Kwowing the current populations of India & China together is 2.5+ (and counting) of those, i think Piznit has it's 000 estimations confused!

Indeed, it was an overestimate quoting 4 billion copies.  Its just even more humorous when someone thinks I was being literal.

P.S.  Everyone knows they only sold 3 billion copies.  The other 1/2 billion were lumped and sold for 1 dollar each for purposes of increasing their "units sold" balance sheet, then those copies were all pirated by friends and little brothers.  So all together it was 4 billion.

well..my friend owns an internet cafe and he is chinese.  So i asked him.."how do you get your games??"  he told me that he gets a member of something call "ice cafe".  Forgot the exact name.  It is a chinese company that paids the publisher for the rights to have language localiztion done.  But that is not all.  Apparently, if you own an internet cafe that has a min of 10 computers running on a server (the company can check this), you then paid them a few thousand dollars a month to download those translated version of the game.  Sometimes, my friend is gets english version of the game from the same company.   My friend told me, on that company server where he get games, there are literally thousands and thousands of games to choose from.

Also, if this chinese company decides not to translate the game, and someone else does and load it on the net.  That copy will eventually make its way to their server too.  I have seen Fallout 3 being translated in some mangled fashion.  Oh my god...the NPCs will be talking to you in english with chinese text.  You answer back in english.  Or you get ask questions with english subtitles, and then answer with the options of seeing chinese subtitles.  

Well the thing is that Demigod is coming out.  And i know for sure it will be translated into chinese.  The consequence of that is..it will be leaked onto the internet, and virtually everyone in china can get accessed to it either thru legal or illegal means.   I guess SD will be having their foray into the chinese market whether they want it or not.

I think that the actual percentage of pirate "converts" is greater than 0%, but I also happen to think that Frogboy is right - most people who pirate and proceed not to buy the game won't actually buy the game if they lacked the ability to pirate it - they would simply go without.

Against that, match up against the number of people who, through piracy, were able to get the game for free, then decided that they wanted to get a legal copy just because they wanted Stardock to make more such games.

I think that the latter more than counteract the actions of the former, making the issue of piracy essentially a non-issue.  If anything, it seems as if secretly allowing people to pirate a great game would lead to more revenue through the latter event.

I, too, made the switch from pirating everything to buying everything right about when I switched from Apple to PC. Part of it was the stuff factor and part was the guilt factor.

The stuff factor was that most games I played came with a huge manual or a box full of feelies. If the game didn't require an engineering degree to play (as did some flight and sub sims) the manual would be rife with researched history, fabulous illustrations and such that were relevant to the game. Ultima's cloth maps were a particularly nice touch.

The guilt factor stemmed from the group photo in the back of the manual of the development team. It was a lot easier to steal from one coder working in his basement (especially when I was one such coder, and relased my products for free) than it was enough faces make two rugby teams.

These days, I STILL buy my products, despite the facts that I can afford them less and the manuals, group photos and feelies are pretty much absent unles one acquires the deluxe verions (which I don't). If the present DRM trend continues, though, I cannot vouch for my contiued virtue.

U.

GG for telling it how it is, particularly point 3.  It's refreshing to come across a company that 'gets it' when it comes to piracy--Bethesda is about the only other one that comes to mind.  It's a shame so many publishers are run by manage-by-numbers MBAs who have no clue how anything actually works, but I have a feeling a lot of them will be getting their comeuppance before long.  Poor economies have a habit of cleaning out bad ideas...