A more accurate comparison would be if a store sold you a bike and it had a lock on it... you decided you wanted a break from the bike and needed more space.. but you could only lock it away with this lock.. unfortunatly this lock only came with 3 keys.. and one broke each time you undid the lock.

Furthermore, every ten days you would have to ride down to the bike store and go "hey guys.. It's me on the bike! don't worry noone else is riding it!"

Meanwhile down the street there is a dude passing out free bikes of the same brand with no lock and no need to ride by for comfirmation.

The problem wiht piracy prevention software is that it doesn't prevent piracy. It might slow it down by a day at best. Meanwhile it puneshes legitimate buyers while the piraters are laughing it up.. the piraters get it sooner from foreign markets.. like people are downloading aussi spore almost a week before North American release, they have less restrictions.. and get it for free.

Essentially the more oppressive anti piracy software they shove onto their products the more they stack the deck in favour of piracy. Same with music from alot of pay sites.. you get it in an obscure non transferable format that wont even play on most MP3 players.. and you pay for that.. or you can get a free one in mp3 format.

People should take a page from Bethesda's book. They released Oblivion with no piracy prevention crap and it was number 1 and number 2 on the PC's top selling games list for months (regular and collectors edition) by April of 2006 it had already sold 1.7 million copies.. at $55 regular and about $80 collectors that's probably over 100 million dollars (I don't know for certain what it is since I don't know the breakdown between collectors and regular sales).

The real reason the PC is "dying" as a platform is that companies shovel out rehashed garbage 95% of the time and PC players wont stand for that. Look at EA sports.. they've been throwing out the same crap for the past 7 years with it's product then whine that the PC platform isn't suitable for sports games. No... it's fine.. we just aren't dumb enough to buy the same crap 8 years in a row.

Simply, good games and bad games are pirated... but good games also sell like hot cakes, unfortunatly.. good games are becoming increasingly rare.. everything is just graphics graphics graphics and no depth.