That is so many levels of stupid, I can’t even begin to explain it.

Murder kills people. You never see them again.

Burglary takes things away from people. You never see them again.

Carjacking takes cars from people. You never see them again.

Piracy copies files from one person to another. There’s nothing lost. You can claim “Oh well lost sales and blah blah blah” but “lost sales” isn’t actually a thing. There is no way to determine whether someone would have ever bought the game or not. Look at how indie devs have dealt with piracy. They release their games for a good price and treat piracy as free publicity. And guess what. It fucking works.

As for why I didn’t mention rape, that’s an entirely different ballpark from every other crime you listed.

Using your “logic” we should also believe:

Murder isn’t the problem, your inability and unwillingness to adapt to it is.

Burglary isn’t the problem, your inability and unwillingness to adapt to it is.

Rape isn’t the problem, your inability and unwillingness to adapt to it is.

Carjacking isn’t the problem, your inability and unwillingness to adapt to it is.

etc.

Rationalization of ANY criminal act just leads to rationalization of ALL criminal acts.

‘It can take weeks for a PC cracker to reverse engineer DRM code and release a patch and then this has to be redone every time the game updates.’

Weeks no; Skyrim as a recent example which uses Steamworks DRM was cracked in barely an hour after release and the patch was also shortly afterwards.

FYI: I have no association with the scene/crackers etc. Merely a keen eyed observer who doesn’t like Steam for lack of re-saleability of titles after my use of them keen to play Skyrim =)

There have also been cases where games have been cracked and released before their official street dates also (I can’t think of any examples right now though but will hunt for some if you really need me to).

In short; only a few games take a few weeks to crack with the rest out just as quickly as (or even quicker than) retail copies.

‘Also, sorry for replying. ‘

Don’t be, it was a name DISQUS gave me because I used donotreply@ when I first used their commenting system on TF, the name kind of stuck with me since then =)

Fact of the matter is Ubisoft has a horrible reputation and it’s a given that no sensible person would voluntarily install a game from them on a PC without letting a hacker having had a bash at the game first to clean out the most obnoxious DRM.
Intrusive DRM is and remains the number 1 deal breaker for any savvy game consumer. Ubisoft did not abandon it’s DRM models with Assassins Creed. And therefore anyone who wants a Ubisoft game will grab the pirated version first and foremost. It’s that simple.

“You can never cater to pirates. Pirates are only looking for one thing.. and that’s free things.”

Your personal opinion – which has been disproven roughly half a dozen times by serious empirical studies. Pirates spend a lot more money on games and media than most other people do. In all forms of media it’s been shown that a good game will sell well – even when the business model is a “pay-what-you-want” option.

And of course it’s a given that the “freeloaders” who are bringing home the fact that “free to play” MMORPGS today are doubling the amount of income they are geting from this “freetard” crowd of yours.

“Most of the users of linux are probably in a setting where torrents are allowed anyhow. If you you factor in the estimated 29 million users of linux, that is still almost double the users of steam. Heck, if you combine the seeders and the leechers on the pirate bay, you have 32 million, almost the number of steam users.”

In what fevered mind did those leaps of logic develop? Linux is used worldwide and quite legitimately so, it has zip and nada to do with piracy, copyright infringement or, for that matter, steam.

You know, Jack…stop posting when you are drunk out of your skull – you make no sense whatsoever.

As for you not knowing how a market works and then trying to put that into a “logical” perspective…that works better if you use empirical data rather than the “facts” you came up with after exclusively asking your own opinion about the matter.

No, that market doesn’t work perfectly. It works well enough. The alternative you usually propose doesn’t work at all in human society. So. Pretty please, with sugar on top – stop co-opting the tired lines of old worn-out commissars as to why information control is a necessity.

I think he’s referring to the permanent “umbilical” the steam software uses to call home with s soon as you start your PC.