like playing with words, too... so let's introduce a new concept of interpretation of commercial figures.

Warning speculative amounts only follows;

GPG invested 150,000$ (Two coders & a PC, maybe) to design, compile & fabricate Demigod, StarDock decided to share the risk by dumping in another 200,000$ into distribution and server(s) support.

They recuperate (15,000x50=750,000) in sales within a week -- no pirated copies there. Net profit equals 400,000$, you say? Get an accounting degree in financial business statements and regulations first, then we'll speak. Substract administrative expenses, locations, offices, staffs, taxes, products, packaging, shipping... then evaluate all you like.

But, that's not my point.

What comes next IF both do not recuperate above the net cost from *MORE OR MINIMAL* sales?

Nothing.

What comes next IF both recuperate enough to cover the net cost and within any supplemental proportions of sales? Including if pirated by ANY percentages.

Probably, plans for another game with potential or not.

What comes next IF both recuperate ABOVE the net cost from additional Sales (than the second theory) and thus, LESS pirated by a lower percentage?

Risk free, plans for a BETTER game with potential or not.

Piracy is not THEFT unless it is magically transformed by the good will but impossible to determine amount of prospective Sales to unknown & unidentified consumers.

Piracy is still THEFT if it never translates into Sales.

Criminal minds, fool around with the truth (or opinions & interpretations of the Law, btw) to get illegally rich at the expense of their victims.

Bah, I'm not interested in this type of so-called "argument" anymore. Seems people here are more interested in bashing other people rather than pursuing lines of logic around here. I'm gone from the conversation. Bye.