As mentioned, it is also necessary if our community wants to see quality games from other vendors like EA. That’s probably the only reason I still keep a partition with windows on it, just so I can run good games. I know its a lame comparison, but I don’t complain about using ATI’s proprietary drivers if it does what I need it to do and performs better than the open versions. Likewise I don’t care if my software is copy protected if it helps bring other vendors to the board. I say put it to the test and see what comes of it.

I’m not to sure with some of the exaggerated figures of how much money is lost to piracy. A lot of people, but not everyone, who pirates software wouldn’t have bought the software in the first place and are only taking advantage of being able to get it free.

I think they do not understand that this error because illegal copies of the game

It seems that everyone who makes single player computer games is hurting these days, because of the open nature of the system. The US market is probably heading in the direction of Asia, where computer games are designed as services rather than off the shelf products. Even fundamentally single player games are taking this direction, e.g. spore’s automatic importing of other people’s creations into your game.

It’s kind of sad that evolution of gaming has to be driven my this market reality, but on the other hand, at least it’s pushing us in a positive direction toward games with greater community participation.