If you update this, I’d like to correct a figure. It is NOT 1:15. Spore, one of the most pirated games to date, has about a 7:8 buyer-pirate ratio, with a vast majority of the pirates citing the restrictive anti piracy measures as the reason they’re pirating.

These things are tracked by torrent downloads, and as bittorrent does include at least 75% of all software piracy, we can assume the statistics are close enough for broad generalizations.

It’s been blown up into something it’s not. The fact is there will always be at least a 10% piracy rate on any piece of digital IP, and the money spent to stop it is more than will be brought in when it’s stopped.

The game developers are finally starting to get it, recently (after this blog was posted) a huge stink was raised about copy protection in the game Spore. A high mucky-muck in EA games, the publisher and developer, said all the complaintents were pirates and people who got caught up in the hype.

Well, there are at least 4 class action suits filed (the first less than two weeks after that comment), and 2 more coming against EA, with another rash against other companies.

The entire stink over PC piracy has the addendum “and consoles don’t have this problem”. The biggest criers are the ones hiking their console game’s prices and the ones that have the most to gain from console sales due to developers being scared of PCs.

People who modchip and write homebrew software have been arrested, the gaming community is snowballing into chaos, and none of these big companies seem mature enough to pull their heads out of the sand.