Stargazer has an interesting point there with the 'legal game downloads'. Not so long ago me and my bf had a discussion on this, but music, for example how it is so silly to declare that it is illegal to download music for free and yet you are allowed to buy a tape, stick it in your hi fi and record from the radio! Same with video tapes, but copying a dvd...
Of course I'm not saying i agree with piracy, I don't, although a couple of my friends do download games. In fact one knew i wanted Beyond Divinity and downloaded for me, and in fact was going to try and crack it, but i said no, i like to have the proper copy and went and bought it the other day! lol. Anyway back to my original point:
I suggested about the music thing, something similar to Stargazers game point. A website that works with most/all music companies, and basically pays £10 for every album they release. The songs would then have to be put up on a site (all properly protected etc to minimise illegal copying etc) and you could pay say 50p a day to just listen to any of the songs on the site, or you could pay something like £50 a year to download up to, say, 1000 songs. Less CD's would need printing, hence less expenses for the companies, plus it would become a popular way to buy music, take up less storage (physically) and a good way to decide if you like a new song or not. Of course there would still be ways round it but still...
So yes, a game download site would be cool. You could say, pay just for that game and not be a member (you'd pay more of course) or you could have a yearly subscription which would of course work out more if you only downloaded a couple of games, but would be cheaper for both consumer and developer/publisher if a lot of that game were downloaded. Also members could download free demo's to see if they were willing to pay for the full game.
On the subject of copy protection as of now, well i've never had any problems except with Sacred. I could run it fine with the first couple of patches, then 1.66 came out and i kept getting a crash when i tried to run it because i have a CDRW with Nero software, but they did a good job and released patch 1.66c which fixed the problems anyone had where copy protection was crashing the game due to conflicts with drives.
