Why don't they do that same analysis now? Everyone knows piracy is frontloaded but sales on the PC stretch out for years and years.

Why even bring up piracy? The most successful games are also the most pirated. Piracy didn't stop Guild Wars from selling 5 millions, or Sins of a Solar Empire from selling 1 million, or Bejeweled from selling 20 millions, etc...

 Tens of millions of dollars, not units. Noone is saying CoD4 sold tens of millions of units on PC, but Acti pockets somewhere in the range of 30-40$ per unit sold, so if it sits at around 6% on PC and that = 500k units, where PC sales should be in the 15-20% of console range... for easy math lets just triple the figure and say a million sales, or roughly speaking somewhere in the range of 30-40 million dollars lost give or take. Very rough numbers to be sure, but worst case its definately over 10million$ lost... best case - could be as high as 60-70 million$ over the course of a couple years... so its not chump change.

 As for piracy, that has no relevance here. Unless you are going to try and assert that the general piracy rate has changed very recently and very drastically and there is no evidence to support that.

You kind of opened yourself up to it. But. Guild Wars is an MMO. Different Genre, different results. They don't need to worry about piracy because you have to connect to their server to play (anything sembling an authentic experience). Bejeweled tailors to a casual audience which really has no need or knowledge of piracy. If you honestly think that piracy shouldn't be brought up, then you are gravely mistaken.

If you absolutely had to pay to play Modern Warfare 2, and there was absolutely no way to pirate the game, then it would have sold an easy 2-2.5 million extra copies.

Guild Wars isn't an MMO in any way. Please do better research.

Sorry Dorbin , most of your assertations are incorrect. Guildwars for one is not a true MMO, its a single and multiplayer RPG with a very very fancy lobby. It does not run on a subscription model, and you can emulate things pretty darn well.

 Piracy should not be brought up, unless you can make at least some sort of valid claim that piracy rates are drastically different in the case of MW2 than across other games...

 And your assertation that an unpiratable MW2 would have sold 2 million plus, is frankly silly. SafeDisc might want folk to believe that, but very few other people do. Instead of bothering to rewrite what has been written elsewhere, I will simply ask where on earth that number came from.

AND if the costs of the PC approximate what it generates in revenue, then Activision crunches the numbers and decides it just isn't worth it going that route.  They may find that having an integrated development route, with uniformity between products across all platforms, is the way to go.  And, if it doesn't sell well, they may decide not to support it at all, particularly when they feel they can make more money pursuing other things.  The moment you need to support having dedicated servers, and lose revenue from driving people to a matchmaking service the way Bliizzard runs there, you decide not to go with dedicated servers.  They get dropped for good.  And then you think of World of Warcraft and try to position the PC version as something you are able to extract monthly fees from, the way you do with World of Warcraft.  You make Modern Warfare a massive multiplayer gamer, for PC users. 

Based on what I have read Activision doing, this is on their mind.  Forego the hardcore community, and either have the PC version map to the console version, or do a new version, which is massive multiplayer.  Of course, the hardcore PC gamer is in an uproar over it, but Activision is thinking maximizing revenues above this, by killing off piracy to boot, and also keeping development costs.  This, in the mind of executives feels like a big win for them.

In a marketspace that isn't the same size as consoles, which has a big issue of piracy.  Consoles don't.  The industry is cracking down on used game sales, as opposed to piracy.  And, in terms of maximizing revenues, that is what counts to the videogame industry on a whole, and I am including PC game development in this.

It might or might not.  One can't be sure of this.  It is possible that the number of sales for MW2 would be only marginally more.  The pirates might move on to an easier target.  Console gamers have showing a willingness to pay $60 a pop, with used game sales being where the pirate tendency has gone that normally shows up in PC gamers. 

There is a concept that people need to understand here, that being the concept of companies firing customers.  In a time where a type of customer ends up being a burden, and isn't sufficiently profitable, a company will look to abandon them in favor of the more profitable customer.  If consoler gamers prove to be the more profitable customer for companies, they will end up treating PC gamers as less and less important.  If they can then generate revenues from selling content that used to be free, they do this.  And this is what might be happening now with PC gaming.   The PC gamer isn't given extra perks they are used to, starting with Modern Warfare 2 as an example.

@richardhutnik

and you are defending this because...?