One of the popular reasons given for sometimes-sluggish game sales on the PC is piracy. If people can get the game for free, why would they pay for it? Go to any popular torrent site and it will likely have many more games than your local gaming store. The situation led the community manager for Infinity Ward to recently complain about the number of people playing Call of Duty 4 online versus the number of copies the game has sold for the PC. Brad Wardell, CEO of Stardock, has a much different point of view: the pirates don"t matter.
"So here is the deal: When you develop for a market, you don"t go by the user base. You go by the potential customer base. That"s what most software companies do. They base what they want to create on the size of the market they"re developing for," Wardell writes on his blog. "But not PC game developers."