[Archonsod]

Nick_K said:
Pirates /are/ potential customers though. Music pirates in particular tend to also spend more money on music than most people, according to some news article I read a few years back (probably bbc, I forget). I've met a few people who pirate games, or who borrow them from friends (essentially the same thing) and they were hardcore gamers who also bought more games than I do.

The article was using skewed results. While it's true that most music pirates spend more money on music than average, they're not spending it on the music they already have. It's the same with games - pirates do tend to buy more software, but either buy games they haven't yet downloaded or else wait until the title is reduced from release price. Either way, they're not usually in anyones target audience.

I recall reading an article about how copy protection that allows some play of the game could be viewed as essentially turning it into a type of demo. The aim is to stop the pirate from playing the full game, while still allowing them to 'get hooked' and thus decide to buy the full version.

But you already have a demo for Dominions 3. Most shareware works on the principle you've described, but the problem in these cases is that what you already have is essentially the full game, with the protection simply restricting certain parts of the code. It's a lot easier to pirate the game, since all you need do is remove or fool the protection. With a demo system such as Dominions, where the demo is a standalone product, then you add a further obstacle to pirates as they also need to obtain a full version of the game.

The damaging effect of piracy on sales can be reduced if a product has high perceived quality, as some pirates will decide to buy the game if they are impressed and others may buy future versions.

Pure speculation. There's not really any figures to support the suggestion, although those studies which do exist tend to support the opposite - the majority of pirates won't pay for software they already have.
In fact, the most reliable study I have seen suggests that the pirated copy has a 'diminished' value. Most regular pirates (regular as in regularly pirate games) tend to treat the games as more of a throwaway item than those who purchased it legitimately. It was used by Toshiba (I think) as evidence that blank optical media wasn't an inducement to piracy.

A pirate who loves the game could generate several sales by word of mouth.

Nowhere near the amount that even a small legitimate source could provide though. Even the smaller gaming websites tend towards a readership of hundreds.

So, it will help sales if even pirates view the game as high-quality. The sales may be less than if there was no piracy, but as piracy cannot really be stopped, Illwinter might as well try to reduce their losses from it.

Your only taking a loss if the person was going to buy the game anyway. If they had no intention of doing so (or were unaware of the game) it's not a loss, since you had nothing to gain. As for helping sales, I suspect you'd lose far more sales to people pirating the game themselves than you'd gain from the odd few people who'd choose to buy the game instead, especially if the game was widely available in pirated format.

That said, I'm still not convinced that this is genuinely copy protection: I'd have thought the game simply wouldn't work.

It depends a lot on the type of protection used and when you check though. Sometimes it's impossible to run the copy protection without starting the game first, other times you run the copy protection before you allow the game to launch. I know Dominions 2 performed the check when you tried to launch a game, presumably this is the same. I'd hazard a guess that it's an addition to the key check which the game already does when launching a new game (the one which checks if anyone else connecting to the game is using the same CD key).