Exactly, you start off by buying games but as they become more and more troublesome just to be able to utilise their product and the companies seem to become more reluctant to believe you are a customer and not just a pirate you will lose faith in them. What started off with people buying games and when they didnt work etc.. getting them illegally will eventually turn around and more and more people will just skip the paying money part. I do not play any EA games anymore because of this reason, I had a bad experience and decided to boycott that company. I also avoid starforce for a similar reason(is starforce still around?)

I believe the industry is fighting piracy the wrong way. You want to entice people back to legal ways of getting the games. If they could make a copy-protection which did not interfere in any way with legit customers that would be fine, but they are making life more difficult for honest customers just to protect their profits. The way it is now, most copy-protection is no more effective than simple cd-keys yet a lot more invasive. As well it is probably a lot more expensive for the company and possibly the user too if they decide to pass on the extra costs.

True, but what I was getting at more was the occurrence of lockups or disabling of non-related software.  Most of us in the know have heard these claims for a long time now.  SecuROM continues to be prevalent.  That's all I'm getting at.

Appropriate methods of DRM have been talked about to death and will continue to be hashed out.  However, making silly claims that extremely popular games are garbage and aren't selling because of DRM is just ludicrous.

It is quite ludicrous, currently. However the way the industry is using these DRM and copy-protection is not helping. Anyone who stops buying games from a company because of their use is very unlikely to ever go back. And as more and more people become aware of these systems they will themselves stop buying games, if this was not bad enough as more and more people start to dislike DRM and copy-protection more and more people will start to make anti-copyprotection statements and increase awareness on the internet. The problem will increase exponentially. They are pushing a small minority of their target audiance away while doing absolutely nothing to get them or anyone else back. As internet piracy becomes more and more common across the internet these companies will eventually start to see diminishing returns. It is an unsustainable business model. Basically all you have to do is piss someone off once and they are probably going to be gone forever and intrusive or restrictive copy-protection systems are quite an effective way to piss people off.

I would say don't pirate anything, just don't buy crappy games. Also make sure you buy good games.

But I know that isn't realistic to expect from a world where its simply EASIER to be a pirate than a legitimate user and the legit user gets treated like an idiot.

I can almost see the people laughing at the common sense in that post.

You are exactly right. It is becoming faster and easier to use a pirate copy of the game than a genuine copy. Young people today use the internet to download more and more, in their mind there is nothing wrong with it. They do not consider IP as something you buy. As these young pirates grow up and become voters, society will start to change more and more towards piracy. It is happening. Copyprotection is not doing anything.

And using copyprotection is not helping. Take spore for axample. A cracked version of the game was available to download an entire day before the release date and it had no DRM. Not only can pirates install the game more than 3 times, unlike genuine owners, they also got it earlier than them, and for free. As more and more people lose faith in the game industry they will turn to piracy to get their games.

Try as hard as you can but a pirate group will just crack the copyprotection. The group is probably a bunch computer programmers and computer engineers anyway, they know what they are doing. So you have a pirate copy with no copyprotection and genuine copies with copyprotection. Which people are affected? The legitimate owners or people who download for free off the internet?

 The game looks "pretty" ... but the gameplay is too limited, easy & repetitive -- before the Space Age. And then ...

The irony is that they recently released a first patch ... and if you visit the various forums, you learn that a lot of people who had experienced no problems with version 1.0 now have a patched version which crashes !

My version 1.0 works fine.   But I'm not a « tween » anymore ... so I'll invest more time & energy into Demigod.