The PC Gaming Alliance (PCGA), a trade body, has said this week that PC piracy continues to decline, thanks mainly to the industry's move towards digital distribution.
Says PCGA president Matt Ployhar (via Bit):
Ployhar does note that while the rates are declining, piracy will not ever disappear.
What's really interesting is piracy was largely, historically rampant when you had an optical drive or a piece of physical media. And people would go and download the crack for it.
The only PC gaming business models that existed and continued to thrive and that could continue to live were MMOs. They did really well. And then there are free to play games. You can't really pirate free to play. You can but it doesn't make a lot of sense.
So, what's happening is game design is shifting and as a result of shifting game design, piracy, at least on the PC side, is actually declining as a result. There are stats that do corroborate that.
Ployhar does note that while the rates are declining, piracy will not ever disappear.
I'm not saying that piracy is going to go away. It's fascinating to watch. For example, you get a game like Crysis that got hit hard by piracy. Now what you're seeing to combat that are developers implementing achievements, in-game pets, all of these things that are tracked and stored in the cloud. So even if you pirate the game you're still not getting the bragging rights. You've got all these additional mechanisms where the value proposition of the game, where if you pirate it, it's just not going to be as fun.
