Anti piracy methods of any kind do nothing to stop piracy. Never have, never well. Pirates just strip it all out and aren't effected by any of it. It only effect honest consumers, often turning them into pirates out of necessity since more then once, over zealous anti piracy measures have made honestly purchased games unplayable by those who bought them. Remember when HL2 launched. Yeah, the only people playing were the pirates, not the people who bought it who couldn't connect to the authentication servers. I know many people who bought the game, then had to download the pirated version just so they could play the f'in thing.
Piracy has NO EFFECT on sales. This BS that publishers give about lost sales is exactly that, BS. It's a made up theory of an assumption that everyone who downloaded it 'would have bought it' otherwise. Uh, no. Most of the people who downloaded it only did so because it was free. Both the GameCube and the PS3 had NO piracy for over the first 3 and a half years of their lives. Guess what the market's own numbers showed? Attach rates remained the same as those of pirated consoles during that time. No increase of sales. Only the people who buy games bought the games, as always, and the rest didn't despite that being the only option. The fact is, only so many people ever will buy games, and the rest never will. While an optimum anti-piracy measure might stop 'the rest' from ever playing it, it won't gain you any sales because as they already proved in the previous two generations, they will simply never buy it and go without it all together. Look at it this way... Ever eat a free sample of something you knew you were never going to buy? Ever go to some kind of event that you got free tickets to that you would never would have gone to otherwise? Same thing.
It's a money loser, even at best. How much money will one spend just to deny unauthorized people from playing your game for the sake of principle? Money that could be spent making games, or paying your people more. Even if you could argue that it might somehow increase sales, which we all know it doesn't, but if it did, would it be enough sales to offset the cost involved? Isn't the ultimate point to 'make money'? Isn't spending money on things that offer zero and/or negative returns called wasting money? They complain about the lost profit of lost sales, but not about the cost of failed attempts to stop it? Programmers complain about the bonuses they didn't get because of piracy. No, blame your company for spending your bonus money trying to vainly stop the pirates that aren't even effecting sale numbers.
Also, the whole idea that it is theft needs to be done away with. Imagine if your car was stolen, but when you came out, your car was still there. Imagine if your wallet was stolen, but when you reach in your pocket, your wallet was still there. That's piracy. Nothing is being "stolen" from anyone. It's not about theft, it's not about money, it's not about sales, it's about an arrogance that exists exclusively in the software world, and always has since day one. Content control. How dare you see what I did without compensating me directly for it. Same reason they are against the sale of used games, which is a strange position because even the movie, music and print industries aren't so selfishly moronic, despite them all being able to state the same arguments of intellectual property providing a user experience as the software industry does.
Even when piracy isn't available as an excuse, they will still complain. Remember Jeff Minter's rant about Space Giraffe. Full of himself arrogant jerk upset that his XBLA game wasn't getting the sales he though it deserved. Wasn't being stolen. Just no one wanted to play the crap. He's not alone in his self righteousness being blinded by his own grandeur. By and large, most programmers seem to exhibit those traits. That whatever they do is great, so if sales are low the problem must be stupid customer that don't appreciate it or piracy or whatever excuse they can float that doesn't revolve around admitting their game sucks, or at the least isn't as good as they think it is. Listen, if we listened to the parents, then every baby is beautiful, but you know what, there are ugly babies, that the couple that made it have a biased interest in not seeing it doesn't make it any less true.
Ultimately, if you want to limit piracy and maybe bump up sales a bit, then you need a new approach.
1) No DRM. It doesn't work and only hurts your honest customers.
2) Try before you buy. No, not some 5 minute demo of the best part of just a handful of new releases. Let me sit down and play ANY and EVERY game I want to try for a while so I can get the true feel for it. Xbox360 tried to do this a little bit, most demos were too short and not a big selection of games. But at least they tried. It was enough to show me Tropico 4 was junk and not to buy it.
3) Quit releasing garbage to make a quick buck. Way to many games truly suck. Way to many games rely blindly on a branding or a name with no real fun experience to back it up.
4) Refunds. Nothing sucks more then wasting your money on something that you can't even return. The idea that this is about preventing piracy is BS in today's world. If I wanted to pirate it, I'd just download it, I wouldn't go to the store, wait in line, buy it, come home, copy it, go back to the store, wait in line, return it and come home again. Can download it in less time without wasting gas and effort. Mail order buy & returns are even worse. Besides, most people 'can't' copy anything anyways because of the proprietary disc formats being used. This is why #3 is a such a problem. They don't have to make a good game, they just need to get enough people to buy it before word gets out because once they got your money, they have it and you're SOL.
5) Quit trying to interfere with the sale of used game sales. That I don't want it anymore and am selling it to someone else doesn't concern you at all. You have no right to double dip. x number of products were made and sold. You already got your cut from those sales. When all is said and done, you still have the same x number of products that you already made your profit from and same number of owners.
6) Sell your games at a reasonable cost. $60 a pop is hard to justify. Especially for many games today that only last a few hours. Don't want to hear about your costs. I don't expect you to license copyrighted music, I don't expect you to hire big name Hollywood voice actors, I don't expect you to license character likenesses. That is your choice, not my problem. Some people there must be a basement musician, let them compose the music for the game. Some people there must have decent speaking voices, let them do the voice overs. Some people there must not be hideously ugly, scan them for characters.
All of these points combined conspire to give honest people no reason to spend their money. If I'm going to waste $60 bucks, I rather do it by picking up a hooker or some drugs. At least those two options would be fun. Don't want to hear about reading reviews as a way to save my money. Some reviews tend to be biased because of direct and indirect sponsorship (how many times has Yahtzee released a positive review of a game just because this site was running site wide advertising of the same game at the time, only to retract it in a later episode?) Even the big boys like Gamespot and IGN aren't beyond influence. Besides, I don't care about the opinion of others, I only care about my opinion. As I like & hate games the majority likes and I like & hate games the majority hates. No rating or opinion by anyone else means anything to me. I'm sure I'm not the only one this applies to.
Bottom line, it's all BS. Every single thing about it.
