Support for Pirates?

Software piracy is still a hot issue in our industry and I most definitely don't support it or buy into the excuses that people make for it. What I definitely don't get is pirates that expect official support from the developers. Ars has an article up that details that the support requests for SiN Episodes Emergence upon release were a 5 to 1 ratio of pirates outnumbering legit customers. That means the cost of supporting this game was 5 times higher than it should have been due to piracy. Tell me that doesn't cost developers money.

Here is the kicker:

I spent seven hours searching for answers to one guy's problem just to find out that when I asked him a question regarding a setting, he was checking on his friend's machine for the "right" answer and then on his machine and if the two didn't match, he was reporting the "right" answer so I wouldn't know he had a pirated version.

And we wonder why devs take so long to put out games or move to different, more secure platforms.

Source: Ars

http://www.snackbar-games.com/n1941.html