Hey,I thought you guys at Stardock were curious if your strategy of luring pirates to play your games through (*ahem* economics) added utility and copy-protection free games worked.I'm an uber pirate. I hail from South East Asia. Me, my mates, my family, and everyone I frigging know pirates everything from watches to cars to explosives to software to porn even. Lots of valid reasons for this that I won't get into simply because of selective reader perception which is probably impossible to counter.Anyway, me and my mates have all bought this game. Every single one of us. Extreme pirates who took the cheapest price for anything without a care in the world went out of their way to buy this product.Added info:Purchasing power parity between Malaysia and US is almost equal.Exchange rate for 1 Malaysian Ringgit to 1 US dollar is 3.3What this means is that we paid $165 each for this game.That's just how awesome this game is. Keep up the good work.p.s: Please don't report me to RIAA or anything like that. I don't have anything pirated here in Canada. Can't afford any storage mediums.
Look a responsible pirate! I think you've just demonstrated what made this game such an easy sale for me and an easy recommendation to many friends. It's sold at a fair price, it's in a finished state (tweaks and imperfections are normal--broken UI's, server browsers, network play, cd-key saving, game save keeping, etc. *cough*UT3/Gears*cough* are NOT acceptable), the game is a lot of fun to play despite some drawbacks, the gameplay is addicting, the visuals are good, the engine scales to hardware so almost anyone can play, and the product assumes you purchased it instead of immediately thinking you stole it (*cough*Bioshock*cough*...really oppressive copy-protection). Easy, regret-free sale.
I don't know if Ironclad/Stardock people are reading this thread, but you may just be the first company to try to understand why piracy happens instead of mindlessly trying to stomp on it without realizing the root. You may also have accidentally stumbled on something here, but I hope you try to understand it. The music industry learned this and dropped their prices to dollar tracks, and now they're making way more money than what they ever did with the more expensive approaches. Exploration into offering content without copy-protection is also yielding higher returns than ever before because people have no hesitations about paying for quality stuff for a fair price. Some people will always pirate things, but they wouldn't have bought the product to begin with so it's not a lost sale, contrary to what the copy-protection companies say. Most of the video game industry has yet to learn what the music industry did. Unfortunately, the movie industry is also going in the wrong direction.
