Actually moral hazards are a very important part to many economic issues. Right now we have consumers who steal games insulated from the consequence of their action (whether or not they think that because something is cheap to reproduce it has no value therefore they should not pay for it, it's still stealing), and an industry that relies on ridiculous end user licences, release day patches, the fact that their consumers can't actually return a product, hidden DRM schemes, and the ability to put features in print and not actually liveup to the what is listed on the box without consequence. I think if one issue was addressed more, you might have less problems with the other (and no, I don't mean that stopping thieves would actually make developers create better games).

I do agree that the more hassle a consumer has, the less likely they are going to be to deal with it and therefore it would lower demand. I would like to see the numbers though, in how much DRM schemes actually add to the production costs of a game (on average).

Please stop this misinformation.

Theft: you take something from somebody. You: +1. Owner: -1

Copyright infringement: you copy without permission. You: +1. Copyright holder: 0, potentially -1 but it's hard to prove. Estimates of sales lost due to copyright infringement vary wildly, and the methods used to obtain them are anything but scientific.

Stardock itself often argues that people who pirate* games most likely wouldn't buy them anyway. If you insist unaothorised copying is theft because it means lost sales, you should go after movie critics and sites which allow people to publish comments. In case of theft, the owner always loses some value because we're talking about physical property. In case of copyright infringement, it's about copying information.

I have nothing against paying for development costs, or seeing ads in a game like Quake Live. But to say that there's correlation between the price of a game and development costs is a big stretch. News flash: you can't treat information as if it was physical property, because it isn't. It's funny, because more and more musicians realise obscurity is a bigger threat than piracy.

* what a silly name. Equaling inauthorised copying with rape, murder, theft, destruction.

Go ahead and justify stealing all you want. I didn't say it was stealing because it's a loss in sales or that it was stealing because pirates who buy the game would buy it. I am sure a lot of pirates don't have enough money buy the game, and then there are pirates who don't think anything is valuable that doesn't belong to them, and then there are pirates who are fed up with being screwed by publishers and developers going after paying consumer. It's stealing because you are taking something that doesn't belong to you. It has nothing to do with costs. The value of something is only correlated with costs but the value may have very, very little to do with costs. Just look at branding. A brand is hardly a physical thing. It's an intellectual, social thing but it has a value. Contracts aren't physical things. They can be if they are written down but verbal contracts are real. People don't pay 100 dollars for a pair of sneakers because it's a the sum of rubber and cotton involved, they pay those high prices because of something that isn't phyisical at all. The fact that get something physical return is only partially relevant.

This silly notion that something has to be physicial to be stolen is the kind of thought process that belongs to the dark ages, not the 21st century.