Steam does seem to be the way forward, such tiny distribution costs compared with packaging, burning the discs, paying for SECUROM or other DRM designed to stop people buying your game anyway, getting it to stores, then months later, dealing with the returns, scratched discs, misprinted cd keys, etc.
With Steam its 'Here's $30, oh my new game is on the way, and it'll just work'.
I know there's people still anti steam, but when it comes to distributing a game cheaply and low risk, surely its one of the better ways forward.
I have to ask, why do we only hear from the huge successful companies about how piracy is destroying them, seems smaller companies are too busy knocking out good cheap games that work and just taking the money, instead of complaining that they're losing 95% of a mystical sum of money that never existed.
Introversion, the Darwinia guys, they KNOW Darwinia and Uplink and the like got the hell pirated out of them, but they still sold, and once it hit steam, sold well, too. They've probably lost tens of thousands to piracy, but they prefer to look to the sales, not the imagined losses. They're not happy about piracy, who would be , about having your creation stolen from you, but they're still queueing up more to come and say the PC is their favourite platform. (Go buy Multiwinia!).
Lets not forget Popcap, Bigfish Games etc, are all doing just fine too, despite games like Bejeweled and Peggle being on just about every PC in the world. In fact because of that, because if 1% of people who had played peggle paid for it, they're doing ok for cash! ( was a masterstroke , slipping it into the Orange Box, too.)
Yes, piracy hurts the industry, yes piracy loses the games company money, I agree.
To stop releasing games on PC because piracy happens is like disconnecting from the internet forever because you got rickrolled. There's bad things out there, there's lot more good stuff, like honest game players who want to buy your game (but maybe don't want to have to move into EA's offices and play it with a security guard watching when they do want to play it).
As for second hand PC games, I'd be amazed if more than say, 5% of all PC games see a second person. What they seem to be getting at is 'here, look at this new game, try it out while you're here, mate' and going 'omg he's played it, he owes us $50'.
Also, as the above guy stated, demos, don't hide it behind the hype and expect us to hand over sizable piles of cash blind, let us see what we're getting.
