I plan on doing both, immediately.

"And for Cliffski, this "discussion" of yours does not sway me, as a paying customer who buys games, to support developers more in the future. It actually does exactly the opposite. "

So you want to post here and tell me why I'm wrong, but if I openly make a call for everyone to email me and tell me why I'm wrong, somehow I'm the bad guy?
What exactly do you want from me?

I'm doing exactly what you suggest. I'm asking why people pirate my games. People give me feedback on my games on my forums and by email every day. I'm not asking for game design criticisms, I'm asking specifically about what upsets pirates.

I've got hundreds of very interesting and well thought out replies, every one of which I've read.
None of them are from Jeryyk

Oh BTW, is this YOUR site jerk? because if not, I don't really care what you think about whether or not I post here...

the only person I'm ignoring is you.

I'm hostile against people who are hostile against me.
Its always people like him who are the first to descend into petty and infantile name calling.

Jerk wouldn't buy a game if his life depended on it, therefore as a developer, his opinions and ravings are entirely irrelevant.

I don't bother discussing the topic here any more, I'm fed up with inflating the egos of people like jerk and giving them their sport.

wow. Out of the 400 responses I got, yours is the most infantile. Who would have thought it eh?

I bet that took you a significant portion of your day didn't it.

YOU give pirates a bad name kid.

Interesting, but why are 90% of the screens FMV (it looks that way).
I skip ALL game FMV, just show me the GAME please.

on behalf of people who don't pirate games, but make them for a living, stop trying to drag everyone else down to your level of (dis)honesty.

really?
completely pointless then.

also since when is a video showing "actual gameplay!" a big deal. what's the fucking point of a trailer otherwise?

Indeed we have. I am sick of the silly excuses big developers use for not making a demo. They even try and tell their own programmers its for some fuzzy reason, yet we all know its because they expect to sell the game based on hype.
How about taking 10% of the marketing budget, and using that to make a kick-ass specially designed demo that lets you experience how cool the game really is?
That makes more sense to me, assuming you know you have made a good, fun agme and not just a hyped tech demo.

derek smart does games in this genre, if you didn't already know. The battlecruiser stuff.

In that case you are the exact age and demographic who tends to buy my games. I'm one of these invisible indie games companies doing games with sub 1-million dollar budgets (by a long stretch!) that does not make casual games, and yet somehow sell enough copies to make a reasonable living and keep doing it.
I've been doing it over 10 years now, and have had almost everyone over the years say publicly that indie game devs and bedroom coders don't exist and aren't viable. I'm still here making games people want, despite stuff like this that gets repeated almost as often as the 'people want ads in games' bullshit.
No big devs want to acknowledge that indie gaming is viable. they panic that their decent coders and designers might leave...

there can be no argument that when unions get too powerful, they cause silly problems, but unions are also behind a hell of a lot of good stuff. Ever been bullied at work? sexually harassed? or told you are being sacked for being black / muslim / pregnant?
A good union will step in in all these situations and fight on your behalf. Would you really want to rely on the guy next to you at the factory to fight your corner on those issues?
Yes unions can be bad, they can be good too. People in a modern 2008 workforce forget how workers were basically treated as disposable machinery in the industrial revolution.

what's wrong with trying a demo? People use a time limited demo to buy cars and houses, why not a $40 game?

"What makes you so sure that everyone who downloaded the game has a source of income? I think you'll find that a large portion of people who use torrents are kids still in middle and high school. Another portion is kids in college who can barely afford to pay tuition. "

somehow they have a PC that can run crysis though...

two points here:
Firstly, he probably isn't mad enough to think they would have all bought. but assume piracy is only 10 times not 20, and that 1 in ten would have bought, that means DOUBLE the sales, which is likely 5 times the profit 9at least). That's a BIG deal to ANY business.

Secondly, if you can get your games for free, then you tend to spend more money on other stuff. Pirates who suddenly couldn't get free games *would* buy more games, they would make cutbacks on other stuff, fancy new mobile phones, beer, whatever. They might not buy as much as they pirated, but to suggest they wouldn't buy games at all is just mad. People don't buy a PC that can play crysis, then refuse to play games if they need to open their wallet for them, as World of Warcraft shows.

they probably extrapolate statistically from looking at the number of people who download patches and extra content. I've noticed this myself. I had more people download a mod for one of my games than actually bought it. given that maybe 20% of players would even find out about the mod, that shows you have a lot more people running full versions than paid for the game.
It's not a 100% accurate method clearly, but it lets you get rough order-of-magnitude figures.
I think they made lots of mistakes with crysis, but pretending piracy didn't hurt them is silly. it hurts all PC devs.

if you guys want to prove us game devs wrong, feel free to make an RPG or RTS or FPS (3 highly pirated genres) for the PC with your own money and make your point.

It's easy to get estimates for pirated copies in circulation. if you get 3 times as many downloads for the latest patch than you sold copies, you know its not bored people downloading the same patch 3 times.

People might not want to hear it, because it makes them feel bad about their own actions, but pirating games is killing off PC gaming.

That's cool, just keen here