All this will do is increase the level of "piracy" of their product and the public acceptance of such "piracy". I mean this forum is a bad place to try to guage the public acceptance of piracy because gamers tend to favor "piracy". But let's be totally honest: Most of us are willing to buy original software if we feel there is something worth what we are paying.
I know of people who have played the pirate version of a game and then gone out and bought the original, just to own it, even if the pirated version was the exact same.
I'm an "old" gamer so I remember the days when shareware was king, and together with several schoolmates actually purchased a copy of a game (OMF i forget which version look it up if you never heard of it, dont try to play on a newer PC unless you have something to slow it to hell down) so we could get all the extra "arenas" to fight in. I rememebr one game where the author asked that anyone who really liked the game send him a lil something in the way of stamps (he was an avid stamp collector and figured that it would be worth his effort if he got a couple dollars worth of stamps from any given country).
There'll always be free alternatives, but because they aren't mainstream a lot of people will not know about them and will not have the experience needed to feel comfortable using them, not to mention the issues that a lot of free systems have that make us gamers want to avoid them like the plague. Piracy on the other hand typically just involves someone calling up this fella they know who come and do a kinda ting so and bam, it wukking and it free too.
The public is already being told that software piracy is funding terrorists and they arent buying into it. I have a feeling that we'll be seeing this sort of thing being the socially accepted norm:
http://www.themexp.org/preview.php?mid=2854&type=boot&view=downloads&page=&cat=&name=Pirated+Edition+III.zip
