That's very interesting. I always thought piracy was small in the US because of the strong arm of the law.

Anyone disagree with ishiki?

Do what I do...buy games that you honestly think the publisher deserves it. I bought Bioshock because those guys truly did an amazing job and they deserve the money...didn't had that thought with lets say...Sim City.

If you pirate old games that aren't going to effect the flow of new games, I really couldn't care less, but I'm against people pirating new games since they then effect the quality and the consoles, or lack there of, which the game will release to later.

I don't think pirated games will allow you to play online like in the past unless it's P2P. Online games now either require an authentication code or Steam. The developer will lock out authentication codes to play online if they're known to be used with pirated copies. Say thousands of people use the same code for example.

Correct, but for all intents and purposes, unless a physical copy has DRM besides disc-check, you own it.

Either way, software piracy is not the same thing as stealing. As for stealing, maybe theft isn't as bad for the publisher but it certainly is for the retailer. Someone ends up losing. And as for piracy, there's studies that show the effect piracy has on sales isn't as big as you'd think - and for things like music, piracy can actually benefit the publisher. I believe the existence of the study that showed that music pirates spend more money on music is common knowledge. My point is that there's very few signs that piracy is as serious a problem as publishers say it is, and there's even signs that it could beneficial (brand awareness, for sure, and positive impressions certainly can push people to buy what they pirate).

Yeah, not a very real threat then. I'd still like to heard some more about the frequency of getting caught by this as I've never heard about this in the US before. I know there was (is?) a somewhat-similar system in France and maybe somewhere else but that's it. As far as I know, the system wasn't very successful in France, and the system there was way stricter than the one in the US. It was basically three strikes and it's over for your internet, I believe.

Anyway, to get back to the topic, I don't think Steam has any effect on pirated games. I'm pretty sure it used to but cracks have gotten smarter and last time I pirated a Steam game, I had absolutely no trouble with it. As for the benefits of Steam, you'll get multiplayer and Steam achievements, as well as Steam cloud, and that's probably it. There's some more too but that should be the biggest benefits. I'm ignoring the fact that you can, at least in some cases, play multiplayer even with pirated copies, but it's not at all convenient and cheaters are probably a problem.

Yeah, I'm interested too.

I don't pirate much, because I feel bad for the devs. Not because I'm afraid of getting caught and the consequences. It would be interesting to see if anyone here is was actually driven away from piracy because of the law, and not some moral dilemma. 

What about the friends lists? Can your friends see that you own pirated copies? Back in 2010 it seemed like my pirated copies didn't get recognized by Steam and thus didn't show up on my list of owned games, so my friends though I only played Mount & Blade Warband and Bad Company 2 while in reality I had dozens of pirated games installed on my PC. (this is maybe a minor issue, but still)

There are various ways around this...you just need a big fanbase to make it worth the trouble, like Call of Duty for example. 

I wouldn't be surprise if you could play CoD Ghost multiplayer illegally by now. 

Edit: sure enough...with a quick google search you can already play CoD Ghost online for free haha

To avoid trouble you should never connect Steam to an illegal game. I honestly don't know if its possible, but I don't think it's a good idea.

Sharing save files is as far as you should go.

I haven't pirated a game for a long time and the reason for this is simply Steam is usually more convenient now and so cheap that it just doesn't matter any more. The days of the pirate copy being superior to the legit copy due to restrictive DRM seem quite far away now.

My last memories of pirating games were the hassle of trying to get the game to work with a decent crack or having to put up with bugs until a crack for the patched version came out. Sometimes it worked, other times it was stressful trying to get it to work.

With Steam at least you don't have that hassle and it auto-patches/installs. Even mods are easier to install thanks to Steam workshop (at least for some games like Skyrim).

So basically, imo, its easier and more convenient to buy legit copies with services like Steam (gog.com is pretty good too) than pirate now.

I rarely pirate games anymore so I'm not sure, but I think your friends list will only show that you're playing a non-Steam game and that's all. Like I said, though, I don't know about that, and another reason for that is that I don't use the non-Steam game feature on Steam.