He's actually referring to me - And I got "owned pretty hard" because he didn't fully read anything I wrote, ignored statistics, links, and developer quotes, and pretty much blocked his ears and yelled "LALALA NO PIRACY ANYWHERE LALALA."

I remember reading a similar article to that stardock game - where a company had 200,000 more people playing the game on their servers than they had copies sold.

Fortunately, industry experts (like Vlad) are here to assure us that piracy is not a big problem, and none of your fancy "numbers" are going to change that.

You gave a very weak example of this argument.  I think it is actually the reverse.  A pirated copy (or download) equals more than one lost sale.  If it's been pirated, it can be spread to any friends, family, etc. without any of them having to buy it themselves.  If one friend pirates it, then other friends play it and want to play with him, that friend can just burn them a disc with the cracked game and have instant free gaming.  Most people don't even see PC game pirating as a bad thing, just like song downloads.

1) PC haters lacking valid arguments?

2) You are totally right, if older multiplayer PC games offered them, their removal is a regress, and a serious one, as gamers appreciated them.

The Stardocks guys that had to work over a holydays week-end to fix their servers because they were exploding due to the number of pirates on them beg to differ............

PS : if it didn't affect sales don't you think you would get bigger sales on the PC than on the consoles for games where the PC features are actually good ( like CoD4).

I mean we keep getting told there are hundreds of millions of PC users while the numbers of consoles users are much lower, yet despite that games that are similar on both mediums sells more on consoles and piracy isn't the reason ?( and to boot it the console version is actually more expensive than the PC version by 10$)

Ok, and if piracy didn't exist, would these individuals go on and do something else with their time, like take up stamp collecting, or create music?  I would wager most pirates would end up feeling the need to buy SOMETHING, if they had to.  They are just part of a culture where it is easy to not have to pay for anything, so they will play with this game or that, and get some hours of enjoyment out of it, and not pay anyone a cent.  They have the mentality of being freeloaders and gloating in how they rip off the system.  In this, I am NOT speaking of individuals who do this to try stuff out first and buy, just the individuals who life a live as a leech. 

Because you will only find recently released titles on the top 10 lists of pirate sites.

As a title gets older more people have it available and you can find it on every torrent or even get it from a friend and you don't need to visit the best site to get hold of it.........

I also wonder how much CoD4 sold in that  same period as well as how many of those downloads were from places where getting the game legally is also next to impossible (lack of publisher, few retail stores, etc.).

So only recently released games get pirated, yet games manage to sell for years. Ultimately there are far more sales than there are pirated copies, especially if the game is not some shitty game like Crysis.

There is a reason why they are the most popular torrents, because they are used by the most people, so your argument as people finding it on other trackers is actually kinda pointless....

@Jereel

I wish you had provided ANY statistics that I could have ignored, sadly you didn't.

Where exactly did I say that ?

Once many people have a pirated version of a game you don't need to get hold of it through a site that tracks downloads is all I said...

Getting it from your budy next door is still pirating ( and is a lot more convenient and faster, college campus for example don't look kindly on their networks users having huge uploads which you typically need to get good torrent download speed).

you really have no idea how a torrent file works... a single file can be uploaded to all those sites. All stats tracked for 1 file will translate into the majority due to all seeds and peers being connected to a tracker that downloads from ONE point. AND, it doesnt matter what the main file for the torrent is named, MW2 crack, MW2 pirated, MW2 steal, etc could easily be all the same torrent named differently due to the main URL for the files being ONE TRACKER location.