If you are having serious trouble with the conclusion he inexplicably draws at the end of the paragraph, believe me, you are not alone. The whole article is like that, really.

I think his argument is that most people don't pirate games just to spite intrusive DRM. This isn't an inherently flawed conclusion. However, his argument fails to account for the fact that CoD4, AC and Crysis had considerably more hype than Bioshock, Crysis Warhead and Mass Effect.

The author does make a good point about torrents, though. They are definitely problematic and they do an excellent job of proving that the idea of "casual piracy" (the copying and distribution of discs to friends) is completely irrelevant these days. Anybody can download a game from a torrent and large portion of these downloaders are complete idiots. Hence the requests for technical support. I much prefer the days when piracy required effort and a modicum of tech savvy. It was much lower profile and much harder to track, making it much harder to use as a scapegoat for poor sales.

This comment was edited on Feb 11, 2010, 04:46.