Hiya.

I'm what some call a "pirate". I download games, movies, and other content online all the time without paying for them. Apparently that makes me an evil, lawbreaking scoundrel on the internet who should be sent to jail, should you believe what most companies and law officials say, even though i'm quite a decent guy.

Quite recently I downloaded Star Wars: Empire at War, a game with "advanced" copy protection software that comes with the game. I cracked the protection and had it installed and playing on my machine in 15 minutes. What saddened me was browsing the technichal support forums for the game over at Lucas Arts... there is quite a substantial amount of people who legitimately bought the game who could not play it BECAUSE of the copy protection software on the disks. The support that Lucas Arts is giving them as well is piss-poor at best. I bet that since Lucas Arts already has their money they're not going to make it a priority to assist in post-consumer support. Not when all that funding can be spent on more marketing.

That actually made me proud for pirating their software. Granted it's small potatoes, but my little way of "sticking it to the man". I would rather Lucas Arts went out of business and never developed any more of their washed out, over-franchised and uninventive games ever again.

Enter Galactic Civ II. I read a review, and followed a link to the official site here. I saw how the dev team and support here is pretty damned decent, along with bieng able to PLAY THE GAME mere minutes after purchasing it online. That is damned conveneint, a stroke of genius. And there's NO copy protection on their software.

So what did I do?

I bought it on the spot. Pretty ironic, huh?

I have to hand it to you guys. You treat your customers like CUSTOMERS and not like thieves. And since my online account here is tied to my purchases, I can download the game wherever I go. So should I go on a long trip to visit relatives, ect, I essentially always have that game with me instead of lugging around (and losing/breaking) a bunch of disks. That's well worth my dollar. I feel good supporting a company like this. You guys rock.