I think one of the things mentioned in the article on piracy was that, piracy didn't hurt them TOO bad for the very reason you are now a statistic of....some people who had a pirated copy, enjoyed the game enough to then buy it.

Perhaps I misread that horridly though, I do that quite often.

Kudos. You now officially have a future that involves something better than serving french fries or airbrushing skateboards.

Sadly, you have also eliminated yourself from a career in politics.

Don't worry too much. This community is much like a religion, we are welcoming of converts...

I'm not a convert. I'm still a pirate. I see no reason to apologize.
Piracy was the reason I ever found this beautiful, excellent game. I didn't pay for it right away. No, I pushed it in front of me for a long time.

If I'm still a pirate, and don't believe in intellectual property or copyrights, why did I buy the game? Simple. It's a fucking awesome game. In GalCiv2, everything a good game should have, from patches to expansions, from release to the day it dies. This company have truly supported their fanbase and their game.

It's that easy.

I agree with Luckmann - I'm glad you bought GC2, but don't apologize for piracy. In today's market saturated with utter junk, I have a really tough time rationalizing not pirating a game. Yeah, I'll buy stuff I like, but rarely will I buy it site-unseen. Heroes IV taught me a valuable lesson - no company deserves your money just because they were successful in the past. Heroes IV was a great concept, but utterly destroyed by 3DO's greed and willingness to release a product so broken that no amount of patching could ever fix it (try a game with an AI ally and watch just how bad the AI really is).

Funny thing: the rule I just mentioned doesn't apply to Stardock. I bought TotA site-unseen (previously I'd pirated GC and GC2 before buying both). I will probably buy their fantasy game in this way as well. Maybe even The Political Machine just for kicks. SD does things right - they treat pirates like customers, not the other way around. They're trying to prove to middle-class pirates like me that they deserve my money. Other companies have an attitude that puts me off (EA, anyone?), but SD is different.

As long as you guys keep your feet on the ground, I'll be the most loyal pirate you ever had.

OldFartAtPlay:

Thanks for an excellent post that made me laugh out loud!

I too download games to try them. Typicaly I play the game for a few days and delete it because there are so many crap games on the market. The key things to keeping people from pirating is to offer a great online experience or continuous support and updates as Stardock is doing. I will admit I downloaded GalCiv 2 and it didnt hold my interest. I recently downloaded DA and it held my interest a little more...then I started reading about TA...then I purchased everything and LOVE TA more than the first 2.

In my opinion, Stardock is a unique company and I will definately support them from now on! Keep it up Stardock!

Heh. I stopped pirating software when I came close to my degree and started to work in the industry myself. Though, given the quality of some titles, I wish I HAD pirated them...

Hold it, not sure about this whole "try-b4-you-buy" schema at all.

In fact, it's always been one of my deepest critic about the somehow reasonable distribution method. Teasing the customer enough to ENFORCE a purchase is simply, bad manner in true commercial outlets - so why should anyone tolerate it for software or "computer fuel" including games?

Cuz, that's what the principles of freeware_shareware are?

Waita minute, we're talkin' corporate business here (profit, registration with social institutions, in that office bldg overthere) not some gizmo kinky boyscout fixing up a gimmick in daddy's basement.

If a product isn't valuable enough to warrant a single packaging worth my ca$h, it certainly isn't good enough in a stripped state demo either. Thus, my decision has to be taken on a tricky pattern; trust. Duh - do you seriously believe most anyone can be trusted nowadays?
Looka around... Piracy may come in all shapes and colors (including delayed people like the OP - honesty implies A cost, btw) but it is definitely a plague to fight against.

Humanity is a crazy bunch, as it is, has been & probably ever will. There's bound to be the atypical sector in any populations of the little blue marble in space.

Conclusion; if i really want something sooooo bad, i just stack the darn doe for it. Money is mine, i earned it bad & glad so i can spend it however i please. But don't come here claiming your stuff is a good demonstration of anything worth my precious leasure time - i've got plenty of annoyingly stupid Pubs_Promos_Commercials in my mailbox and on TeeVee already. What i ask for i get when i can afford it - anything else is junk flaw of someone's idea about fooling people's intelligence & time.

There, off my soap-box.

Thank you very much, all of you, for your welcoming replies. I didn't expect it...least of all from a Stardock Representative.

I'm already enjoying my purchase...and I'm enjoying the game itself in a whole new way again. I hadn't realized just how much this feeling of "It's bad to pirate" has always lingered in my head whenever I had been playing it before, partially ruining the fun. Without that, it's ten times better. It's psychological, and stupid psychological at that, but it's how I feel.

Zyxpsilon: Unfortunately, there's only so many ways to get information on a game before you buy it, and being what a game is, the information usually doesn't convey the whole picture. You have to be able to play some sort of demo before you buy a game.

Luckmann: I'm apologizing for the piracy of Stardock's intellectual property. Whether you choose to believe in it or not, I do, because Stardock and the employees spent large amounts of their time labouring over this not for free, but because it earned them money. (I imagine it was also a lot of fun, but that's beside the point.) They created this not for everyone to enjoy, but for the people who spend the money to enjoy.

Now, I encourage and love the idea of freeware. I use Firefox, Open Office, and a whole lot of other freeware stuff over the professional stuff. But Gal Civ II isn't freeware, which means people should pay for it if they want to play it.

doogles: Now that is a good point. There is a lot of saturation, and early on I justified piracy of games as trying them out(and in a way it still is a good way to do it if the game lacks a demo/the demo is very limited.) Still...I would rather there be another, better way.

"Demos" are worthless. All of them are rigged, and often have only limited correlation to the actual game. Also, they offer absolutely no reason why you'd actually want to buy the game at all: If you liked what was in the demo, why would you buy the game, if it is already in the demo? Conversely, if it is not in the demo, then you have been told nothing about it, and therefore, the demo is worthless.