The point raised about affordability brings to mind a related issue that's been bugging me for a while: what the heck happened to PC game demos? I've long ago resigned myself to the fact that PC games have zero resale value, due to CD keys and the ease of copying. That said, why the heck would I want to put down $60+ on a game when I have no idea if I'll even enjoy playing it? Most of the games I've purchased in the past few years have been bought on the basis of personal experience with the game, either through demos, playing on a friend's PC, or when those weren't available, torrenting. Game reviews are all fine and good for weeding out the obvious crap, but with most games, no reviewer is going to be able to tell me whether I'll enjoy a game or not. Only personal experience can give me that answer, and if I can't get that experience, I'm more apt to skip over that game entirely.
"Demos are fine and good," you say, "but making them takes time away from making the real game, and some things have to be cut when the budget gets tight, and blah blah blah..." I get that. But even if you don't have the time to make a demo, there's a solution that works well for many games, and adds minimal time to the project: the time-limited full-size demo. What this is, is a full, working copy of the game wrapped in a container that limits playtime, and has hooks to send you to the company website to purchase an unlock key. What this allows gamers to do is grab the full game, try it out, and if they like it, go punch in their CC#, get the code, and keep playing. Some companies have tried this already, and it works far more effectively than any amount of ads at convincing people to buy.
"But wait," you say, "that just makes it easy for the pirates to crack the game and distribute it over the net!" Yeah, but realistically speaking, nothing you do is going to significantly slow them down. Cory Doctorow and others have already explained this in regards to other DRM-ed media: Keeping a message secret is impossible when the receiver and the attacker are the same person. If your end goal is to get the game into the hands of gamers, then any attempts to lock it are going to fail, simply because you must provide the key in order to make the game playable.
There's been a lot of noise about how DRM is just the logical extension of CD keys, but it's just that--noise. The real purpose of CD keys is to serve as a reminder to the gamer that the game they're playing cost the devs a lot of blood, sweat, tears and cash to make, and if you like the game, you really ought to give them something for their efforts.
DRM, by contrast, says to the consumer: "You're a thief, you dirty thief. If you want to play our supremely awesome game, you have to prove you're not a thief, thief. And you have to keep proving it at whatever interval we deem necessary. Having trouble because our sh*t 3rd-party DRM breaks your computer? Tough! Don't want us phoning home, sending the-gods-know-what kind of information back to the mother server? Too bad, thieves have no rights!" It's a back-handed slap to the face of every person who loves gaming, and wants to express that love with their purchases.
Stardock, and companies like them, have realized something important: People respect you if you respect them. They release their games free of any DRM encumbrances, and focus their support on the paying customers. Your purchase gets you access to materials beyond the game itself, and plenty of help if something goes wrong with the game. They choose not to look at illicit copies as lost sales, because they rightly recognize that many people who torrent games would not have bought them in the first place. If a game doesn't do well, they don't whine and moan and blame "teh pirates", they recognize that it was a flop, and do what they can to keep their future games from flopping. The respect, and income, this has generated from the gamer community speaks volumes.
Make no mistake: real, dishonest-to-badness piracy is criminal behavior, and needs to be punished; but at the same time, the sheer amount of it speaks to a need that the official channels aren't filling. Illicit torrenting, though nowhere near as horrible, still speaks to a larger problem. The industry as a whole needs to step back and ask themselves: Why is there so much of this going around? An honest assessment of this just might lead to some surprising solutions.