For the past 8-10 years I've pirated almost every game I've bought before I purchased it, excepting this one, actually. I didn't care if I hated the game or not, I would have purchased it simply to support stardock and its anti-DRM policy. I have, in fact, since purchased their object desktop suite and a few other things as well, though I'll probably never use them. There are several reasons for this:
#1 Demos are terrible. The last GOOD and ACCURATE(note, more important than good) demo I played was Warcraft. Yes, the original. They gave you 2 maps to play in skirmish mode and that was it. No units locked, everything worked exactly the same as it did in the regular game(except you couldn't play orcs, just humans IIRC) and it was beautiful. It was enough for me to judge the entire game on. Which is what a demo is supposed to do. I gather that the sins demo is about the same, but I haven't actually played it, so no comment on that.
#2 I don't have a gambling problem, so throwing $40+ bucks at a counter in a video game store and saying "Hit me" doesn't overly appeal to me.
#3 Review sites are complete garbage. In order to get even semi accurate reviews you've gotta wait at LEAST 3-4 months after the game comes out and then go slogging through the interwebs hunting down some customer reviews that consist of more than "omgthisgameroxors!!!11one!1" or "This game sux!!!!!! Never buy it!!!!!!!!!!!!!". Don't even get me started on most of the actual professional reviewers. I came to the conclusion long ago that for anything under a 9.0/10+ or equivalent rating, they are either completely retarded on most titles, or paid off. Somehow, as ea and microsoft games don't usually get bad reviews from these folks, I suspect its the latter. Now, to maintain some credibility the game usually actually has to be good to get above a 9.0 ish, so you can usually trust those somewhat, of course this doesn't tell you how the controls handle, what the interface is like(at best you get a screenshot), and generally, unless its EXTREME, tedium is left out all together(or, if they didn't get thier bonus' this year from company x, false tedium reports may be added, as of course, this is purely a matter of opinion). Now there are some reviewers out there that do a good job *most* of the time. But honestly, with the massive bag of reviewers that are out there now, seperating out those that actually played the game they are writing the review for from those who simply posted a pre-typed review that was handed to them by the game company that produced the game. Notice how I said "produced". Thats because there are actually a ton of developers out there that would actually want honest reviews. Not all of them do of course, but there are a lot more than most would think.
#4 Crippling DRM. I always try out several different cracks, wait a few weeks, see if there are any updated cracks, then try those. 99% of the time, if the game fucks up while its cracked, it hasn't got a PRAYER of working right when the DRM is actually running. Point in case, I bought a copy of SW: Kotor and SW: Kotor 2. Neither of them work properly without being cracked with my sony dvd drive. I still thought the developers deserved the money however, so I bought them anyways. They were awesome games, if a tad buggy, but nothing game-breaking, except for the DRM(I think it was SecuRom, specifically). Titan quest I wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole attached to somebody elses computer. I heard about the crashing, and even knew the real reason for it, the DRM. But also heard about all the issues that LEGIT players were having with the DRM. A friend of mine had the game(he actually only recently told me about this, it came up in conversation) bought it, all out legit. Hes one of those guys thats afraid to pick up a cd in a store because they might think hes shoplifting(ok, that might be a bit of an exageration, but you get the point). So he starts playing the game, and boom, it crashes suddenly. No error messages, just crashes. He loads it up again, same thing, crashes. He does everything he can think of to check out his PC to see if theres anything wrong(check drivers, defrag, updates, etc) and when he runs out of options, he goes forum hunting. He finds out that its because of the DRM, and that he should contact tech support. He does this, emails them his product code, cd-key, the works, at one point he even sent them a scanned copy of his receipt. They tell him hes a pirate, and refuse to do anything about it. Repeatedly. For his effort, and his $50 he got a good-looking paperweight. Because, you know, there couldn't ever possibly be anything WRONG with game-breaking DRM. Then theres the rootkits etc, well, thats all just ridiculous. Too ridiculous to think it could ever happen, yet it did, and still does. So, thanks to Titan quest, this same friend, who could very easily have been a pirate before any of this, now does the exact same thing I do. As other people have said in this thread many times already, when the hackers pirating your games are producing a better quality product than you are, something is SERIOUSLY wrong, and you need to review some procedures and make some changes.
#5 There are very few publishers I can trust to release a quality game, and even there, its not limited to the publisher specifically, but more so to the game title series. The last thing I bought before sins without testing it was NWN2: MotB. The only real publisher that I can trust to realase at least a decent game is squaresoft, but sadly they don't make anything for the PC. As a result, I usually buy consoles a generation behind, so that I'm certain whatever games I want have a ton of feedback floating around by this point, as with consoles thats the only thing you have to go on. The only exception to this was my modbox, for obvious reasons.
#6 Major, MAJOR bugs on release. Crap just keeps getting shoved out the door before its finished. There are a lot of games these days that are released, that I wouldn't even call past the alpha testing stage. I'm sorry, but deadlines are not the most important thing in the world, but they do seem to be treated as such. If the game isn't done, delay it. I don't care if I have to wait a few extra months so that the game actually, you know, WORKS. These, a lot of times, are actually caused by DRM. Mostly because the dev team made the game, tested it, said it was ready, and then went "oh shit, the DRM". Which then screws everything up. For the rest of my rant on DRM see #4.
And I'm spent. A lot of this is echoed sentiment already posted, but I felt the need to add my 2 cents worth anyways.
To those of you that are actually supporting this DRM garbage I say: How would you like it if you bought a universal remote control, programmed it, then went to change a channel, and because it though you were not the actual owner, it whapped a blade out and slit your wrist. I figure that this more "price equalized" example may shut up some of the idiots spouting "you can't compare a video game to a car!!! omgwtf!!!". If thats still not enough for you, track down a legitimate copy of titan quest, and a pioneer dvd drive, try getting it to work. Now go have fun with that while you find your only recourse is to crack the game and remove the DRM, which is going to be rather difficult, since you have to find a crack that will also disable the crash DRM, which is a bit harder to find. Don't forget to wear your tin foil hat while your doing it and yell at the top of your lungs "The damned aliens is comin to take us all. We needs more security to stop them durned aliens." While your at it, throw in a few comments about how iraq has WMDs. They're just as legitimate as all the other over-used and abused rhetoric you are spouting.
