I steal a lot of things. I steal hearts, I steal music, but I do NOT steal PC games. Partially because it’s too much effort to go through to try and download a 2GB .iso file. After all, when I want to play a game, I want to play it now, not three or four hours from now. Mostly, though, it’s because there just aren’t enough good PC games to warrant theft. While Crytek’s CEO Cevat Yurli believes the ratio of pirates to purchases is somewhere in the range of 20-1, I can assure you all that I am not one of those 20.

Crytek’s answer to the thievery is to not make games PC exclusive any longer, which is to say the very least, a silly decision. BioWare (Baldur’s Gate, Mass Effect), on the other hand, has their own idea to combat internet piracy: Kill them with kindness.

Speaking with 2003 Santa Fe Big Mac Eating Champion* and MTV Multiplayer Writer Patrick Klepek, BioWare’s Ray Muzyka explained his company’s battleplan to combat piracy:

We think it’s a good thing to encourage players to make them want to buy a PC title. That’s ultimately the best, most successful path to prevent piracy is to have players that want your games, want to believe in them and think they’re high-quality and realize they’re going to get a lot of value out of them as platforms for long time afterwards.

In short: Downloadable Comment and QUALITY will deter people from stealing your game because they will want to support you. While it certainly sounds noble, I just don’t see this resonating with people.

Especially Crytek, who apparently believe that we all own freakin’ supercomputers that can actually run Crysis. You wanna know why people are steaking your game? Simple — they want to know if it’ll freakin’ work! Then, of course, they realize that it’s a perfectly average shooter and don’t spend their gas money on it.

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