When you pay a lot of expensive people to sit in cubicles and write code, and you pay a lot of talented designers to create nifty characters and new worlds, and you spend oodles of cash on hot new equipment, and then you see your one-player PC or console game pirated so much that your sales fall off a cliff, it kind of bums you out.

What to do? You can engage in the fantasy of copy protection technology. That's worked wonders so far, hasn't it? Each new security system is like waving a red flag in front of some 15-year-old kid in Rotterdam or Moscow, just daring him to crack it. And they always do.

Another option is to change your business model, and that's what has happened in the gaming industry. Check out this Wired article commenting on the Activision/Blizzard deal and what the writer refers to as gaming's "post-retail future."

Yeah, that right. Blizzard's World of Warcraft has 9 million+ subscribers doing the online, multi-player thing, each paying USD 15 per month. Damn, that makes up for a lot of piracy, don't it?

The new entity is going to have strong multi-player titles like WoW, and also hits like Guitar Hero, the developers of which are constantly coming up with new ways to make it more interactive between players and adding new features that will require downloads, like new songs, etc.

Will we make it to a point in the future where the client software is given away for free for some of these titles? It has happened before, although I don't see that being a huge trend for games that cost tens of millions of dollars to develop. However, the online and added value features of these games will continue to be emphasized, and perhaps piracy in this sector will, some day, not be such a big deal.