Just off the top of my head- people travelling, people on holiday, armed forces personnel serving abroad, people with flaky isps, people with no internet at all (a pretty significant number), people who have maxed out their bandwidth limit. None of these would potentially be able to play a game they've paid for.

Any chance you could get off your high horse? What's it to you what people spend their money on, you sanctimonious arse.

@Zorro. Where is the evidence there are any dollar losses at all? As I have posted numerous times the studies on piracy have reached the conclusion that the cost to the industry is either statistically insignificant or in fact causes more copies to sell.

Something you're forgetting about the way the worlde works - if people can't buy something because they have to spend their money on the essentials that is as much a lost sale to the developers as it is if that very same person pirated the game.  In the grand scheme of things it is no loss whatsoever to developers when that person pirates their game because they were already not able to buy it.

It's not that the retail version has lost out to the pirated version, though, it's that it has lost out to the market at large.  They have lost to the food industry, or some other provider of essential goods.  Chasing these people down is a complete waste of time because there's not a whole lot to take from them. There is no value gained by taking the copy back, if they could, and if they don't have money to buy games there's nothing to sue them for.  In reality "losing a sale" to someone who couldn't buy the product in the first place is the same as losing a sale to someone who could have but chose not to because of disinterest.  Neither were going to put up the cash, neither is a lost sale.

As has been mentioned by others, psychologically people WANT to pay for goods, sometimes they just can't.  Whether or not piracy occurs as result of that is irrelevant to the developer's bottom line.

It is also a good thing that some people simply cannot pay for the game could play the game and love it and aware of the game and the developers. That same person could be potential future customers that came to love the games s/he played and finally able to afford.

That is exactly how Microsoft become a giant as they are now. They took advantage of the piracy and their softwares became popular and dominant. But that's going off topic so stop now :)

On this point I'll say this - 41% of software worldwide is pirated.

That aside, what the piracy rate by nation shows is that in places where it is affordable, where people have the means to make the purchase, they uverwhelmingly prefer to buy the product.  Ideally everyone would buy the product, but when a person does not have the means it is of no consequence whatsoever to the developers if they pirate.  It's hard to lose a sale that could not have ever happened.

Whether you believe morally that they should not pirate is completely irrelevant.  That will neither stop them nor empower the developers.  The fact of the matter is that it has no real impact on the developers if a sale couldn't have happened regardless, and it is wasteful to put efforts into stopping piracy if it doesn't.  Anti-piracy measures haven't worked yet, and to make matters worse these attempts at stopping piracy frequently end up harming the legitimate customer instead. 

Frankly, I can't understand why you'd so vehemently support people that would inconvenience you in exchange for not stopping people from getting a free ride one bit.  Even if you think the freeloards should be stopped, at best anti-piracy measures only keep a game out of their hands for a few weeks, and at worst they have led to hardware damage and security issues (StarForce) that could have cost customers hundreds or even thousands in damages.

As a consumer, to me, that's disheartening.  I just say "why bother?"  They can't stop it, they HAVE hurt loyal customers while trying, and in the end they've just flushed millions down the drain for absolutely nt gain.  A loss, in fact, since the DRM issues are exactly why Spore and other games have ended up being so heavily pirated.  If they wanted to not lose millions of dollars they should've have stuck to copy protection and cut their loses.

Yea I totally do not agree with this system. I'd just minimise the game and run it in background and finish it off in a week. If you really do wanna go around the system its not that hard- sure its inconvenient. Frankly there is no fool proof piracy measure. But there are stupid ones. This is one of them.

Heres another piece of commercial suicide. Tell everyone the Assassins Creed 2 DLC is gonna cost 320 Microsoft Points and they list it for 99999 points

You're missing the point. You wouldn't have a gaming PC or console for that matter to play games on, pirated or otherwise.

How does everyone pirate games these days? They download them. Pretty tough to do without a) a PC and b) an internet connection.

Sure you can always find sources that will sell you pirated copies of games, but paying for bootlegs in the days of file sharing for the convenience of having someone steal something for you is a pretty odd concept.

If you think people don't have access to the internet while travelling, you're living in the dark ages. I would hope that most people on vacation would be doing something other than playing the same games they could be playing at home, barring a gaming convention where internet connectivity would be about the last problem anyone would be having. Armed forces serving abroad get their internet service provided free of charge assuming you're not in some remote F.O.B. with limited communications where you would probably have more pressing concerns than playing video games. Service members duty stationed abroad at any permanent installation can subscribe to an ISP like anyone else stationed CONUS.

I guess people without any sort of internet connection are SOL. They can't play WoW either.