So they spammed the torrent site with an "official" handicapped version to make people ignore later complete pirated version? Clever.

@ Los255

Actually, there's are multiple ways to almost completely stop piracy. All you have to do is make things pirates don't care about. Or as an alternative, require hardware that a pirate can only get through buying the game (almost like guitar hero). Heck, sometimes both happen.

I do believe it is fair to say that pirates are a very specific demographic; very computer savy gamers who primary system is most likely a PC. Now, there is simply no way to get the full Guitar Hero experience without a plastic guitar. The peripheral, for better or for worse, is very good for the atmosphere for the game, and acts as a partial defense against piracy. The other defense simply requires companies to make a game like Brain Age. Yes some people might pirate brain age, but the type of person who pirates games (tech savy computer gamers) and the type of people that buy brain age don't seem like they would overlap much. The type of person that would be most likely to want brain age probably wouldn't even know that DS games can be pirated in the first place.

Of course, the only problem is that I don't actually have an interest in either game, which means piracy is most likely to hurt genres I enjoy while helping genres I don't care about. So I dislike piracy a bit.

I think all game companies should release broken full versions of their games to torrent sites (multiple different versions, even) to discourage piracy. Spending so much time trying to pirate a game only to find out it doesn't work would make me wonder if pirating it was worth the trouble.

I know whenever I try to find some crazy old PC game on the torrent sites and all I get it gimped copies or things that simply won't work it makes me not bother anymore.

Wait, what?

...does this mean its okay to torrent Trials? I mean, I already bought Trials HD for my 360...

@ Xyliac

I'm not familiar enough with the piracy scene on the PSP to comment intelligently, but I know quite a bit about Wii piracy. Interestingly, Homebrew seems to be very popular for Brawl hacks and turning the Wii into a DVD player. After that, it's used to exploit the virtual console. The archetecture is supposedly so similar to a gamecube that most the old hacks carried over.

I don't know if the Wii is particularly popular for piracy or for just hacking though.

@ Cowboy

Before another reiteration of "piracy is here to stay", I want your (or anyone else who believes that) opinion on how piracy will affect Natal games. Not the wishy-washy games that have Natal support optional, but the games that will integrate Natal necesarily and seemlessly into the experience.

(I'll admit I'm skeptical of Natal, but because of the Xbox 360 PC architechture and large number of PC games, it's more fair to ask how new technologies on the 360 will affect piracy than technology on the other systems.)

What? This is stupid. You get sites like Score Hero where you can take a picture of your score, upload it and be set. You don't need ingame scoreboards to get anywhere.

Why not just release a demo?

Oh wait thats "90% of the DS players are pirates". Yarrr, matey!