This perfectly illustrates the vicious cycle of piracy. Dedicated servers were removed, presumably in an attempt to combat piracy. This resulted in outrage among PC gamers. Now that the game has already been cracked, the developers can point to the piracy rate and claim that it justifies even stricter methods of protection in the future. At the same time, gamers point to that same number and say it illustrates the consequences of withholding features in an attempt to reduce or delay piracy. Neither is completely right, and neither is entirely wrong.
There are certainly some people who will pirate a game rather than pay for it if possible, regardless of their feelings toward the company. However, there are others who won't pirate it at all . There are some who claim to have pirated the game over the dedicated server hullabaloo (and, I'm sure, many more who wave that flag to justify piracy.) Several here have argued that the best way to protest IWs decision to drop dedicated server support is to simply not buy the game. In principle, I agree.
However, boycotters aren't reflected in piracy rate in any way: they neither purchase nor download the game. There's no direct way to tell how many people are actually boycotting the game. Some of those who've signed the various petitions have certainly pirated it, out of cheapness, protest, or both. Like in other instances of piracy, the honest dissenters are left out: pirates generate much more coverage and discussion, and often have access to games with the contested features hacked in [http://www.destructoid.com/modern-warfare-2-gets-dedicated-servers-via-hack-155250.phtml]. Those who've chosen to wait, by contrast, virtually never get serious mention in the wake of disappointing sales figures, and their original complaints are often forgotten as well.
This is especially disturbing for a feature like dedicated server support, as other developers are already hinting that they may not continue to offer that feature [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/95955-John-Carmack-Says-No-Dedicated-Servers-for-Rage] in upcoming games. If they aren't convinced that sales will suffer, or that it will be ineffective in combating piracy, there's no reason that they won't drop support. Sadly, this means that piracy may actually be an effective form of protest, as it would show the weakness of feature removal as a method of combating piracy. Of course, that brings us back to the start of this whole mess, and is another strike against the PC as a desirable platform for development.
I would be interested to see the difference in the % of sales from PC buyers and piracy rate between MW1 and MW2 once the dust has settled. It'd be possible to estimate the number of actual boycotters from that.
On a mostly unrelated note, it's worrying to see so many posters conflate piracy and theft. Piracy is a copyright violation, not a form of larceny. Stealing a video game is what this guy [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/96119-Man-Steals-100-Copies-of-Modern-Warfare-2] did, pirating a game is creating, distributing, or downloading and unlicensed copy. It might seem purely semantic, but the distinction is important. For one, it's much easier to prevent someone from holding up a GameStop than it is to prevent someone from torrenting a game. As illustrated in the article above, stealing a hundred copies of a game is newsworthy. By contrast, a hundred thousand downloads might generate press attention.
The reason, of course, is that piracy doesn't deprive the rightful owner of the pirated good of anything, while theft does. To compare game piracy to stealing the food from children's mouths or jacking someone's hubcaps is to misunderstand the problem. The issue with piracy arises from the lost sales that the pirated games represent, not the total number of pirates. If, somehow, no one who would otherwise buy a game pirates it, there's not a financial problem on the part of the developers. The same is not true for theft, which of course leaves someone liable for the cost of replacing the stolen goods. I'm not defending piracy in any way, but it is important to understand the distinction if we're to have a coherent discussion of piracy.
