I think the bad thing about piracy is that once a person starts down that road it's extremely hard to get off of it. And I rarely if ever see a pirate buy a game "they really like", I think that's just an excuse and a way for pirates to make themselves feel better and justify what they're doing. As for piracy being different than stealing, it is stealing and just because there are no physical goods does not mean that the developer isn't out sales (and significant numbers of sales) for some games. I realize it's ridiculous to think a person who pirates thousands, or tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of software would buy it all but the truth is they very likely would have bought at least some of it and when you consider that almost every game gets pirated and there are a massive amount of people using bittorrent it stands to reason that every developer is out at least some sales.
And Michael Capps is right, there are *many* people with highend PCs that are using bittorrent to pirate their games. Just go onto bittorrent sites where people talk about PC games and you'll see many people listing their system specs and many have 7900GTX, 8800GTS, and 8800GTX cards. Since games like Crysis are geared directly for those kinds of cards and the market for them is a small segment of the total PC population it's no wonder that such cutting edge games are becoming fewer.
As for people who blame the software companies themselves for piracy, lets be honest, even the best games available get pirated by a lot of people. It wouldn't matter how amazing the game is, if it showed up on bittorrent sites it would be pirated. There are people who pirated The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Grand Theft Auto 3, Resident Evil 4, Halo: Combat Evolved, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Half-Life 2, and other truly amazing games that are ranked very highly on Game Rankings by the media and consumers. And it's not price either since I've seen dvds that came out new for a very reasonable price (US$14.99) and with a lot of additional content get pirated as well. Sadly many people that pirate wouldn't buy the stuff unless it's the same price as a blank dvd or dvd-9, I mean they are of the mindset "Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?".
Anyways that's my take on it ;)
