lol man, think before you start writing. If u say 90 - 95 % that means that if u own 5 games u have to pirate 95.

come on, thats ridiculous, I myself always borrowed games from friends and recently also downloaded some, but to make up for the games i actually BOUGHT in my life ( about 50, maybe 20 fullprice ) i would need to pirate 950 games.

thats total BS !!!!!  maybe im not the common case, but many people dont pirate at all, but even the captain jack sparrows amongst us dont have such a % of pirate games. let's say captain jack owns counterstrike and WOW, maybe half life 2, so he needs to copay 97 games.

UNREALISTIC !!!!

I do have friends, but I don't pretend that my friends are representative of the whole population. No one has enough and diverse enough friends to be able to claim that.

Think about it this way. Lots of people use their computers just for browsing the Internet, listening to music and chatting online. For doing that you don't need any pirated software, since most PCs (in Europe and USA at least) are sold with legal copies of Windows which allow you to do all that. Many people also use Microsoft Office to create some documents, but not everyone pirates them. So for many people they'll pirate one or zero programs.

Whatever you think by looking at your friends doesn't say much about the true percentage.

I only claimed that the overall PC piracy rate is well above 41%.

The 90-95% number was based on my anecdotal evidence, an average estimated of the people Ive met through the years, not necessary representative of the whole world population. Most of the people Ive met (friends, classmates and so on) practically dont buy games at all, they pirate everything. These people have usually "by accident" bought 1 or 2 games (remember we're talking PC games here). That's the majority of ppl, their filosophy is "0 paying".

In my own personal case I estimate it's at least 90%. I started PC gaming in 1995, 14 years ago, and all the games I paid for r in my profile (plus maybe a couple i forgot the names of) - that's 22 games or 1.6/year. But yet I have at least 15 PC games per year that suddenly just "pop up" on my hard drive every once in a while.

 Good point, but those with OEM software drown in the statistics. One copy of Windows every four years is negilible compared to 50 games/programs downloaded though torrents by a pirate in the same time span.

95% of the stuff i have downloaded illegally i would have NEVER bought. The companies did not loose out at all.  I think it does hurt sales but not to the degree they say it does (By counting every pirated version as a potential  sale)

nobody was going to buy that stuff in the first place.

Here is the problem. Most of the piracy is for software that isnt released in those regions so really these figures don't matter much at all. I don't see how a company can lose money in a region they don't release their product in.

I don't like the piracy debate because the human nature is so cheap and dishonest. No one admits that piracy is all around them, and u save a lot of money by doing it.

It's always easier to blame someone else (the big evil money hungering corporations or that most games are so crap so u wouldnt buy them anyway).

You have a thing agaist PC gaming? Something that has been the foundation of all console gaming to date and the foundation of gaming in general? Dispite all my love towards Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft. PC Gaming has brought leaps and bounds to the gaming industry the likes that the consoles cannot hope to reach anytime soon.

That being said, this is terrible news. But it begs ask the question, is this piracy being caused by a belief that PC software is too expensive? Or the ease it is to aquire pirated software? Either way piracy is wrong and I personally enjoy holding onto my boxes of my games as I obtain them but I know many people in real life who have pirated software. My brother for example, got a pirated copy of Windows Vista with his brand new computer. Would you believe that?

More like the consoles ar a decade behind the PC when it comes to features. LBP's stage creator? I'm pretty sure that's been around for well over 2 decades. FPS game frenzy? That happened around '98 with Quake, HL, UT, etc. Multiplayer? Been around for decades as well and there's so many features now on PC multiplayer it's sickening in comparison, can't vbelieve people actually PAY to play online on consoles still.... It's just an overall disaster.

OT:

I do pirate any game that comes out and movie, but that's more along the lines of protection against the amazing amout of shit that has come out in the past few years. For instance, the last good single-player FPSes on any platform were HL2 (and episodes), and FEAR. If I haven't been doing this I would have actually paid for shsit like the new PoP, Crysis, Far Cry 2, etc. This goes for other genres as well, I've only bought (and subsequently, finished) about 4 games in the past year, year and a half.