Thanks newtekie for being the boogie man all publishers fear. You know the one that makes us paying customers suffer for your cheapness and disrespect. :shadedshu
It has nothing to do with cheapness or any amount of respect.
I have spent thousands on PC games in my lifetime, from good games to shit games, I've bought them all.
Now, I pirate everything, if it is good, I'll buy it when it goes on sale. I will not pay more then $40 for a game, no game is worth that.
Game publishers continue to push out shit games, that are usually bug filled and require patches to run properly,
if they even decide to patch the game, forcing paying customers to be their beta testers, and have pushed the level of gameplay way down, both in quality and playtime.
The idea that the pirates are the cause of DRM is flawed. The publishers are the reason DRM exist. They give BS reasoning that every pirated game would be a sale, which we all know isn't true, since 90% of pirates would not buy the game if they had to, so their claim that every pirated copy would have been a sale is total crap. Yet they use it all the time.
On top of that the publishers spend more time on DRM, and less time on actually making sure the game runs properly.
Just to give you some examples of how I, a paying customer, have been screwed, and what drove me to now pirate almost every game:
Prototype - Paid full price, a known flaw in the game causes it to play fine for about 2 minutes, then the framerate drop to 10FPS or less. The only way I can play the game is to disable every HID device possible, so I can't use my G15 LCD, my G7's resolution switching or extra buttons, and my battery backup gets disabled. There hasn't been even a peep from the developer or publisher about a patch, in fact the site for the game isn't updated, ever.
Doom 3 - Paid full price the day the game come out, and it sucked. You can't hold a flash light and a gun at the same time. Are you serious?
Just Cause 2 - Paid full price the day the game came out. I get random settlements that just aren't there. Visually they are, but my character just walks right through them. I have to resort to work arounds to fix this. Oh, and the story lasted a whole 4 hours of play time...yes I beat the sotry part of the game in 4 hours! That is pathetic.
Those are just three games off the top of my head that I've paid for and been ripped off by the publisher/developer.
And it is now a trend for publishers to pretty much completely drop the game, and ignore it completely, once it has been released. Virtually no game is patched anymore, it is just released, then the publisher/developer moves on to the next piece of shit. Want a prime example of this? Look at Metro2033, the game was released over 2 months ago, and the publisher hasn't even cared enough to updated the site to no longer say "Pre-Order Now". Thats right, the site hasn't even acknowledge the game was release...yeah that developer really deserves my money...
Sorry, developers and publishers have gotten totally lazy, and then they wonder why we don't want to pay their inflated prices...:shadedshu