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Zkuq on 27 April 2009
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WiiStation360 said:
Words Of Wisdom said:
There was a company that made a game (I forget the name of it), but it had a bug in it that got fixed just before it went into production. Hilariously enough, it was pirated before it fully went to full distribution. After it launched, the company's forums were filled with people complaining about the bug while the developers were busily going "Uh huh, how interesting."

I know Titan Quest for the PC a problem like this.  The DRM check would crash the game at the load screen if the game was pirated.  Because of this, the game got a reputation on the internet as being full of bugs, and negatively affected sales.

Hm, I never had a problem like that? Though at a certain point (or, to be precise, place) of the game it would crash pretty much always.

Anyway, piracy is bad but DRM is even worse. Right now DRM is one of those things that actually provokes me into pirating the game. (Steam is one of those DRM systems.) Then there's boycotting some companies but things can change and it's not that provoking compared to DRM. I'd really like to support some great games but I don't want to support DRM. I'd also like to say that if I like a game, I'm pretty likely to buy it as well. Of course there's these stupid pirates that don't understand they're actually hurting the industry by pirating everything and paying for nothing, just because they can get it for free. On the other hand, there's  these idiots who think that every pirate is evil, and piracy is a theft.

All in all, I accept piracy in those cases where it doesn't affect sales, and understand and somewhat accept piracy in some other cases (DRM being the most obvious example).

Oh, and to respond to the OP: there's no fact that publishers should switch to consoles only; it's no fact, and probably doesn't even make much sense. Even with these piracy numbers many games sell very well so it's always slightly more profit than with a console-only release. Besides, PC gaming seems to be developing new business models (mostly microtransactions, which happens to be something I hate).