[kalniel]

While I agree it's unwise for a company to jump on piracy as a reason for bad sales, it's also unwise for people outside of the company to automatically assume that they are making it up and don't have any evidence.

Whenever any company complains about piracy on the PC it's instantly shot down for some reason, yet most of the companies I've heard anything about have actually got a fair amount of proof that piracy is rampant for the games (even longer term too). Sure, there's not a 100% correlation between pirated copy and lost sale, but it's still a higher correlation than you'd think, given people don't generally waste time downloading and continueing to play a game that they think is rubbish.

Demos are a tricky one - most companies have tried them and they have different effects for different genres. I actually thought the DMC demo was very good - it addressed the two big uncertainties I have about PC games: will it run on my system and what is the control scheme like? Everything else I can get from comparing detailed game reviews.

Regarding treating the PC as an afterthought I think that's an absurd suggestion to be honest. PC versions cost WAY more and generate much LESS revenue than a console version, so unless a company is deliberately trying to break into the market and establish a proper effort there it's not worth doing in the first place. I know a huge amount of effort was put into the PC version (hence the delay of course, it wasn't just for the sake of it) so to say it's just an after-thought is completely inaccurate.