Interesting and mostly (I think) right on the money article about why people pirate games.

Talking to Pirates

A couple of things that I found interesting were the implied percentages of people who responded with different reasons/justifications for their piracy. As someone who used to travel to Malaysia, Thailand, and Hong Kong regularly (before the Internet made location irrelevant) I saw just how many people would buy pirated movies/games just because they were cheap and easy. It was actually easier to get a pirated copy of Fallout 2 than it was to get a real one, by several orders of magnitude (as measured by distance to travel) and certainly cheaper...

I wasn't as surprised as Cliff that price was a major factor, although I think he was biased because he intended it as a question about his own games, not the general market, and the answers were based on retail for the most part, I would guess.

I was surprised that Cliff didn't mention Stardock as another example of a company that makes great games and doesn't use any DRM. I love their model of install it, use it on as many machines as you like, but you have to register to get the updates.

dropping the price of his own games I have to question, as well, since are already fairly reasonable, but certainly dropping the price of an old game right before the next installment/version comes out is an old marketing trick that is a proven one.

Best of luck to Cliff and all the other independent developers out there, it's a tough biz to be in.