"In fact, most PC titles have a pirating rate near or greatly exceeding 50% anyway."
So most PC games have a 50% pirate rate, but Demigod happens to have a 1000% pirate rate. Strike you as a little odd?
First of all, the way that % rates of piracy have been calculated in this thread is (# users with pirated versions)/(# total users). If the article quoted here is correct, this sets DG's pirating rate at 85%, not 1000%.
Secondly, different video games have wildly different % rates of piracy for whatever reason. Some games with DRM have rates as high as 90% (http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17350). Some have lower rates of piracy.
As of early March 2008, the rate of PC game piracy was estimated to be somewhere between 75-85% for all games, most of which have DRM (http://www.gamepro.com/article/news/165488/hard-times-pc-game-piracy-in-us-estimated-at-75-80/). As noted in the article, sales on consoles of Bioshock were nearly 5 to 1 on consoles vs. PCs, and sales of Call of Duty 4 were nearly 10 to 1. It's belived that the difference in the popularity of console gaming vs. PC gaming cannot account for this, especially considering that these hardcore FPSs are often preferred to play on computers.
That's what's making me frustrated about these articles on DG and World of Goo: they are not comparing these rates of piracy for non-DRM games to rates of piracy for DRM games. As anyone who does work with statistics will tell you, stastics are meaningless without comparisson to a control.
