Some personal thoughts on piracy (warning - long post)

[Mjarr]

You know, they'd have money to fix this stuff on time if it wasn't for those pirating scumbags.

Even if there would be no pirates at all they wouldn't do that since PC gaming has tons of variables. OS, soundcard display driver, your GPU, GPU drivers, your CPU, even harddrive or simply mouse can render a game nonfunctional as ridiculous as it sounds. There are always inevitable hardware issues but the ones that are truly 'weird' are also quite rare, unless you can name a company that is willing to spend tons of money for every imaginable variation of common PC configurations to see what's the problem. Sure they could just have few PCs and just change\replace some of the hardware and go for massive trial and error but average developers would simply dismiss it and allocate their resources to something more creative.

Frictional Games' support is quite unusual in the industry and they are probably doing it because they want to provide good service rather than just "oh lol shit happens" but even that's mostly touching the individual component, even though it can be helpful in certain cases.