Its not as bad as on PC. Modding a console, Whether a soft mod or a hard one, is generally a somewhat complicated process that carries great risk of bricking your hardware. From what I understand, it also prevents online multiplayer to some extent. In the end, you really have to know what your doing to pirate games on a console, while pretty much anyone can pirate a game on PC. It weeds out a lot of people. PC games are what? 10% of the market? A quick search on a popular torrent site shows the top Xbox 360 torrent (of 4 complete torrents) with a seed count of 1760. The top PC version torrent (of many, I don't feel like counting them all up) has 21322 seeds. I think its fair to say that console piracy while still a problem Is no where near the problem that PC game piracy is.

That's true, but the problem isn't piracy so much as it is the second hand market, and the second hand market for consoles has always been a much more significant affair. I'm not sure if that was purely because most people couldn't make their own carts or what, but when I was a kid, we didn't buy second hand PC software, we'd pirate it. But we wouldn't pirate console games we'd buy them second hand typically.

I don't think that applies so much anymore, as the discs are readily creatable. Even carts are trivial to copy at this point, both to and from ROM.

I bought DN3D as a preoder because it's a lifetime event and good or bad I wanted in at the start. Basically so that I could say that I did. It turned out to be a fabulous game, but even if it had been crap, I would still have had future bragging rights.

The main reason that Steam is so popular isn't against pirates, it's because it prevents people from selling their games 2nd hand. Plus, the anticheat mechanism is apparently quite good for multiplayer.

I know what you mean. I bought New Vegas on D2D. I like it so much, I'm going to buy it again through the boxed Collectors Ed, but since it comes with Steamworks, I'll just torrent the full game first before buying the Collectors Ed, so I can play wherever I please w/o Steam.

I'm as anti-DRM and anti-company bullshit as anyone. I completely understand that pirated copies are not always lost sales and that pirated copies can often increase sales by acting as demos or word of mouth. I get all that.

That said, OF COURSE piracy is a big problem. It basically makes every PC purchase rely on the honor system and HUMANS ARE NOT THAT HONORABLE.

Don't diss the skill of people who reverse engineer PC games.

My LEGAL (the people who had access to the code were unavailable, blame it on the administration) experience with reverse engineering wasn't pleasant.

Even if you use a tool to convert the binary back into high level code, you'll have the hell of a time making sense of code where variables have meaningful names like "i" or "j".

I'm sure that given the amount of code in a typical PC game, parsing through the lot of it and tweaking the right parts is no trivial affair.

Simpler than reverse engineer the hardware in consoles? Sure. So simple that anybody can do it? Don't kid yourself.

And yes, I think GoJays2025 has the just of it for pirating... People who wouldn't pay 50$-60$ for a new game and don't have the patience to wait until the price goes down.

I have a friend who only gets pirated movies and he's clearly not a great movie enthusiast (from his attitude, I'd infer that he thinks movies are not something worth paying for and he probably wouldn't pay for it if he couldn't obtain it illegally).

All my acquaintances who are real movie enthusiasts purchase legit copies or at least rent.

Not any more than when I buy a movie, I'm on some sort of honor system not to run my miniature theater. The whole notion that software is somehow different is absurd. Provided there is only one copy installed at any given time, the publisher has precisely zero right to decide how those particular copies are divided up.

It's farcical to say the least for them to pretend like these purchases are any different than CDs or movies.

I don't understand what you mean here - it sounds like you're more talking about the second hand market than pirating. Pirating the games means one single copy becomes infinite and infinity distributable outside of the manufacturers control. Second hand market is where there is just one copy being passed from person to person and used one at a time.

Where did I say otherwise?

And when the publishers stop using DRM to prevent that from happening, they can get taken seriously. Which is sort of the point, they're expecting more protection than other industries get, by virtue of being able to tamper with their own merchandise.
You didn't, my apologies if that wasn't clear.

It was the natural extension to the industries attitude that they don't have to tolerate the honor system when other comparable industries do. If anything, they've got even less grounds to gripe that the music industry does, and music, even by major artists these days, is frequently available legitimately sans DRM.

Sumone say pirates?

Lol.

I've come to find that it would be easier to rob a bank and purchase the game at a high bid price on an auction site. XD

To me it's pretty easy...know which torrent sites to visit, look for the ones with the most comments/highest seeds/etc as being the best to try downloading(both in terms of virus free and fast speed), and you're all set. Then of course you need a virtual iso mounter or iso burner app. Still it's not too hard.....it just appears that way to the newbies to keep them out of the loop, I guess. :\

Of course I haven't downloaded many seafaring games lately since joining Gog....still, it's like riding a bike. A 16 wheeled bakcwards driving rusty bike........with padlocks on the pedals.

Yeah it's pretty damn easy. You don't even need to worry about viruses if you're using the right sites/services. I haven't downloaded many such games either lately, and Steam is mostly to thank for that. Damn them and their irresistible sales! With the amount of backlog I have right now (and growing all the time), I'm not even sure I'll be pirating a game ever again. Of course... having been employed for consecutive months last year also helped.

I personally don't download anything that is still currently being sold. I think as someone else pointed out - the pirated games that are easy to find are the new releases. Older stuff has been removed from the web and only available through torrents. Given that the old stuff is no longer sought after, there are no seeds for it.

A few places claim to have what you're looking for but they want a credit card or cellphone number in exchange for giving you download access. This looks to me like either authoritative agencies keeping track of who is taking what or a 'tit for tat' system where in they allow me to engage in something shady if I, in turn, make myself vulnerable to other's shady dealings.