Okay. I am sorely tired of reading all the banter in this thread. I'll read more after page 5 later... *bookmarks page*
I have worked in a very small software company(which also offers iPhone games development), so I have a very partial view of the behind-the-scenes of a similar industry.
Of course, by now, you know that making software is quite hard. I, personally, experienced such hell partly because we were using the RAD methodology. Although in a bigger company, they are always pressed for deadlines for the components that make the software. For the owner of the company, the longer it takes for a software to reach gold, the more they lose money. And even if they have hired more professionals just to get the software working as designed, it'll cost more money for them. And i'll restate that making software is quite hard. (And before you tell me, a game is also a piece of software.)
After long sleepless nights writing code, producing content, playtesting, etc., the software is finally finished, and with a large sum of money poured to it to become a product. The next logical step is, of course, to sell the product.
As a smart consumer, we always have to judge the product so that we could decide if we are purchasing it or not. It's like those testers for perfumes, we have to smell it so we can see if it's appropriate to our tastes(it's not the taste buds that will do the smelling, of course. Well, you know what I mean...). For a game, we have to experience the gameplay itself so that we could see if it will waste our time long enough before our next game purchase. Thus a demo of that game should be available for the consumers.
Unfortunately, most of the time the demo is much better than the whole game itself. So some of us will do something in order to experience the whole game without giving an arm and a leg, and assure ourselves that it was the real deal, thus resorting to pirated copies. And when we genuinely find out that the game really sucked bad, we can finally come to a decision to not buy the game. Else, if you are ashamed that you didn't buy the game by pirating it, you go paying for it, either for a physical medium or through a digital distributor.
Now, there are these people who REALLY wanted to gain it for free. These are the real PIRATES. And DRM is really aimed at them. However, the problem with software, which includes software with DRM, is that with the right tools, any hacker can change the way it behaves. And those software behaviors include those anti-piracy measures that were with the software. Therefore, DRM isn't really achieving ANYTHING, aside from being a pain in the butt for those consumers who paid for the hardwork poured by those developers who had such a hard time producing it.
Sometimes, the sales of the software won't give a HUGE amount of profit for the company who produced it. And it's caused either by the software's inability to please the consumer OR piracy was too severe. And most of the time, if not ALL THE TIME, they blame it to piracy, even if it was really the software itself that is to blame. Sure, maybe it really was piracy to blame for the lackluster sales of a software. But if the consumers REALLY believed that the software was really worth the price, then they'll buy it.
What complicates the piracy issue is the fact that we can easily copy the files from one system to another, which makes it impossible to control.
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Now resuming reading at page 6...
iracy will allways exist in one form or another. If you think there is a way to stop it, or even reduce it drastically, you are deluding yourself.
