All due politeness, guys, and all due respect to the moral value of refraining from theft or gaining access to other people's products without their permission, it is very misleading (and perhaps interestingly pointless) to refer to "losses due to piracy", especially misleading to actually try to quantify such losses! I mean, seriously, are you counting how many pirated copies of a game were downloaded to calculate the losses? Why?! Are you blindly assuming that all those downloaded copies must have been bought if they were not pirated? Isn't that—at least—a bit absurd? You really think that a teenager from a developing country, where a $30 product basically may cost 300 units of his local currency, which simultaneously happens to be two-week salary for the average job (that 300 whatever, pounds / lira / etc), would have BOUGHT the game if he could not download a pirated copy of it? Hah. Wishful thinking really.

Let's face it, guys: no less than 90% of those who download a pirated copy of a game would have NEVER bought the game, ever, if they could not download it. So it really is completely pointless, and extremely misleading to assume or claim that because 1000 pirated copies were download then that's a loss of $30 x 1000 = $30,000. That logic is flawed, because it is purely theoretical and completely detached from real life.

And don't get me wrong...I do NOT condone piracy at all; I do believe it is theft, because it is gaining access to someone's product or fruit of labor without that someone's permission, but I passionately urge gaming companies, leaders, decision makers, corporate strategists, profit ***res, whoever you are and wherever you are, to see part of the other side of piracy that actually [may] have some benefits to you: the more your game is pirated and downloaded, the more it becomes popular, the more it is talked about, the more the word about it gets spread, and the higher the chance that an honest, paying customer is going to be enticed or extremely tempted to buy it. I passionately, earnestly urge you to please NOT implement frustrating, aggravating anti-piracy or digital rights management measures that compromise the fun and gratitude and appreciation of your paying customers. Please do not force me, as an honest, paying customer to be online every single second I want to play your game. Do not force me to have internet connection so I can start to play your game.

Do not force me to update your game before playing its single-player non-online campaign. Do not force me to register your game. Yes, yes, encourage me to do all that, give me incentives to do all that, but please do not FORCE me to do any of it. It really makes me genuinely hate you as a publisher or developer, and it seriously compromises my appreciation of the game itself, even if it is a brilliant game. Believe me, I will always remember the frustration that you made me feel before I was able to play your game, and as soon as your game becomes old news, yesterday's news, and I start to look for new things to do, new fun, the first thing I'll remember about your game (even if I had hundreds of hours of multiplayer or single-player fun playing it) would be the painful process of registration and forced DGM measures, etc. etc. Try to make money all you want, but realize that punishing your honest, paying customers is far from a way to help you make more profit.

Also try to see that there is at least a tiny other side of the coin, or other side of piracy, that can help YOU gauge how actually fun and popular your game truly is. Again, I am NOT condoning piracy, and I do believe it is theft; I would not encourage it, participate in it, nor facilitate it for anyone; ALL I'm saying is that if it is simply a reality of life and a reality of your industry, then try to make your own life easier and less stressful by seeing at least one tiny bright side to it....it makes your game more popular, and it may very well also add hundreds of thousands of hours of your game being played if those thousands of gamers using a pirated copy also have a program like Xfire or Raptr installed, right? Because those programs are going to count the many hours of your game being played. Those really and truly are a few bright sides to the piracy that some of you so vehemently, so frenziedly right against that you takes us, honest paying customers in your crusade, and inadvertently make our lives a bit miserable, and make us hate your company rather than feel pure gratitude and appreciation towards it.