Your tired old clinical idealistic view of piaracy has been used for years by the game, film, and music industry and is simply false because the people that pirate have no intention of buying a game, film or music so to say that that revenue has been lost because of piracy is plainly wrong, this "lost revenue" never existed so can't possibly have been lost. We know that game companies won't be happy until all games can only be played on their servers where they have complete control and MS were prepared to take a bullet for supporting the big games companies so that a corporate wishlist of technologies that supposedly reduce piracy and eliminate game trading could be introduced but as soon as the gaming world kicked back at MS then they couldn't backtrack fast enough because all they are really interested in is the bottom line on their balance sheet, "Sod the big games companies we are going to lose money supporting their (and our own) dictatorial DRM mandate!" These so called "anti-piracy" technologies are not to the benifit of the end user, they are designed to stop things, rather than enable them, they are designed to check on you rather than encourage you and ultimately they are designed with the core assumption that you are a potential thief and the onus is on you to prove otherwise by daily checkins and verifications, what other consumer electronics would demand a daily check-in just to perform the features that were sold to you in the first place? I'd say your views, along with those of MS have been shown by the gaming world to be in the minority.
So what you're saying in this example is that ArenaNet should have just let the codes that were never paid for by the middle man just be playable? This wasn't a pirate stealing games, this was unpaid invoices. Have you ever worked in credit control? Because on the bottom of most invoices it will say "the goods remain the property of **** until paid for". That's all they've done is reclaim goods that were not paid for. It would be the same if they'd sold licences for any other product; say for Sage 200. An alternative to your view is that "we should just let the pirates have them because it doesn't cost us any money", but thats not a type of society I want to live in. As has been said above though, if you have an issue with all of this, boycott it. The back catalog of retro gaming is amazing if you're happy to play super mario on the SNES etc, and there are also lots of independent games companies that would love your investment instead of the big guys. I don't really want to have this argument anymore, as I am not happy to be persuaded to lie down and let pirates have an easy job of stealing content, and you are clearly not happy with companies protecting their investments so this will be my last comment on the topic in this thread and maybe we will just need to agree to disagree.
your argument is flawed as all sage software is the work of the devil and therefore shouldn't command any licensing fee's. (long live xero)
