[bluestarultor]

Normally, everyone would know what I'd be saying here, but you'll all surely be surprised to know I've had an epiphany recently and have changed my stance slightly. I've come to realize not all pirates can be painted with the same brush.

Pirates, in a way, can be compared to gamers, another paint bucket thrown at a crowd of random people. Some of the same logic can even be applied. You have casual pirates, hardcore pirates, collectors, testers, ones who do it because there's no other way of getting the product (such as ones that have gone out of print), people who bought a remake and got curious about the original, some who bought the game and then got the DRM-free version, and zillions of others.

With such a diverse population, I've finally realized that piracy isn't an act of entitlement so much as it's often just a thoughtless one. And there are ways to avoid it that really aren't all that hard. Demos, for one. Heck, there's the old DOS-era trick where the full game itself can act as a demo if you don't have a password or other sort of key. By putting part of your game out there for people to test, you avoid people playing through the whole game to see if they like it.

But to tear myself away from that topic change, long story short, my stance on pirates has softened a little. I still hate the everliving tar out of hardcore pirates, but I also realize that those people wouldn't be buying the game anyway.

Basically, to bring this around to the topic, I half-agree with Brian. I just think the creators need to step up and do the beneficial work the pirates are doing for them. The best way to limit piracy is to make it redundant. He's right in that trying to stop piracy is like trying to make the Earth spin retrograde. I just think it's the responsibility for producers, if they want to limit piracy, to dissuade the non-hardcore pirates, i.e. the ones who might actually pay for the product and/or care about the producer being able to produce more. The world is full of assholes, but to be honest, it's quite a bit more full of decent people. By winning those away from the ones conducting the war march, pretty much everyone wins.