I'm posting my own opinion here, in a separate post, because, well, to be honest I'm still not entirely certain what my thoughts ARE.
I'm certainly sympathetic to the cause of "piracy" in certain instances--old games that are not available via digital distribution services like Steam or GOG being the only "reason" I can fully support--but, as I said earlier, the dynamic is different with pre-release, in-development software.
And this has happened plenty of times in the past, most (in)famously with the Half Life 2 source code and Diablo 3 beta.
But what does it mean? I think it can be partly read as a positive--if people are pirating an alpha or beta version of a game, it indicates a very clear demand for the product. After all, no one is going to go out of their way to pirate a beta version of "Cabella's Big Game Hunter 2015," or the latest Train Simulator.
But at the same time, I worry that this kind of piracy may work to a long-term detriment. An alpha or beta version of a game is very much unfinished, plagued with bugs and missing features that would be utterly unacceptable in a finished game. Can pirates be trusted to understand that the game they're stealing is unfinished? That they should not judge it as a final product? Because one pirate seldom means one potential sale lost--gamers are social animals. We all love to share our opinions with one another and hear others' opinions before we delve into games on our own. One pirate with a positive opinion of a game can potentially stimulate dozens or hundreds of sales--but the reverse is also true.
For example, around 13 months ago Beamdog released "Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition." (They've since released Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition, and I highly recommend you pick up both titles ASAP if you haven't already). When the game released it was, well, let's just say it was in a state not dissimilar from the Divinity: Original Sin alpha right now. Basically, just as much worked as didn't.
Now, Beamdog did manage to fix up their game and get it relatively stable within a few weeks, and virtually bug-free within a few months, but it was too late. Too many gamers had played the game too soon after launch, and their perception of it as a bug-ridden unplayable mess persists to this day. I still see these people in various forums denouncing BGEE, and urging gamers who ask not to buy it--all because the version they played 13 months ago was in sorry shape.
And I fear the same thing may happen with the big crowdfunded RPGs of 2014. These are not titles like Diablo III, or Half Life 2, where the games are destined to sell enormously well regardless of quality. I fear I'll be browsing through GameFAQs one day in 2014 the week Original Sin or Wasteland 2 is released, and someone will ask if either game is worth buying, and someone will say, "Hell no: I played it back in December and it was a terrible, buggy, unplayable mess. Go by X or Y instead."
