Similar story, I subscribe to emusic, audible, netflix. It's really not too much to ask if you have a job.
The problem is people on Slashdot who complain about the RIAA and how they will never give them any of their money or hating on game producers when really they are cheapskates who won't change.

Guess I was too busy playing real arcade games which all have fire buttons for the right hand and sticks on the left...

Sorry if you misread what I wrote, or if it came out wrong. I am not saying people don't buy games, I am saying that people will pirate games no matter what.
There are those who pirate / steal, and those who don't. Some of those who pirate / steal act like they would typically buy things but then have some excuse on why they didn't this time etc..

Imagine a poor person who downloads 10 CDs a week, 10 games a month, 10 movies a month etc.. and acts as if they would buy all of the above if they were rich. This is typically bullshit. People steal and steal a LOT! They steal at least one thing per day if not 100s.

I've yet to meet a pirate who is moderate or only does it once or twice.

Waiting for patches to get fixed is a major turn off for me these days. When I was a college student and pirating tons of games sure I could wait for a legitimate game to get fixed if I knew I would be playing it for years. Now as a working adult I give a game a first impression and then I'm done with it.

Good thing the 360 / PS3 allow high resolution gaming that you don't have to worry about getting stuff that won't play out of the box..

My main issue was having a machine with 512MB of RAM and a game chewing up 1GB.
I played Civ2 on a Packard Bell 133Mhz with 16MB of RAM and sure my turns took up to 10 minutes sometimes but the game would never freeze completely due to memory leaks / system requirements.

The thing I hated most about all of the plugin classic all in one games released a few years ago was some genius decided that the stick should be used with the right hand and the fire button on the left. Am I the only one who had this issue?

People who pirate games on the average will never buy the real game, unless there is strong incentive to play online / multiplayer on an authenticated server.
I don't think I ever bought a PC game that I didn't HAVE to have a valid code for online play back when I was into Warez other than the Civ series which I expected to be great. Civ 4 was the last game I bought and gave it to a friend after loading the largest world with most opponents and it crashed at over 1GB of used memory 10 hours into it.