Sorry, but I'm tired of the denial among gamers about piracy. It's an ignorant, knee-jerk insistence of fact based on nothing but that ideology.
I can recall PC publishers finding an estimated 90% of players of their games had pirated them about 20 years ago, threatening their staying business - so they made 'shareware'.
The level of ideology can even be seen in this case, when posters allege the publishes is blaming it all on piracy and denying it has anything to do with the product - when the very headline in the linked article says it's both problems with the port and piracy. But peope want to make the false claim, so ignore the facts.
There is no reason or excuse for players to excuse and deny the piracy.
Bulletstorm has a PC gamerankings rating of 82%, which is not bad at all, just as the publisher said.
Supporting, defending, denying piracy is a threat to the creation of the creation of good products - in part forcing them to shift more to forms less pirated, like MMORPG's.
There are no 'pirated copies' of World of Warcraft I know of, given the need for an online subsciption - but look at the market in stolen, hacked accounts and gold.
I've personally had my account stolen and hacked multiple times in WoW; it's a many millions-dollar industry. I can't count the phishing scams for just that game's thieves.
Some publishers have shifted to consoles away from PC's in large part over piracy.
Some of the ones who remain tend to pander to the PC crowd, reassuring them, 'oh we agree with you! Piracy is overblown! And when it's done it's by honest people who will buy the game! And whatever else you want to hear to make you feel good about the publisher and just hopefully be one of the few actually buying the game!'
They know they get 'street cred' by spouting the line denying piracy.
Meanwhile, a lot of honest publishers try to deal with the issue with DRM, with the problems that brings, and not working all that well to stop the pirates.
But as I said I'm tired of the BS denying the thievery. The sellers of games deserve to be compensated, and that's what brings quality new games. But not Bulletstorm 2.
Look, let's take just the comments of the CEO of CD Projekt, which seems to be a darling of the anti-DRM crowd by choosing to offer games without DRM.
Is it because of views like the posters above - piracy isn't really a problem, publishers use it as an excuse? No.
First, I just noticed he made comments like mine about the high rates of piracy for decades; second, he said: "We of course experimented with all available DRM/copy protection, but frankly nothing worked. Whatever we used was cracked within a day or two, massively copied and immediately available on the streets for a fraction of our price."
Then he went on to look for approaches, since he couldn't defeat piracy, that would sell copies despite it, like adding items gamers would only get by buying the games.
That's not excusing or denying piracy as a policy - it's trying to work around it, which might help the publisher but it at odds with the 'piracy denier views'.
Take the very visible 'no DRM' release of The Witcher 2. A very well-reviewed game, and one loudly being offered with no DRM, with many gamers praising that.
And how was Project CD rewarded for being a game that 'deserved being bought' as a poster child as a good non-DRM game? The CEO estimated the piracy on it:
"The result is roughly 4.5 million illegal downloads. This is only an estimation, and I would say that’s rather on the optimistic side of things; as of today we have sold over 1M legal copies, so having only 4.5-5 illegal copies for each legal one would be not a bad ratio. The reality is probably way worse."
So, 'probably way more than 4.5 million illegal downloads' for about 1 million sold, and that's a 'not bad ratio'. So, cut the crap about piracy not being a problem. It is.
Some games get made despite having that 1 to many ratio copies sold to piracy; big titles like Skyrim made good money despite piracy. Other games like Bulletstorm 2 - no.
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