With all the claims that PC gaming is dead and the many rebuttals that followed, it may come as a surprise to hear one of the industry's leading authorities say that piracy might actually aid PC manufacturers.

That's more or less what id CEO Todd Hollenshead claimed in an interview with Eurogamer's Tom Bramwell.  On the surface, companies are crying foul and appear to be doing everything in their power to prevent pirates from getting their products; Hollenshead states that all these precautions are simply formalities and in reality, those same companies are quite content with piracy at its current level because it actually helps hardware sales.

Q: It's the barrier-for-entry thing isn't it? It's really easy to pirate PC games whereas console games are much harder to pirate so the returns are better. What can PC hardware manufacturers do to make it harder for pirates?

"There's lots of things that they could do but typically just they just line up on the wrong side of the argument in my opinion. They have lots of reasons as to why they do that, but I think that there's been this dirty little secret among hardware manufacturers, which is that the perception of free content - even if you're supposed to pay for it on PCs - is some sort hidden benefit that you get when you buy a PC, like a right to download music for free or a right to download pirated movies and games."

Q: You think they're secretly happy about it?

"Yeah I think they are. I think that if you went in and could see what's going on in their minds, though they may never say that stuff and I'm not saying there's some conspiracy or something like that - but I think the thing is they realise that trading content, copyrighted or not, is an expected benefit of owning a computer.

And I think that just based on their actions...what they say is one thing, but what they do is another. When it comes into debates about whether peer-to-peer file-sharing networks that by-and-large have the vast majority, I'm talking 99 per cent of the content is elicitly trading copyrighted property, they'll come out on the side of the 1 per cent of the user doing it for legitimate benefit. You can make philosophical arguments that are difficult to debate, but at the same time you're just sort of ignoring the enormity of the problem."

Hollenshead also considers Steam to be the best method of digital distribution currently available to consumers, despite those who claim its security measures can be tweaked and bypassed. 

The bottom line here is that there's no sure solution against piracy, though the closest option may be turning completely away from box copies to exclusively digital downloads that require verification with each use:

"... Because the problem is that games are pirated and unless you go exclusively to a digital distribution system and require people to authenticate every time that they log on, and you have some way of verifying that - in other words you completely go away from a boxed copy on the shelf - then I think you're always going to open yourself to be pirated because you have the content resident on the disc there."