No - piracy will not kill PC gaming or development.
Keep in mind - years ago piracy in the PC realm was 10x worse than it is now. It was very easy to copy disks, and even more copy them to your hard drive. Hell, you could install a game, then copy the game folder to a disk, re-copy that to another PC, and it would work fine.
Back in the day, the only real counter measure in use was to randomly ask for a word or phrase from the game's manual - and this was easily dealt with by simply photo-copying the game manual. All this could be dealt with by the average user, with no technical skill needed or involved.
Today, though, due to the size of modern games, it practically requires an image of the game's disk passed via torrent, and some form of crack and/or serial number to bypass the disk-check and serial authentification. Breaking anti-piracy solutions now requires a user to have better technical knowledge to start, and even setting up a pirated game is beyond the skills of the general user.
Granted, it's nowhere near of a PITA as it is to pirate console games, which is why the PC piracy "market" continues to thrive . . . but it hasn't seriously hurt PC gaming yet, and I seriously doubt it ever will. At the most, it will slowly lead to crap-tastic PC games where the devs have spent more time cross-developing the titles for console as it's a more "secure" market (ATM). Or, it will lead to more draconian piracy counter measures.
Either way it'll hurt the PC market further, but it will not kill it.
Keep in mind - years ago piracy in the PC realm was 10x worse than it is now. It was very easy to copy disks, and even more copy them to your hard drive. Hell, you could install a game, then copy the game folder to a disk, re-copy that to another PC, and it would work fine.
Back in the day, the only real counter measure in use was to randomly ask for a word or phrase from the game's manual - and this was easily dealt with by simply photo-copying the game manual. All this could be dealt with by the average user, with no technical skill needed or involved.
Today, though, due to the size of modern games, it practically requires an image of the game's disk passed via torrent, and some form of crack and/or serial number to bypass the disk-check and serial authentification. Breaking anti-piracy solutions now requires a user to have better technical knowledge to start, and even setting up a pirated game is beyond the skills of the general user.
Granted, it's nowhere near of a PITA as it is to pirate console games, which is why the PC piracy "market" continues to thrive . . . but it hasn't seriously hurt PC gaming yet, and I seriously doubt it ever will. At the most, it will slowly lead to crap-tastic PC games where the devs have spent more time cross-developing the titles for console as it's a more "secure" market (ATM). Or, it will lead to more draconian piracy counter measures.
Either way it'll hurt the PC market further, but it will not kill it.
