A lot of the excuses are true though. I would never personally buy Crysis. Mediocre game by most game standards, just with a pretty window dressing. Nothing worthwhile to own, but had I just built a nice PC and wanted eye candy to look at? I would consider pirating it simply to see what all the hype was about. I never would buy it though, especially not at full price. If I couldn't pirate it, I just wouldn't care about it.
It's not black and white. Stealing is different from copying, no matter how much people try to argue otherwise. Business models needed to change to accomadate the current generation of gamers, music listeners, etc. Old business models are out-dated and don't work and the huge corporations not listening to this have been punished in large part due to this.
I pirated a few games in my days, but with the release of Steam...Steam has made me eager to purchase games a lot more readily. Steam is a very good buisness model and it's worked out perfectly.
Many people who are pirating games really would never buy the game in the first place and again it's good to realize that some people will always pirate things and have been since the dawning of time. (Whether it's audio tapes or etc) I say it's free advertising for the most part and only large scale piracy hurts.
It's really an overblown issue that can be avoided in many cases. PC games should be releasing via steam / online activation if they're that worried about piracy.
