I'm not offended, Grandia, I assure you <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />
The PC games industry goes through ups and downs, but a lot of the problems now are due to the publishers wanting fast development and the consumers demand for state of the art everything.
The developers are thus caught in a vicious cycle. State of the art takes more time, but publishers are demanding less time, so many games are released before they are really ready. The games are buggy, which damages consumer confidence, so the fans wait a while for the patches to start appearing before they buy games, which slashes the profits made...
You get the idea. Things are looking pretty nasty because of consumer expectation and publisher pressure. A lot of publishers are also very risk-averse, which means that genuinely new ideas are thin on the ground. This damages consumer interest rather than consumer confidence, but it's also bad for sales.
So as you can see, piracy - while definitely being a problem - is not really the main problem the industry is facing right now.
This, at least, is my understanding from reading far too many articles on the subject <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/biggrin.gif" alt="" />
