i'm still not convinced that piracy has much (when you cut through corporate-speak and a lot of b.s.) to do with the perceived "decline" of p.c. gaming.
with the exception of the ps3 (and that seems to have a good deal to do with the expense of blank blu-ray discs) every console has been compromised, all of their catalogs pirated. while the average user might not know how to make these pirated copies work on their systems, these workarounds exist and only get easier to use as time goes by. (square made a very good point clarifying the difference between casual piracy and piracy in post #20)
now take a look at dell, or hp, or in any best buy or any other retail place where the *average* p.c. consumer is most likely to purchase a system. the gulf between an average p.c. and a gaming p.c. has never been wider. if you purchased an average p.c. today you'd be lucky to get half life 2 to run on it's onboard GPU. anything released in the last 18 months would be a crapshoot. run stalker: clear sky or crysis on it? not likely.
i've never seen any "one" platform so divided before. its to the point where i'd have real trouble classifying a 1000+ watt psu, 3xSLI geforce 280, quad core gaming p.c. as anything resembling a "high end" inspiron or pavilion mass market machine.
supporting such a wide range of configurations has to be somewhat maddening.
its my guess that hardware has more to do with certain developers moving towards consoles than anything else. consoles are closed systems, one (technically untrue now, but whatever) configuration for each system. it seems a lot easier to bump a console game up to p.c. standards than to squeeze a high end p.c. title into a console.
closed system environments, a higher price point and a lack of a modding culture (seriously, imagine how many different game configurations players of TES IV: oblivion on the p.c. are running around with at this moment...) just sounds like a LOT fewer headaches for developers.
call me suspicious, but i just dont believe this whole "piracy is making the sky fall!" thing.
i cant imagine stardock has lost so much money distributing the GalCiv games without copy protection of any kind that they are about to release the Demigod game in the same way. (when you look at screens for demigod, it does not look like it has been an inexpensive game to produce...)
maybe i've got a tinfoil hat on, but i just see piracy as a timely ruse being used to move developing costs to cheaper platforms with fewer support hassles and a more concrete set of demographics to project revenue onto. (you can google and find exactly how many ps3s have been sold around the world, you cant find similar data for how many p.c.s out there are capable of running a game of crysis)