There are many software sellers that don't use DRM. Wouldn't it be nice if customers actually did their homework and supported them?

There are quite a lot of software developers/distributors for whom piracy IS the reason that DRM exists. There are others for whom it definitely isn't. There are many many more that neither you nor I is in a position to say for sure. You have no call to assume bad faith in a blanket statement. Hanlon's razor?

It sucks being poor, tired, sick, and working to get even that far. No one's disputing that. But there are ways other than warez to get some entertainment without paying for things, or at least, without paying much.

Depending on where you live, you may be able to find all sorts of free music on offer to go and listen to. Buskers would prefer you threw them a dollar, of course, but other gigs exist solely as advertising and are straight-up free. Religious services can double as free concerts if you find one with a decent choir. Get desperate enough and you can hang out in stores to listen to the music they're piping in, or hog the free listening stations in a music store, like the penniless teenagers.

Small theaters often have pay-what-you-can performances. Many museums are that way all the time. There's these things called libraries where they let people go to read books for free, and some of them even allow you to rent movies, music, and games. Some people also borrow books, movies, and games from friends, or buy cheap used ones, or FIND discarded ones on the street.

There are an uncountable number of ACTUALLY FREE video games on the internet you can download, no stealing required.

Look, I'm not a 100% raving anti-piracy fanatic, but this particular argument does not hold water. "Don't steal my games" is not me cruelly denying you the only tiny drop of joy that could possibly reach into your benighted life.

Are these people aiming for jobs within the mainstream game industry, aiming to become independent game developers, or interested in game design as an art form? If they're looking for jobs then yes, give them time with Unity and talk a lot about the limits of 3d and how to balance speed and beauty. If they want to sell their own games, step away from Unity and look into simpler game builders that can be highly customised by people with artistic talent. Even RPG Maker would do for that (look at Rainblood for an example of an artist-driven RPG Maker game). RenPy or one of the adventure game toolkits, also. If they're not very techie but they want to create games, you want to give them tools that make the basic game-making easy, and then let them go wild exploring how different they can make the results. If you want to explore weird experimental/conceptual game design stuff, then along with the 3d give them some simple flexible 2d tools that they can prototype wild concepts with.

Ignoring your rude suggestions (Slashdotters don't like women? What a surprise!) the exact money figure is mostly a distraction from the issue. If he's done something *actually wrong*, then the fact that he can't pay the fine shouldn't mean that he gets off scot free. If he's done something that ISN'T wrong, then the fine being a thousand instead of a million makes little difference.

While I don't apply DRM to my products because of my personal moral beliefs, that does not appear to have any effect on people's desire to pirate or not pirate, nor does it make anyone think of me as a 'nice' company that they shouldn't steal from - I still get rants about how I'm evil and deserve to die because I put thing X in a game, or didn't put thing X in a game, or didn't sell on Steam, or didn't sell at retail in Malaysia, or didn't accept some payment method I've never heard of and they never asked me about anyway, or didn't use photorealistic 3d that I could never afford anyway, or dared to charge any money at all! People who want to come up with an excuse not to pay are quite good at finding other justifications.

And what about all the publishers who DON"T use DRM and still get pirated just as much and see tons of posts about how all game publishers are evil and deserve to be ripped off? If you treat them like thugs, they may as well act like them... :)

... and then there's all the games that DON'T cost $60 and DO come with free trials, and they still get pirated just as much. Game publishers don't have to 'come up with' a fair model - there are PLENTY of game sellers out there who are more affordable and less restrictive, it's just that no one actually cares. Pirates aren't going to change and will continue this BS anyway.

Good. Buy games from developers with smaller budgets instead of buying the megazillion shiny thing. The crazy parts of the industry that just blindly follow the money around will change course if the money is obviously somewhere else. :)

With the exception of the marijuana (sorry, just not my thing) I'd be quite happy curling up in a nice dark room with couches, games, and TVs, and no man am I. Are women supposed to be afraid of the dark or something?

There are cheaper games out there. Big companies aren't complete morons - if the cheaper games are flying off the rack and the expensive ones are lingering, they'll change their sales tactics. However, if people sit at home sulking and don't buy any games at all, that just registers as either "OMG! RECESSION!" or "OMG! PIRACY!"

People love to complain about all the things big companies are doing wrong - short gameplay, high prices, nasty DRM - and sure, these things suck, but there are plenty of people who DON'T do those things. Yet as long as the big companies make more money than the people trying different tactics, they're not likely to change.

Until developers have access to time machines, retail price of a game will NOT affect the development process.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. The intended retail price DOES affect the development process. Video games are generally NOT built from scratch, completed, and handed to a marketing department which then says "Gee, what should we sell this for?" Publishers can have profit projections of what they intend to sell the game for and how many sales they think they can get before production even STARTS.

Those projections affect how much budget the publisher is willing to put up for the game.

Can you make games an awful lot cheaper? Of course you can, I'm an indie, shoestring budgets are my living. And shoestring budget doesn't always mean the game's no fun. But it does mean you're not going to get fancy physics engines and photorealistic 3d. A big budget doesn't guarantee that a game's any good, but it means that the company had the opportunity to put more Kewl Stuff into it.

... is that your DMs weren't very good, especially when it comes to adjudicating magic. And everyone knows what poor management does to a business!

PT Barnum is proved right: there IS no such thing as bad publicity.

... Except that becoming the most TORRENTED GAME hardly does the game-makers any good, does it?

Of course, many hentai companies don't *want* to sell games to Westerners (some have been very anti-export precisely because they were trying to prevent this sort of mess.)

Still, publicity that boosts piracy - or worse, boosts SALES of pirated copies, since there are places selling the download burned to a cheap disc with a broken fan-made patch applied - is not exactly helping them. And since many companies are having to alter or cancel products in development because of this mess? This was definitely bad publicity.

Dating sims aren't necessarily porn. Plenty of them are not. It's just that many of them, if they're PC games in Japan, contain some adult content. Many SHOOT EM UP games contain adult content if they're PC games in Japan.

... for that matter, Katawa Shoujo isn't a dating sim. Nor is it hard to get hold of. Nor does being on the shelf matter, since it isn't being sold. And even if it were being sold, lacking adult content wouldn't make it that much easier to get it sold on US shelves because the US doesn't have the same sort of doujinsoft tradition.

Yes, it's weird that American videogames are all yay-violence boo-sex, but your comment is rambly and doesn't entirely make sense. :)