I do share some of your concerns, but all this talk of piracy and "legality" is really starting to bother me. Like I said before on these forums, I work for a small book publishing house, and it annoys me quite a bit that every single entertainment/art industry goes through exactly the same problems as the video game industry, but, for some reason, the video game one seems to think they're entitled to some kind of privileged treatment. Other entertainment industries (mostly the movie and music ones) are also extremely protective and aware of copyright and intellectual properties, but, despite all the protective measures they take, neither one is as bothersome with it as the video game industry is; plus, it seems the video game industry plays the victim card quite often, too. They're not victims at all, they're not martyrs, and they definitely do not deserve any kind of special treatment.

These are digital times. We're talking about digital copies of games, here, not physical ones. How can you measure losses via the number of people playing out of a virtual endless stock of copies of something? The people who would buy the game bought it despite piracy and giveaways. Sometimes piracy can be a good thing; when people don't have access to an album, a game, a book, a movie, and they stumble upon it on the internet, maybe, just maybe, by experiencing it, they'll come to the conclusion the quality of it is so high that they need to support its makers. Then they go and buy it.

If it wasn't for piracy, I would never have been able to come in contact with bands such as Man Man, The Duke Spirit, Sons and Daughters, The Black Belles. And now I own their albums, because I really liked them and didn't feel like not having my physical or legal digital copies of them, since the artists did deserve my money. I'm from Portugal and most portuguese bands and artists are pro-piracy, since now they're getting to be known in countries like Japan, the US, the UK and most of South America. Something they wouldn't be, if piracy didn't exist at all. If you like something -- if you *REALLY* like something you downloaded illegally -- you'll be sure to buy it.

On the particular subject of video game piracy, here's an article I find quite interesting, by Team Meat's Tommy Refenes, in which he argues that refunds and apathy hurt your games more than piracy: Apathy and refunds are more dangerous than piracy.

I'm not trying to change your mind, I just wanted people to know that there are ways in which piracy can be a good thing, actually, and not the huge, morally-wrong monster it's always labeled as.