Roy Taylor, NVIDIA's Vice President of Content Relations, says, in a Eurogamer interview, the future of PC gaming will see "more digital authentication, and we're going to see more of an approach that says that PC games aren't products - they're a service."

By this he means additional content, expansions and all that stuff for sale, because "pirates are just killing the developers - and I think it's really unfair, what they're doing."

It's certainly a divisive issue. Taylor is pretty hard in his stance though, expressing his disheartenment at the situation:

"One of the things that I find frustrating is that PC gamers tend to be very passionate, and they love the people that make great PC games. If you ask any PC gamer what they think of John Carmack, they'll say he's a hero. What do they think of Tim Sweeney? He's a hero. Ken Levine is a hero. And yet many of them, sadly, will go and steal from them. I just don't get that, I really don't."

Well, it's easy to blame the overall low PC sales on piracy, but there are examples that contradict this theory (inside and outside the gaming industry, take the music industry for example). A couple of months ago a developer from Sins of a Solar Empire posted an article about this on his game's forums. Empire, by the way, contained no copy protection, was under an independent development house, and topped the PC sales charts a few weeks after being released. Read on:

"Our games sell well for three reasons. First, they're good games which is a pre-requisite. But there's lots of great games that don't sell well.

The other two reasons are:

* Our games work on a very wide variety of hardware configurations.
* Our games target genres with the largest customer bases per cost to produce for.

It's irrelevant how many people will play your game (if you're in the business of selling games that is). It's only relevant how many people are likely to buy your game."

Obviously, there are a lot of PC gamers here. Why do you pirate or purchase PC games?