deject wrote:
Buying an MP3 from Amazon is easier than pirating it. I know the ID3 tags are going to be correct, I can find more obscure artists easier and download the songs faste, and they're just MP3s, so they work anywhere.

this is exactly what gaems are not doing, and why they are failing. Anti piracy is never going to work when it is based on making it harder to pirate things than not. Its only ever going to work when it is easier to not pirate than to pirate.
At the moment, I have the choice of going to the shops, buying a game on a disc, getting back home, hoping the on disc copy protection doesn't get upset with my set-up and refuse to work, and then keep putting the disc in the drive to play the game. Or I can download it for free, whenever I want to, slap on a no-cd crack and play.
The obvious exception to this is steam, where you have most of the advantages of pirating (get it when you want, not worry about where the disc is) with most of the advantages of not pirating (getting updates, not having to look for a crack, not worry about spyware and viruses). All this is probably why Steam is slowly taking over the world.
What games publishers don't seem to get yet is that the money aspect is often not what makes people pirate games. It's how much they can be arsed. I cant be arsed to go to the shops, or wait for deliveries from online stores, so almost all of my games now are downloaded. I prefer getting them legit, as I think the reasonably small amount of money is well worth the support and so on. But if I cant...well lets just say I don't tend to go to the shops as an alternative.