I would do the same if there's a draught of games to play and/or I have too much free time.

In which, neither is happening. Maybe it's for the best, less money spent, LOL.

I think there is some legitimacy to this. When you make really good games, you will not have an issue selling the game. Even if there are lots of people pirating said game, who is to say any of these people ever actually intended on buying it?

I'm one who found the DRM in Starcraft 2 to be quite annoying due to the nature of the internet at my house and how it decided it liked to d/c all the time.

I managed to finnish the campaign without a disconnect luckly, now I just play online so the DRM isn't really an issue. A game like Diablo 3 on the other hand I am not sure I like the idea as much as I would be more likely to play single player than SC2...

How do you know RE5 didn't sell well on the PC? Ofcourse I mean relative to typical PC software sales.

I can't imagine RE4 didn't sold well because its hard to find and not distributed on digital services.

As I pointed out in a different post, Capcom was happy with how SF4 sold. They just weren't happy with it being one of the most pirated PC games. It seems quality games see both good sales and massive piracy.

Gabe's argument suggests better games get pirated less. The reality is better games get pirated the most.

He doesn't say it will curb piracy, nothing will do that exept going full cload/streaming bassed he said “It doesn’t take much in terms of providing a better service to make pirates a non-issue.” As in piracy doesn't matter if you make a good product people want as people will buy it. Even in a country most publishers wrote off as a haven of pirats where nothing could sell like russia which is now one of Steams biggest reigons. Sales are up but piracy isn't down but that doesn't really matter. 

As for Resident evil 5 sales it's hard to tell as CAPCOM haven't released sales numbers for the PC version, interesting note RE5 has sold 5.6 million copies (as of June this year) according to CAPCOM on PS360 but VGChartz has combined PS360 sales at 7.16 million. I do know that CAPCOM sold 600 thousand PC games in 2009 the year RE5, Bionic Commando and Street Fighter 4 released, they claim 4 titles so I guess their last PC game DMC4 is included. they also sold 900 thousand in 2010 with 3 titles (Dark Void, Dead Rising 2 and Lost Planet 2). So I think we can gather from that RE5 flopped on PC, unless their "shipped" numbers don't include digital, which is possible because they have a totally seperate consumer online games thing with like 40+ million sales but that only starts in 2010... So I don't know http://www.capcom.co.jp/ir/english/data/pdf/explanation/2010/full/explanation_2010_full_01.pdf

Yeah making better games won't stop people from pirating,who wants to pirate a crap game? I always heard this crap about "they (company X) deserve to be pirated cos their games are so expensive etc etc" ... people pirate because they want to get stuff for free. Of all people, pirates hinder the improvement of games because obviously the publisher is losing out on money they should be getting. That said, it's counter productive to have such harsh measures against piracy that it puts the law-abiding gamers off. Personally I love how pirates got a uncompleteable version of arkham asylum,serves them right for pirating.

Absolutely wrong there.

Naughty Dog gets paid to work from their publisher, Sony.  They have a set budget that can only be increased by Sony so they have to work within that budget or ask Sony for more money.  If there's any money used not from Sony, it's likely only from their own reserve.  This is the model almost every studio out there uses because making a game costs A LOT of money.  The publishers eat the risk, but it's less money for the developer.  Because the publisher is the one footing the bill, you cannot iterate until it's perfect unless the publisher says so.

Valve on the other hand publishes their own games because they get their money from their past games, Steams, and licensing.  Since it's their money, they can take as long as they please.  They get all the money in this case but assume all the risk and they have to have the revenue.  Not many developers for major games can even come close to this (not even an amazing developer like Naughty Dog).

Well piracy does matter to them because it does deter sales. Its not solely responsible for games flopping, but it definitely has an impact.

I know Steam says Russia is one of their biggest regions, but I'm curious to know what that actullay means. Does Russia actually account for a large portion of their profits? Saying Russia is one of their biggest clients could probably just mean they do better in Russia than most countires.

For example, Technically MS could say Japan is one of the biggest regions for Xbox 360. Simply because the 360 sells better in Japan than most other countries. However, we see the Xbox 360 numbers so we know Japan isn't very important. But we don't see Steam numbers so we don't actually know how important Russia is. Hence, I'm not going presume Russia is as worthwhile as Gabe is implying.

From everything I have read they are a show peice developer they get as much money as they need to perfect their games, just like Team Ico the only difference is that they are very good at keeping a schedual. They work on one project until it's perfect and do it faster than everyone else itereation is their moto and unlike games like Battlefield 3 that are not gold until a week before release they go gold a month before release.