Just attempted to acquire an iso for a game that I already own on a different platform. It's not being sold anywhere because the servers for the game were dropped in 2009.

This is why I never invest good $ in MMO's. The company that released this game stopped support for it after the mulitplayer aspect died and didn't bother to keep it alive for those whom wanted to play single player and LAN.

There was no way to download it

-without giving away intimate details like cell phone or credit card number
-sitting around with a torrent open hoping that someone starts seeding again sometime within the next decade...and god only knows who would be seeding what
-downloading the game in it's entirety broken into 30 rar files with a three minute wait before each one.

With all the red herring and bullshit, I really can't see where piracy is any more of a problem nowadays.

Yes, apparantly it is, just ask Ubisoft with their total BS copy protection. Question; Are you refering to the total piece of crap known as Hellgate London?

Near Somalia, apparently.

It'd be even funnier if they all had eye patches and said "arrrr."

Damn you!
Now I really want to disguise as Dr.M, invade the GoG Headquarters and threaten to publicly humiliate TheEnigmaticT by feeding him Polish vodka and cookies on upstream unless the GoG community pays ransom!

Take that, you credit card information!

Naw, it's the Marvel Trading Card game. I bought the DS version and liked it more than Magic the Gathering (which I'm playing now) but wanted a PC port and the only place I can find it is on auction sites with high collector price tags slapped on it.

You can get a watered down version of it for PC for free but it's missing campaign, you can't unlock any more decks or cards than just the default two decks and...well..shit, even half of the tutorial is missing from the game.

So much for ever throwing a penny towards Konami's Yu-Gi-Oh. =/

But my whole point is, if you successfully manage to get full retail software over the net you spent far too many days and effort to get it than what that software was worth.

I would have to have a compulsive disorder and be at home all the time in front of my computer to spend THAT much time googling for software and weeding through red herring and run arounds in order to actually ever achieve anything.

Piracy hits its hardest not on older titles, but on newer ones. Games generally have a very short highly profitable lifespan, rather like films and DVDs, they peek very fast after release and then quickly dwindle down before they are in bargain bins and then out into the sold out software companies and places like GoG - where profit per unit is much smaller.

So older titles its not as much a worry because the title has already either failed or succeeded in its profit for the company - some manage to have renewals in popularity, but most only ever get one chance at it.

However early piracy can hurt companies in several ways:
1) Stealing sales
2) Stealing server space - get enough pirates and it can hit servers harder than expected based on sales.
3) Support - yep even though they've pirated many will still use official channels to try and resolve problems - these might well only be present in pirated versions (either because of a defect in the method or because they are based on an older, buggier, release and didn't work with patches released later).

It's definitely not good for sales but apparently it is not the massive problem that it used to be - I simply can not see how anyone is successfully getting anything through the net unless they sit at home all day every day and turn it into a career.

It's like fishing in an ocean where there is only one little fish and everything else is worn out shoes, tin cans and tires.

That analogy is scarily closer to reality than we'd like to think possible

As for piracy - chances are to get it to work you've got to get into the pirate community - learn where the distributors are and who is distributing and how to get at it best and all that stuff. Its just harder to tap into because its not totally overt.

I personally pay for everything unless it has been discontinued and can not be bought anywhere.

But once again it takes a lot of effort to find the right communities and even then, there's probably going to be slim chance to find anything specifically and you wind up in a situation where your just taking junk to take it.

I really don't think software companies have as much to worry about anymore as they used to back in the nineties.

I disagree. It's only become worse. Perhaps you're not familiar with Usenet but broadband connections and nzb files have made that a huge problem.
I've found and downloaded your Marvel Card game in less than a minute.
Why do you think there are so few PC games in the shops lately? Developers rather develop for XBox and PS3 because piracy is hardly an issue on those platforms.

The thing is, at least in my country, that some parts of the industry have to adapt. I don't want to turn this in the classic piracy, not piracy, but some companies, like steam are obviously a great success, so great that others like EA are trying hard to emulate them.
Sincerely, I don't remember the last time I went to a shop to buy something, I know is sad for the traditional comerce, but physical or not, I buy all my stuff except food on the net.
And piracy perhaps is a bigger problem now that in times past, but is also true that videogames industry has never been this big. In the times of NES it would have been unthinkable that practically every home would have a Pc for gaming or a console.
So perhaps it has not grow percentually, I remember in the times of my spectrum how games where copied over and over from one friend to another, the thing is, that the industry has never generated the amount of money it moves nowdays.
And quite frankly, I think that console games are much easier to copy than pc. With PC is always about versions, patches that don't work... In some console system, when you have altered the hardware or software, something that cost you abou 50 euro in a lot of shops here, it's only a matter of cut/paste. They even renew it when necesary for half that price.

Bollocks its not, a very quick search found xbox version of la noire, alice 2 & crysis 2 as well as the ps3 version (not that there's any other) of infamous 2.

When people say there's minimal piracy problems on consoles it just shows they haven't done the research. I strongly suspect that the only reason the PS3 seems to have less piracy than the 360 is because the cost of the equipment & media needed to burn bluray isos is more expensive than its worth

Getting older games as a pirate is not a concern, trust me. The more obscure games... well that could be a little more problematic, but so can be hunting down a legitimate copy of it.

The thing about the new games part is that yes they are losing money on it, but no, they're not losing the billions that they'd like to have you believe. I really doubt a large percentage of people who's resorting to pirating a brand new game would be willing to spend the $50 or $60 to pay for it (and some even would buy after they pirate!). The point is for everybody that pirates, the company might lose $5 (random number, no idea if that's true), but not the $50 that they reported to have lost.

And consoles have major piracy problems as well. Even non-tech-savvy people can get their consoles modded pretty easily nowadays.

Also, I think piracy is a problem that's been getting more attention than before because games are such big-budget productions now that they just don't provide nearly as much profit for gaming companies than a decade or more ago when each game was developed with only a small group of people. In order to make as much money they need to sell a lot more copies of a game, so maybe piracy just hits them much harder now.