Here's a question. Why couldn't they just do both?

A random dude quotes statstics that are generally accepted as being true. (He wasn't the one making them up.) And yes, popular games selling 5 to 1 or 10 to 1 on consoles indicate show pervasive piracy is. A game sells 5 to 10x as much on a system where it can't be pirated. You can call it BS all you want, but the number of small developers who have suffered from piracy(want an example? check some of the other links in that same article, one of which is a small developer talking about the effects of piracy on his company) and have made clear how much damage it's doing, carries a lot more weight than "this is BS. I have spoken.

I especially like your last paragraph. Let me paraphrase is. "What you say is BS. I don't use matchmaking, so you need to do research." Oh wow, someone who hasn't used matchmaking in recent times (thus making you rather unqualified to compare it's current weaknesses to custom servers) decides I should do some research, when I'm the only one who actually linked soem data about piracy - and what's more, you apparently cherry picked a line where the writer expressed his opinion, when the article is has quotes from developers discussing actual piracy rates. Speaking of research, did you even read that before deciding it was invalid?

"Popular games?" Do you rea;ize CoD4 was utter shit MP with its levellig system and BioShock was inferior to System Shock 2. Maybe people jsut didn't want to play the games to begin with. PC gamers have a far higher standard than console gamers. If Halo was multiplatform it'd have had the same ratio, yet Valve and Blizzard come around d they have sales in the millions? Please, it's not pirating it's poor quality. Again, show me the damn statistics. A few hundred years ago it was widely believed that the sun rotated around the Earth too, even the damn Pope said it was true!

Just to clarify here:

http://torrentfreak.com/top-10-most-pirated-games-of-2008-081204/

Look at spore and the sims 2. I realize that it's old data now, but consider the fact that in the same time frame the top 2 games sold far many more millions than they were pirated in that same time frame. Now provide  numbers to contest that or stfu with your bullshit.

MOST people don't use matchmaking. They go to the same server they have selected and they play there. As pointed out above, it gives people a sense of community. In fact MOST PC gamers do that. Why do you think Valve added in a semi-proper server browser to L4D? Because people wanted it and didn't want their matchmaking bullshit.

"Popular games?" Do you rea;ize CoD4 was utter shit MP with its levellig system and BioShock was inferior to System Shock 2. Maybe people jsut didn't want to play the games to begin with. PC gamers have a far higher standard than console gamers. If Halo was multiplatform it'd have had the same ratio, yet Valve and Blizzard come around d they have sales in the millions? Please, it's not pirating it's poor quality. Again, show me the damn statistics. A few hundred years ago it was widely believed that the sun rotated around the Earth too, even the damn Pope said it was true!

Just to clarify here:

http://torrentfreak.com/top-10-most-pirated-games-of-2008-081204/

Look at spore and the sims 2. I realize that it's old data now, but consider the fact that in the same time frame the top 2 games sold far many more millions than they were pirated in that same time frame. Now provide  numbers to contest that or stfu with your bullshit.

MOST people don't use matchmaking. They go to the same server they have selected and they play there. As pointed out above, it gives people a sense of community. In fact MOST PC gamers do that. Why do you think Valve added in a semi-proper server browser to L4D? Because people wanted it and didn't want their matchmaking bullshit.

I love how nothing you've said is remotely backed up by your link. You give your own reasons for why CoD or Bioshock sold poorly on PC, (though experts - and the developers - would say piracy) with no basis. And then you list stats for a few games based on 1 year's bittorrent estimates. Reading the page you linked, Spore had 1.7 MILLION downloads within the first couple MONTHS of it's release. And you're using that to defend your claim that there's not much piracy? Or Assassin's Creed? I'll go off the stats from the page you listed  - It had a million pirated copies downloaded in '08. 700K of those were before it launched. It's first few months on the market, it sold 40,000 copies.

http://uk.gamespot.com/news/6195570.html

Pirated copies outnumbered those sold 17 to 1. and this game was critically acclaimed, it didn't suffer due to "poor quality." Are you done, or you want to make up some more excuses and link more vaguely relevant data to support it?

If you look at the numbers Spore sold 1 million day one alone. While those numbers are for the whole last 3 weeks. I don't feel I have to provide the CoD and BioShock data since you provided none of your own that conecerns piracy at all. If anything your data showed console agmers are fine with playing crap games.

Assassin's Creed and and the rest wee subpar games to games that have come out a decade ago. Hence the "poor quality." Maybe if hey released good games they wouldn't be pirated. Why arent any Valve or Blizzard games up there? Most of the ones I see are multi-platform and subpar, except for spore/sims which Hhave sold quite well. Again, show me good games being pirated more on PC than being sold then you can start using your bullshit facts to bac up what IW is doing.