Jocks think that, but luckily they know very little about the absence of correlation between genetic material and nerdery.

I, for one, welcome our new German teen-aged overlord - Der Unwahrscheinlichmann!

I understand that piracy can make someone think they lost money (it is disputable, but there's at least a bit of truth to that claim). However, I have yet to meet a person that was fired (or a company that went down) because the company's product was pirated too much. Naturally I'm not counting cases where the person in question leaked the product herself.

Make the client Windows-only again and you'll feel my wrath!

(Reply by Google: What are you going to do, quit gmail? Ouch! )

...it would definitely make some games more fun. Imagine that at the end of the game, you meet the big boss - but instead of his usual self (object 13023), he looks like the one at 13024, a steel door.

Full House, eh? Three Democrats and two Republicans?

To be honest, I don't think it's just that. In the country where I'm from (Czech Republic), pirating is the prevailing method of game distribution among teenagers and young adults (everyone does it, and it's "free", so why not me?). DRM, serial numbers, CD checks, none of that was ever a problem for us. Even young kids always check for a Crack/ folder on the game CD.

What really seems to be working (note that all of this is personal observations) is adding some functionality for players registered online. Good examples are Spore (except the DRM part) and Half-Life 2 - both of those had pirated versions circulating, but you wouldn't get access to updates or multiplayer (HL2) or new content (Spore, at least I think so) when you play the pirated version.

Of course, what works every time (for myself) is to have a really new, innovative game. Prince of Persia is not exactly hot new stuff, and even though its visual style is interesting, I'm not convinced there's anything new in the gameplay.