Nicely written. As always, good to read something that helps keep one's ego in check and hold back blaming anyone but yourself to see what you can actually do to aid yourself and the people you work with and for.
I'm thinking that perhaps releasing unfinished games is part of a strategy against piracy. Gamers always want the most recent, shiniest version of a game. One of the greatest advantages of owning a legitimate copy is the automatic update or otherwise seamless patching of a game. Pirates on the other hand are impeded from patching and usually will have to wait for weeks until a new crack is released, being stuck with all the old bugs for much longer than legitimate users.
If it is, then it's a very lousy one. You can be quite certain that a fair amount of pirates can be surprisingly patient if it means getting something for 'free'. Not to mention that new patches are cracked fairly quickly too, heck even DLC doesn't take that long to crack. So really, rather than 'hurting' people who don't even contribute to the industry with such tactics as DRM and such, it'd be far wiser for developers to instead focus on the part that *does* contribute, that *does* in the end purchase their games with...oh I don't know...making games that work upon launch for example?
This is exactly why Ubisoft's DRM for example was moronic. The pirates were patient enough to wait until the cracks eventually came through, whereas in the meantime the loyal customers who actually paid good money for the game potentially wound up with exactly what Russ Pitts describes in this article here - a game that did not work.
The reasoning for it may have sounded as a noble one - to combat the evil tides of piracy on the high seas of teh interwebz. But the result and effect was funnily enough very similar to what this article describes. A game that did not work when the servers hiccuped due to the authentication. Meh...sidetracked myself here with this line of thinking but...the gist is pretty much the same as the vibe I got from this article. Look to thine own yard before pointing out how much the neighbour's yard sucks.
