I'm not specifically for or against piracy. What bothers me with piracy is that it creates problems for people that make the games we play and then they make no more games. What bothers me with anti-piracy is the poorly implemented software protection that looks more like a trojan/virus than a protection program. Most of all it's the fact that anti-piracy is not really what's on some people's minds, they use it as an excuse to gradually implement software and hardware solutions that will make it easy to monitor and file everything we do on our PC, either for advertising purposes or for other more sinister purposes.
I think that responsibility here is shared. A developer that's rushing half baked projects and delivers less than promised can't expect me to pay 40 Euros for a disc with an unfinished game in a very cheap package. I will download and try the game based on what i read in reviews, if i like it i'll buy it and play through it, if not i'll uninstall it before completing it.
It also depends on the company that released the game, the way they operate, how much they value their customers and the quality of their products. In the case of IL2 i have never downloaded anything, because it's coming from a company i trust to bring me quality products and listen to feedback about improving them. It's also a small company and i want to support them with my money to help them make more quality games.
In the flight sim genre it would be highly hypocritical of me to pirate games, even if it was for sampling puproses only, when most of us complain that there's not enough independent developers and not enough good sims around. It's the same with decent RPG games too. I might still download shooters to see what it's all about, but if i don't like a game i will still delete it and if i like it i will buy it.
There could be a workaround to this, i think 1C has alreade done it and it's mentioned in this thread as well. One of my friends bought a license for Theatre of War and he told me that you can get 2 keys for one license. This is a very clever way to make more people aware and interested in the product, without doing something illegal in order to try out the game. If you don't like it, you can uninstall it and deactivate your key so that someone else might receive it-->another person that you can "advertise" the game to. Sooner or later, someone will think "hey, this is a cool game, i want to buy it too".
I would still prefer to have printed manuals and goodies in the box, instead of just the discs and a couple PDF files. I know this will drive up the retail price, but maybe it could be done if the company agreed to ship different versions for a different price (just like 1946 special edition). I know that 90% of the people in this forum would gladly pay 10-15Euros extra to have BoB:SoW with a manual. That is, as long as it was a well researched manual that includes real, useful advice and tips for each aircraft in the sim. If CEM goes the way we were discussing in the other thread a manual would be indispensible and that alone would drive piracy down. Imagine someone pirating the game only to find out that he kills his engine right away because he doesn't set the correct RPM and manifold pressure that's listed in the manual
