I commend you on having a circle of friends with superb moral fiber then. ;) In my case, I know of nobody among my friends who would do that. I know plenty of people online online who SAY they would, but anybody can claim such when hidden behind the veil of Internet anonymity.

That's a fair enough stance, although in my experience, isn't it easier to simply purchase games from companies with reputable track records for making good games? And if a game is from a company that you have no experience with, why not look up reviews, get friends' opinions, or view Youtube videos instead of pirating the game?

As vAddicatedGamer mentions in his reply, I don't think it's necessary to see the WHOLE movie or play through the WHOLE game in order to make one's decision. Not only would it ruin the sense of anticipation and spoil the plot of the movie/game (which may or may not be an important factor to a person. I tend to regularly spoil myself before finishing games. Or even starting them!), but again, you'd run the risk of people simply opting to not purchase the game once they've had their fun with it. The vast majority of gamers evidently never complete a game more than once, if stats from MMO's and services like Steam are anything to go by, so once they've completed the game, their motivation to buy the game when they're never going to touch it again is next to zero.

That isn't to say that I don't sympathise with your position. I've played through games where the experience ended on a sour note due to a terrible (and obviously rushed) ending. (I'm looking at you, <practically every single Obsidian Entertainment game ever made>!) But although the ending may be dismal, it doesn't detract from the fun I had in the other parts of the game. I have never, ever played a game where I thought, "This game is absolutely PERFECT! There is nothing that could be improved!" Every game will have its shortfalls, and you can't expect to pay only for perfection.

Tipping does not exist here in Australia, so I can't comment on not tipping for good service. ;) Even though I know how tipping is meant to supplement the wage system for people in the service industry, it still feels incredibly weird to tip waitresses or similar folk when I'm in the US.

As for your other examples... No, the restaurant's patrons won't ALL stop paying, but I guarantee the restaurant would rapidly go bust because you'd get patrons who insisted on ordering all the most expensive dishes for them and their 21 relatives, then refuse to pay. And the other normal, paying customers simply can't make up for the losses those jerkwad customers inflict on the business. The good street performer probably wouldn't starve, but he'd probably give up doing the job after he realised he could get better money by playing in an orchestra*.

Your other examples are also different because they all involve the 'pirate' having to look a real person in the eye and say, "I'm not gonna pay you." As any person who's frequented internet forums long enough will know, when hidden behind the veil of internet obscurity, people's darker, uglier sides often emerge.

* - And on a tangentially related note, check out this article about how a world-famous and critically acclaimed violin player performed his craft in a subway.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html

This guy can charge up to $1000 per MINUTE for his performances. How much did he earn playing his $3.5 million violin for 43 minutes at this subway? $32 plus change. You could argue that this is more a case of people not appreciating true art, however. Or that art is ridiculously overrated. You decide. ;)

I think this is the crux of the issue and probably the reason my opinion is what it is--I've personally done all of those things. I've trusted Bioware and been burned. I've trusted Obsidian and been burned. Even Black Isle let me down (compared to their earlier games, at least) with Lionheart. That's not to say that there's anything wrong with blindly buying a game, but supporting someone based on faith sometimes means supporting awful things. Case in point: DA2 made enough money for them to announce DA3 just two months after release, despite most people probably wanting the bad men to stop. Had everyone pirated the game and realized how worthless it was, they would have gotten a much different message than, "Hey, these people will buy literally anything we put out!"

I've looked up reviews where the reviewer has no clue what they're talking about, too. One of my favorite games has a bunch of 6 out of 10 ratings, whereas other games that I hate with a fiery, burning passion score near-perfect scores. Reviews and reviewers just can't be trusted implicitly anymore. As for my friends... let me just say that they're part of the "Halo" crowd and have completely different tastes than mine :)

Youtube is sometimes a viable option when a game has been out for awhile. On the other hand, Youtube convinced me that this one game was good... don't even remember the name, and I no longer own it. It was some action/stealth hybrid that looked amazing in the clips. I installed it and after five minutes of unbearable VA, I realized that I could literally walk through tanks like some kind of X-men character. Walking in a straight line actually managed to be difficult. This game was awful beyond words. That's not to say that Youtube is always bad, but it's a bit inconsistent. Still the best option at the moment, though.

I think this is something we're going to have to agree to disagree on. My opinion is simply that supporting something good, even if you're never going to play it again, is an unwritten rule of piracy, but I'm aware that some people will just finish a game they enjoyed and never look back. Those people are asshats, of course, but I like to think that they're in the minority (though there's no real way of backing that up).

You know what would be amazing? If there was some kind of subscription service where you paid a certain amount of money per month and get to play whatever games you want, and at the end of all that you have to allocate the money (which has already been paid) to the various games, purchasing the ones that were worthwhile. Something like that would probably make a big dent in piracy, aforementioned asshats aside, and drive the industry in a positive direction. Of course, I doubt most game companies would ever agree to it, what with their propensity to create 4/10 games and market them as 10/10 games. It'd probably be too scary to have to let their games stand on their own.

Interesting idea, mate. A daring place for game companies to showcase their best fairly, beyond the reach of paid reviewers.

Still, not changing the status-quo of moot point regarding piracy, imo. The games could still be leaked underhandedly by some asshats customers of the aforementioned subscription service, simply because they could. But perhaps this way it would relatively be much easier and accurate to track back the perpetrators.

I think.

