Quote: Originally Posted by DickNervous Yet, the Xbox360 version of Fallout 3 has already hit the torrents, but piracy is killing the PC? Have you looked at the list of games available on Pirate Bay lately? Way more console games. Sure, you have to hack your console to play them, but many people do. Here is a great article on PC Games, DRM, and Piracy. I really suggest you take the time to read that. In my opinion there are 4 categories of people who download pirated games: 1. Try-n-Buy 2. Because-I-Can 3. Pirates 4. DRM Haters The problem is that games are expensive, especially the good ones, and people need to know that they are going to enjoy the game before dropping $50-70 on it, especially the way the economy is now. And despite the widespread of broadband and the ability to mass distribute good demos of games so people can sample them, many companies don't do it. So the only way left to try a PC game before buying it is to pirate it. There are a large number of people who fall into this category, the "try-before-you-buy" pirates. These are the people who if they spend more than an hour or two playing the game will go out and buy it. Now granted, there are a percentage of the try-n-buy group that never do buy and play the game all the way through. These are most likely people who would buy the game, want to, but can't for whatever reason. Then you have the "because-i-can" pirates. These are people who never would have bought the game to begin with, and probably never even install it. They just download it to say they did. Then there are the people who, well, are pirates. They download the game knowing full well they are going to play it with no intention of paying for it. Finally there are the DRM haters. These are people who buy the game, get pissed off at the DRM, and download the no-cd hack or pirated version so they don't have to deal with the DRM. The only lost sales in this group honestly are the try-n-buys who don't buy the game. The others who pirate it were never going to buy it so it is not a lost sale. If companies want to sell more games they need to make games that appeal to a larger audeince (look at PopCap games for examples) and are good (look at Bioware for an example). Then they will make money no matter how many pirates there are.

could you supply a screenshot from piratebay with those statistics, i just checked mininova and pc pwned 360 by 30,000 torrents

with this economy i wouldnt be surprised if a lot of game companies pull similar stuff. join their linkedin group and ask some questions.