Listing of obscure games and media (Score 1)

I'll put forth Starsiege Tribes as one game or a series of game that suffered from piracy. Sure the company that developed this game might not have been the best ran, but the number of people who paid for this game vs those who played was considerable. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starsiege:_Tribes "Starsiege: Tribes sold a total of 210,000 copies, but due to its small size and complete lack of copy protection was frequently copied and distributed over the Internet. Actual users at the peak of popularity were over one million users." - meaning that the game had effectively ZERO DRM 800K Piraters vs 200K payers. Ask yourself what an appropriate ratio is? Long story short the game was very successful in terms of the number of gamers actively playing it. They were ran by a company that was not spending it on hookers on blow, but they did maybe have more employees than they should have. From what I hear part way through the sequel, tribes 2, they were becoming insolvent and released the game a few months too early. "Tribes 2 sold a total of 400,000 copies," but i remember it being filled with bugs and issues. The series died after this as the company went under, but for those who played both games, it was regarded as the best squad based FPS at the time. It was years ahead of battlefield, call of duty multi, and operation flashpoint. What could have saved the series and game, slightly better management for sure but what if they were able to sell another 100K copies of Tribes 1 which would not have been unreasonable. They could spent at least 6 more months working on Tribes 2 and all the issues they had would have been resolved and we'd be talking about tribes 8. When it comes to piracy I feel the ones that hurt the most are those who release better than average wares that aren't outstanding, but with a few more dollars it could have been.