[ajg1977]

To be honest no.

While there may be people who buy the game after being able to sample it, there are far more who would happily pirate a game and never look back. Of course, it's foolish to equate every pirated copy as lost sale (as the RIAA/MPAA do), but I do believe many titles lose a respectable number of sales through piracy.

It is important to ensure that any anti-piracy measure that affect gameplay can be identified as such and not as bugs. This can be difficult to do in the game since providing messages/warnings gives crackers a place to begin backtracking, so at least on my games we would carefully seed FAQs message/boards with questions/answers that if X occurred it was because you were running a pirated copy.

As a developer my bigger concern, both at the time and ongoing, is ensuring that any demo we release is produced in a manner that's both expedient and forward looking. If you go back 5+ years it was fairly standard for developers to release demos way in advance of a retail release - infact far enough in advance that it was possible to make changes to the final game based on feedback/metrics from the demo version.

This practice now seems to have all but died. Many games never release a demo, and games that do have a demo version often wait until after the retail version hits the shops to release it. I think that's a real shame and driven largely by fear of possibly bad press for games that need to recoup multi-million dollar investments.