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I think you have to take a pragmatic approach to the issue of piracy. As Gabe Newell and lots of other intelligent and non-coercive and consumer-friendly devs will say, make good games, and people will buy them. There's no use fretting about piracy.

 

With all the arguments we have on here I'm growing tired of writing something and expecting people to understand it, so I'm just going to list a series of propositions and you can count how many you agree with (again, this is just my understanding of course)

 

1) People found ways to pirate games and software way back when, and this damaged companies by robbing them of money they're owed for their products

2) Companies responded by imposing restrictions and DRM on their software and games (serial keys and internet license activation namely) Sometimes these were a minor inconvenience for honest buyers.

 

3) People still found ways to pirate (keygens and such), and enjoyed all the free software and games like it was some kind of heaven.

4) Companies respond this time about 2002-2003 I suppose, with draconian restrictions and DRM that hurts honest buyers (as technology advanced to allow things like always-online validation, having to make a user account to log into specific games). There are numerous outcries (specifically for games,  I'll pick on ubisoft)

 

Wings of Prey (yuplay client must be run to get updates and play the game, 3 activation limit etc).

 

Ubisoft recently REMOVED DRM from From Dust because pc gamers lashed out at them so much for it.

 

Paradox CEO Fred Wester says DRM is a waste of money, doesn’t work, and is out of date (january this year)

 

 

5) People still pirate, get AAA titles before release, and accessing them is as simple as copying a cracked .exe into the main folder. Honest buyers today are still ridiculously inconvenienced.

 

Ok so that's the scene set, and I think most people will agree with all of that, here's where it might get hazy:

 

6) From what we can observe looking at the issue historically, any and all attempts to stop piracy beyond simple measures that ensure normal consumers won't be easily able to pirate (i.e serial key activation) have grealy inconvenienced these same normal users.

 

More extreme measures are required to stop more technical/expert users pirating, and fucking stupidly enough, these expert computer users ALWAYS still manage to find a way around the restrictions, and again the average consumer is the one who's hurt.

 

7) We have heard many industry authorities speak lowly of drm, and many devs and even indie devs have succeeded GREATLY without these "protection" methods.

 

8) These devs often estimate their piracy rates, and comment on them after the game has been selling a while. And still we see games pirated that are successful.

 

9) From this we can infer reasonably I think that piracy, whilst possibly  denying a dev of potential revenue, is not always the "1 pirated copy = 1 lost sale" because this makes assumptions that people who couldn't pirate would otherwise buy the game, and there are LOTS of reasons people pirate.

 

10) Of the people that access games, users who I'll simply call "evil pirates" who just want to get the game for free, are a HUGE minority. (in the great majority of cases). And even when they aren't, games can still be hugely successful.

 

11) Piracy is not going away. Not now, not ever. Being pragmatic about piracy is the best solution to this problem, and that necessitates accepting the fact expert users WILL ALWAYS pirate if they want to, because no drm will ever stop them.

 

(Finally, on to the good part)

 

12) From ALL of this, we can reasonably conclude we should look into methods of preventing piracy other than DRM and blocking websites.

 

For example, as Gabe Newell has said, if you make good games, people will buy them. To this end, I think there are a number of things developers can do. And I say this with a wealth of piracy experience (I'm lying of course)