The PC Gaming Alliance has spoken out on the state of the industry and the musings contain an eyebrow-raising statistic, notably that piracy on the PC platform is in decline. PCGA president Matt Ployhar tells trade site Gamasutra that the rise of social elements such as achievement tracking is encouraging consumers that’d otherwise hop on a torrent to pay up.

There are stats that do corroborate that. I’m not saying that piracy is going to go away. It’s fascinating to watch. For example, you get a game like Crysis that got hit hard by piracy. Now what you’re seeing to combat that or reduce the chances of piracy are developers implementing achievements, in-game pets, all of these things that are tracked and stored in the cloud.

So even if you pirate the game you’re still not getting the bragging rights. You’ve got all these additional mechanisms where the value proposition of the game, where if you pirate it, it’s just not going to be as fun.

Even if piracy numbers are down, that hasn’t stopped publishers like EA from investing more resources into DRM routines, many of which are a nuisance for paying individuals and hardly hamper ‘cracking’ efforts — even in the short-term. If only more pubs would hop on the Steamworks bandwagon! 2K Games has the right idea.

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