If the idea of copy protection is to prevent or at least delay piracy and the most pirated game of the year has a certain form of copy protection on it, I'd say that constituted absolute phail. Especially when it was also proven to put off many legitimate customers.
It doesn't! :P
Does the fact that 'Spore was the most pirated game of the year' tells you how many people bought the game legally, because of SecuROM, i.e. how many people refrained (sp?) from getting it illegaly because of the protection? No! It only says that it was pirated alot. Which is natural (inevitably so, you know what I mean) for a popular game. If a game is popular enough, the game can be pirated alot AND the protection is effecive at the same time.
We have 2 games, one bad, one good. Normally the number of pirated copies is one third of the number of legally sold copies. The good one has protection that stops piracy by 50% (= 1/6 pirated copies for the good game, which is, I think, an effective form of protection), the bad one hasn't protection.
The good one sells 100 copies, the bad one 30. This means that means that the good one has 16,7 pirated copies, the bad one 10. The good game has more pirated copies, while the protection is still effective. A game with effective protection
can be pirated alot. Wether a protection systems makes more people buy more legal copies is another story. Maybe a part of the 1/6 that didn't pirate in the end because of the protection will. I don't know.
Perhaps this isn's very realistic, because the difference in legal sales here is quite large, but are there many games, without protection, that sell as many copies as games with protection? I don't know anything about that, but the story 'Spore is the most pirated game of the year' doesn't say anything about that either. I don't come across alot (or any) of (new) games that don't have some form of copyright protection.
Errr... no. The principled stand is the one I take: I won't allow any company to treat me like dirt, but I won't pirate from them, either. Two wrongs do NOT make a right!
Here I confess, I'm an asshole, I would get a pirated copy (if I would want it at all).
No wait, I probably wouldn't, but the fact that an legal copy is less user-friendly then an illegal one is still insane.
