Lessen it? as far as I remember, in my early gaming years (1987 to 1993) I thought games only came in unlabeled 5.1/4 BASF disks. There literally wasn't any way of getting games here in Argentina if they didn't come from a shady dark store in the back of commercial centers ("galerias").
I saw (and bought!) my first original game in 1994, a boxed edition of Indiana Jones and the fate of Atlantis that I found in the upper shelf of a music retail store.
Piracy will continue as long as:
- Anyone sees the price of a game as "too steep"
- Code monkeys want a shot at the new unbreakable DRM system.
- Publishers dont take chances, so we get the same games and genres over and over, and they take like... 6 hours to finish them.
Cheers!

HAHAHA kinda shows the standard of little cliffs intelligence if he thinks the likes of that is savvy. But then I think people who want to be known by "hip and cool" names like "Cliffy B" are a bit stupid anyway XD

i was born in 1987

Actually I believe he prefers Cliff Bleszinski nowadays.

I've actually kept some of those, plus my old 486 DX2 in a box. It should be quite rusty by now! maybe later I'll unplug my box and give it a try =D
How was piracy back in those days in all of your countries? I've always wondered about that.

The only game that comes to mind at the moment where the piraters might have a better (or smoother) experience is Spore. That is solely the fault of EA which can not look at a larger picture and go around the problem.

It was pretty much the same I'd suspect. For us, since we had no internet, and even worse for where I lived, no BBS access, we were limited to copying disks between our friends. I never used the 5 1/4" disks, I was one of the early adopters of the 720K 3 1/2" disk so copying stuff was especially painful for me. This was even more painful since all my friends had their games on the aforementioned 5 1/4" BASF disks and finding people who had both drive types was like finding a needle in a haystack. This was aside from the hassles of altering the media type. Some games didn't take too kindly to the transition between the disk types (you'd either have to format the 3.5 inch disk to 360K or some other more involved voodoo). But the big fun was finding a way to crack the copy protection. I remember the Sierra protection being particularly troublesome (for their AGI games). But a program called Rescue (I think it was called that, made by the same people who created Copywrite) soon fixed that :).
I certainly can't justify my actions as a youth, but it is what it is. Nowadays I actually buy my stuff since I'm very much in a position to be able to purchase what I want and being a software developer, I tend to have a negative bias towards piracy. But being a software developer with some sense of ethics, I see no advantage or noble purpose in creating the kinds of restrictive copy protection/DRM we see today - it's just blatent greed.

I didn't have a "home" computer until I was 11 years old. I knew nothing of pirating. But it existed, and our family would get copies of games, and copies of the manuals to break the copy protection. The only legit games I got for a few years were from my step dad, and he bought me killer games like Eye of the Beholder 2 and Hero's Quest 1 (yes QFG 1 but I had the copy before it got renamed) -- at the time I was living with my biological father.
As a kid and teen pirating was something that was done to play online together with my friend who could afford new games while I could not, so it was a one extra copy type of deal. The games that were involved were Doom 1, Duke Nukem 3D, Hexxen, mostly shooters because that was pretty much the only type of game that had multiplayer support where two computers could directly connect to each other over the phoneline and play together.
After 16 I would say I pretty much stopped pirating. I moved back in with my mom and played mostly console games, but occasionally borrowed a pc game. That's the extent of those years, borrowing a game for a week at a time.
After I became an adult I was given a couple copies of games, but they were single player games (no justification I know) but I hadn't asked for them, they were gifts. That was about the last time pirating games was a part of my life. The past several years I have bought every game I own, and I do not torrent games.
The debate for and against pirating is endless and will go on until torrenting sites become saturated with IP trackers and become no longer usable. That's about the only way I see pirating lessening. My friend went to a torrent site to check out the recent torrents and Fallout 3 was listed with like 3 thousand people torrenting it off of 20 seeds, so yeah those people are getting a free game... in a week. Plus he said people on their forum were saying the torrented copy has bugs.
That's kind of why I think pirating has its own failsafe measures. I know pirates, and they say that not all the games they download are crippled, but invariably every time one of them downloads a new game it's got some form of crippling bug so that they can never finish it.
Some people pirate because they're poor, and there's arguments for and against that. I think most people pirate because it's easy, but that's just my opinion. If it weren't so easy than there wouldn't be 3,000 people torrenting FO3 as we speak, and that's just on one site.
Anyway I think I've rambled on enough... sorry about the banter, I hope I was at least a bit constructive.
-Cym

Given the choice between Cliff Bleszinski and CliffyB, I might've gone with the latter myself. :P
Just checking TPB only, there's a torrent with 1200 seeders and 12000 leechers. Which has apparently been up a day before release (the console version two weeks before that). Also, public trackers are far from the only option for piracy.
I don't suppose bugs are exclusive to the pirated version, given that bad releases would've gotten nuked by now. People managed to finish the game just fine, anyway, if the game videos are any indication. And Bethesda's previous game, Oblivion, has a user-made patch that fixes a couple thousand bugs (there are 2894 entries in the full changelog) not addressed in official patches, so bugs are not entirely unexpected.

Wow that's a lot of pirating. I was just throwing the trackers out as an example, I've been thinking about my post and perhaps it isn't the best method.
I was thinking if instead of fining people $200,000 they fined the purchase price of the software... maybe that would make it more enforceable, I don't know.
I'm just frightened as a pc gamer because I've heard Epic and Ubisoft will not be coming out with any more pc games. Epic has been validated so I know that's true, not sure if Ubi is totally throwing in the towel or just limiting what they put out.

And I was born the year before you.

In case of Ubisoft - thank God. I'm tired of their DRM crap. You can be sure that there are hundreds of developers that just can't wait to make some profit, where Ubisoft was stupid enough to waste. It's a multi-billion market - anyone who decides to leave his well-established place on it is actually shooting his leg. I won't cry because of Ubisoft, wasn't going to buy any of their crap anyway.

Quite true. I bought the last settlers game and had to apply a crack to run it, since it was asking for the dvd while it was inside the drive all along. 1st and last time I get a game from them.

You're lucky it didn't disable your anti-virus and dvd drive at the same time :)