Azrael the cat
Arcane
Why are we talking about Piracy? There is no point when it comes to game piracy.
PC game piracy is effectively "balanced" because of Steam.
This is not an issue even for independent developers.
Simply put updates exist and steam has its own DRM per update.
This factors make any pirate who has even the remote possibility of buying it do for the convenience.
Anyone else is simply not going to buy it whatever the case.
Exactly. It's why there are less of these topics these days - the stakes just aren't there anymore. Personally, having just enough piracy to convince companies that they need to compete by offering long support periods, convenient online distribution and reasonably priced (i.e. cheap) means of buying the game long after it would have disappeared from physical shelves, seems like the optimal outcome. My only concern is whether a full disappearance of piracy would lead to backsliding on those things.