piracy is a loaded issue in pc and sure it might have been a factor but they don't suggest at all that iron lore's titan quest happened to be just a decent game. i mean i bought the first one and thought it wasn't great and certainly not good enough to look in to purchasing sequels, let alone disk space from a torrent copy.
it's tragic that independent talent get burnt but piracy at 70%? i don't know if i should be laughing or congratulating them.

Many of the people who pirated the game would never have bought it if they didn't pirate it. If you take those stats and consider the amount of money people have as disposable income, you will see that there is no possible way to sustain the total amount of pirated copies of games in sales. People just dont make that much disposable income.

Lets be honest: its stealing yes, but are they really losing money? Absolutely. Is it losing as much money as the statistics suggest? No. Its a long way away from that.

Many indy games will do better due to the increased awareness. Many BIG GAME's will do worse because generally speaking they have a large audience and conumer base anyway, and each download is actual potential loss.

Im not saying its good, but if you make it so that each person HAS to buy the game to have access to it, the game is just going to be less enjoyed.

I love how they basically accuse a large part of the PC gaming community as pirating the game... suck up to developers much? Yes Pirates are a problem but a lot of the game devs who whine seem to have something in common and that is crappy Games. No that isn't a reason to pirate but come on Titian quest as another freaking remediable game that any random guy in Korea can make. A also what doesn't anybody bring up crap like how Microsoft pad a insane amount of money to have those GTA4 episode things or whatever they are called and how that hurts PC gamers.

Sorry forgot to add this. Go look at the sins of a solar empire guys, they have more informed opinion on piracy.

I enjoyed those games immensely, and I paid full price for them

Part of the challenge to such assertions: there are TOO MANY GAMES THAT COME OUT ALL THE TIME. As a result, you can fail simply due to the fact that you end up flying under the radar; you don't get noticed fast enough by enough customers.

So, even without piracy to contend with, you can go out of business. Ever have a favorite restaurant of yours go out of business? Same deal.

Secondly, I know some people that pirate a lot of stuff. They tend to have a philosophy that if it's good, they end up deleting their cracked copy and getting a real one. It's not the way it's meant to be, but they also take some enjoyment out of the process of the piracy process.

Third, games like Titan Quest have the same gameplay style as some MMO-type games. So a huge chunk of the audience spends a gross amount of time playing MMO's with their buddies instead of trying out more indie-style games like Titan Quest.

At least THQ had the good sense to work with Steam, and I bet they'll get some return on their investment through it, although it's too late for Iron Lore. But the guys from Iron Lore will be back.

In the end? It's a real shame.