It's not hard for your lazy pirate to crack a game though, as since few if any crackers can make money selling cracks they make them fairly easy to access (note, I won't tell you how to find them, figure it out yourself).
That's what I mean by lazy. Some people can't figure it out by themselves and don't want to. Hence, they buy.
I doubt buying will ever be competitive with piracy, if only because one would usually prefer to buy something for free than buy something for money. I'm not aiming for competitiveness, just limiting the effects of piracy.
I think most people buy because of some level of guilt (I know I do). I buy games because I support the industry. If I want to play a game but not pay, I look for freeware games. It's not like there aren't tens of thousands of freeware and shareware games available through a simple search on google.
My argument is that since pirates can always crack any amount of security on a game, and are very motivated to do so, any amount of protection beyond what will stop a lazy person is superfluous at best. Rather than penalize the people who actually payed for the game via debilitating DRM and other ridiculous restraints, they should remove these so people aren't pushed into piracy to keep the game marginally playable.
If your pay analogy was 100% accurate, the rise of piracy would have immediately destroyed the gaming industry, but the gaming industry is growing. People will, in my experience, buy a game if they have the option. When you put restrictions on the game (such as the ones detailed in the OP), you rig the system in favor of piracy.
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Topic: Telltale Games, and why piracy exists (Read 9216 times)