Odd, I worked as a waiter for 5 years in Australia and tipping DOES exist

I loathe piracy with a passion. I won't mention a competing developer's name, but my User Entitlements page on their website is packed full with the added content for games that I purchased and registered.

If gamers aren't sure about their PC being able to run a TWIMTBP Nvidia game, Nvidia has an application that will tell them if they can run it or not.

IMHO, I still think the answer is this:

http://www.gog.com/en/forum/the_witcher_2/about_piracy/post45

At least for the foreseeable future. Sure it still has loopholes to be exploited by pirates, but that's not the point. Since we know that people's consciousness / awareness is the key, this particular method is meant to educate them intellectually to eradicate both DRM and piracy.

Yeah, I can see where you're coming from. Again, I haven't started DA2 yet, but it seems to be a really polarising game. I know friends who HATED what Bioware did to it, but at the same time, there are fans who are praising the new direction the game took. (Likewise, the same division of opinion exists over the change from Mass Effect 1 to Mass Effect 2.) I guess I tend to try and appreciate the game for what it is and what the developers tried to achieve with it; I think that both ME1 and ME2 were good games, but for different reasons. (Even though I WOULD have preferred that they kept the combat system from ME1 in 2. :P)

The thing is... We NEED developers to take risks and experiment sometimes, otherwise we'd just end up with the same old, tired formulas recycled over and over. (Heck, games like Call of Duty and Modern Warfare are already falling into the Madden trap!) Take Valve, for instance. If they'd never experimented with drastically different games, we'd never have gotten Portal, Left 4 Dead, or Team Fortress 2. Those games turned out to be successes, of course, but keep in mind that they could just as easily have been colossal failures had they not struck the right note with the gaming audience. (And I bet there's some gamers out there who think that L4D would be 10 times more awesome if both the Survivors and Infected regenerated health behind cover.)

Heh, to be honest, I don't trust official reviewers these days anymore either. It's really, REALLY hard to be scathingly honest about a bad game if it means getting boycotted by the game companies in the future. I tend to get my reviews from independent blogs instead.

Hmm... That's a VERY intriuging system. That system would never work for me though. I HATE subscription services, because it creates this feeling for me that I must "get my money's worth". It's the main reason why I stay away from games like WoW; if I'm not playing the game, I feel like I'm wasting my money. It thus locks me into a cycle of constantly sticking with my subscribed game, and then I never have any time to do anything else.

One other idea I had... What if developers released their games as "trial versions"? You can download and play the full game, but with certain functionality restricted or under a time limit. For instance, perhaps a trial version of TW2 lets you play the game, but it restricts you to making, say, 10 save games (or 10 days of play, whichever comes first). After you've made 10 save games, you can't save your game anymore, and you can't load up any save games either. That should give a player plenty of time to decide if they like the game or not, and if they do, they can purchase a CD-key to unlock the game and continue.

Eh? Whereabouts were you working? I suppose it's possible that in some places like international hotel chains, they might have tipping in place because of overseas guests that are so used to tipping their servers, but go to any other restaurant or hair salon in Australia and you're never asked to leave a tip.

Option 3...

Some developers over-hype and under deliver (present company excluded).
Demos and reviews are almost always not an accurate representation of the product.
For console games you can get then at EBGames and if you do not like them return them within 7 days back for full refund,
For PC games, well your options are limited due to draconian DRMs and greedy developers

Am I the only one who appreciates the irony of someone making blanket black-and-white moral proclamations about a game which has the distinguishing feature of grey, complex, and sophisticated moral decisions? I'm fairly sure the OP has no understanding of irony, though. Maybe some of you do?

Or this could just be one of those conversations for the sake of conversations...

So can I conclude from this that you won’t be answering the questions I raised but just make bad puns :< ?

I pirate because, well frankly I don't have the money to buy all the stuff I watch/play/use -simple as that. If there wouldn't be piracy I wouldn't watch/play/use these programs.
2nd reason is that I don't get manhandled by corporations - some games/videos are too hard to get legit means or have so horrible drm that I don't want that shit to my computer. Besides it is much easier to watch videos from computer than from dvd's (I don't haven the equipment even to do that). Usually pirated copy with cracks is better than original. Also it is much easier to find pirated software than legit ones.

But here is the thing that some products are better than pirated ones - like witcher 2. I buy for example games that make me feel emotions and last enough time (not 6 hour rush games). After some games I just get feeling that damn this game was good and I buy it - sometime even after I have played through the game - because I want there to be 2nd game of this series. So witcher2 does everything right- when I bought the collector's edition it just felt so right and package was so big so it was well deserving my money. Other game I played trough was Mass Effect2- very good game but I had much worse drm and all that dlc money grasping feeling to it - so I pirated it and didn't even feel bad about it.

So bottom line is that creators need to make so good product that it is superior to pirated one and it need to have real content, not just marketed right. But even so I can't buy everything and have to resort to piracy.

Nobody's forcing you to get new computer games.

Hell, this is *GOG*, which sells a LOT of perfectly good classic games for SMALL amounts of money, if you absolutely refuse to consider other recreations, many of which are perfectly free.

Yeah, but I want to play them, and it is not like I am hurting them if I wouldn't buy them if I wouldn't able to pirate them

And I want a red Aston Martin, a beachside mansion and sex slaves.

You can't have everything you want, and just because you want it doesn't justify or excuse theft.

News flash, the world doesn' t revolve around you or your wants and needs.