"One, i don't think piracy is theft. Theft is when you actually take something such that the victim no longer has it. Piracy is piracy. Copying with out permission."

I'll give you a hypothetical, and then follow up with a question.

Suppose you write a book. Let's suppose for a moment, that this book is reasonably entertaining. Entertaining enough to sell to a publisher for a modest sum- let's say $5,000 with a bonus of $1 per copy over 50,000 copies sold. You've been an attendant at a public laundrymat, cashiered at a retail store, and done some odd jobs while writing this book over the course of a year. You've lived a pretty modest life, sometimes having trouble making the rent on time, maybe skipping a meal here or there to make ends meet at the end of the month. You could have gone after a better job as someone with a 4 year degree (even if it was in Liberal Arts), but you needed something that would leave you with the time to write, and these jobs allowed you that.

The book gets published, and sells 45,000 copies- a marginal success, and so you are paid $5,000. It's not everything you'd hoped, but it's enough that you can afford to stock your refrigerator without having to send in the electric bill a week late. You are browsing reviews of your book online, and stumble onto a link to a site where someone has a downloadable text file of YOUR BOOK. You contact the publisher and let them know about it. After some investigation, it is discovered that while 45,000 people bought your book, 300,000 people downloaded that book illegally, they "pirated it".

Had even half these people been honest, your book would have made the best seller list, potentially catapulting your career to a new level. Certainly, that $150,000 bonus for writing a best seller would not have hurt. Maybe you could give up those other jobs and really take the time to develop your craft. Maybe you would have given the world it's next great work of literature, something that would resonate with audiences for the next four hundred years. Maybe, maybe not, but the experience is enough for you to stop writing, and go after that slightly better paying office job so at least you can afford to eat.

I promised a question. I have two.

1. Did the people that downloaded your book without paying for it steal from you?

and part 2.

2. Did they only steal from you or from everyone that enjoys literature?

I don't expect to change your mind, only hope that you at least think about it from a different angle.

There are lots of things that contribute to the decline of PC gaming IMO.

Microsoft did a number on us when they forced Vista as a condition of DX-10.. BIG mistake.

I also believe that the inflated prices manufacturuers of GPU's have inflicted on us at any opportunity have taken their toll. I'm sure everyone remembers the 2007 as the year without a mid grade card from Nvidia (the 8800GTS 320MB at $300 doesn't count).

Another item on my list, believe it or not, is Crysis. While I respect what K. Salvatore was to say on this subject, I just do not share the author's high opinion of this game. To my way of thinking, this game did more to hurt PC gaming than it ever did to help by pushing "state of the art".

Crytek broke a sort of unwritten rule. People that drop $5000 on a PC expect to be able to push those little settings sliders all the way to the right for at least a year without a second thought. When Crysis was released, you could have dropped $20,000 on a system and it would not have helped. A year later and you can get close if you care to drop $1200 on GPU's alone, nevermind the beast of a CPU you'll need to keep those graphics cards fed with frames to render.

I didn't care for the gameplay in the demo enough to complete it myself (let alone plunk down $50 for the full game)- alot of people didn't, but these same people forever ask "will this system play Crysis" when considering a new purchase, and when they recieve the answer "yes, but not at even close to max settings". It doesn't matter at that point how nice "high" settings in the right places can make the game look. It's disheartening. I believe the fact that a game could be released that no system could play at even close to "maxed out" brought the basic problem with buying a gaming PC into focus for alot of people. "No matter how much I spend, it will never be enough" was a sentiment I saw expressed by more than one online post. Now to an extent, this is always true, but the perception of value was hurt in a way I don't recall seeing before now.

Finally, piracy. It's been around for a long time, and some people still don't get it. It's stealing. Let's say you like the look of a car, only the dealership doesn't allow test drives. You refuse to buy with testing, so you wait until it's dark, break into a car, and "test it". You will get tossed into the nearest jail if you're caught- true story.

Stealing, whether physical or intellectual property is wrong. If you think it's a victimless crime, think again. We're the victims. Those of us that pay for games end up with a smaller availabilty of new releases, or releases ported from consoles rather than developed for our platform of choice, because game producers want to maximize their profits and see those margins being sliced thin by piracy on the PC platform.

I do agree with the main points in the article, and think we all need to get behind the well polished games that are released with our wallets. I also believe we owe it to ourselves to support original titles that show some creativity rather than rehashing the same tired themes with graphic updates. Thanks to a review on another site, I picked up a copy of a game called Crazy Machines II. I freely admit I would not have gven this game a second look before reading the review, but this is exactly the sort of thing we can get behind and support with our dollars: reasonably priced ($20 or less), original games that will work well on a wide range of system hardware.

There are others out there, waiting for people to take a chance on them. As much as we need to support PC game developers, we could use a hand.

1.Give us games that don't break the wallet. No one had to eat any hardware expense to get the platform into our homes other than us. We should not pay console game prices.

2.Enough with the DRM and SecuROM B$ already. It does nothing to deter pirates, and pisses off your paying customers.

3.Please stop milking franchises into the ground with uninspired remakes and sequels. If you want to make more money on minor changes to what amounts to the same content, offer up $5 or $10 expansion packs. Please don't give us $5 worth of new content and ask $30 or $40 for it. It turns off new gamers- you know, "customers".

Maybe this is too much to ask, but I hope not. I would hate to see this platform continue on the decline it's been on. It may be far from dead, but it isn't as healthy as it has been either. I've been gaming on PC's now since the Vic 20 and Commodore 64. I really enjoy the complexity in game play the PC allows over what is possible on a console. It would truly be a shame if that experience were lost to new generations of gamers. While I don't see a day where games are not offered on the PC, I can easily see a point in time where all we have to look forward to is the next console port, and at that point, the platform might as well be dead.

Just my opinion.