Your opinion not withstanding, piracy steals income from the creators and discourages development.
In some sense it does. With my career in the industry I can see it from my point of view -- video games put food on my table. At the same time I won't lie, the vast, VAST majority of games I played and loved I never would have had without piracy when I was a teenager.
...but those were different days. We live in a weird situation now. I can go to a bundle site today and get some great games *FOR LESS THAN THE PRICE OF A FLOPPY DISK* that was needed to pirate a game back in the day. I literally spent more money on pirating a game back then than I spend now legitimately buying a game.
Sure there are some AAA games now that are still expensive, and I can see how some people might still pirate them, but I'm older now and have more money, so if there's a game I really want I buy it -- or I wait a bit and it's cheaper -- or I wait only a couple of years and suddenly it's pennies on the dollar to buy it.
The funny thing now is that there's no longer much economic incentive for piracy for me. Piracy today seems more useful to get around broken/restrictive DRM. I have *boxed* games now that don't work out of the box and I have to download a crack to actually use them. =P
I dunno, I think it's just plain easier to rail on piracy now. I think we need to keep things in perspective about how expensive/different things were in the past (particularly for people in Eastern Europe before and shortly after the iron curtain came down).
And now, back to the original topic, I don't think we'll ever see 100% Vampire compatibility -- just "close enough". They don't want to sacrifice performance to implement expensive fixes for a few tiny edge cases. In that sense, whdload+piracy will save the old games we'd really like to play.
