Mike Russell, QA Manager of Ritual Entertainment, makers of the SiN Episodes games, discusses the impact of the scale of piracy on tech support in this article:
Some recent calculations revealed that, last week, gamers with pirated copies of Emergence requesting support outnumbered gamers with legitimate copies of Emergence requesting support by a ratio of nearly five to one. This, understandably, is a source of great frustration for Russell, who is essentially performing two jobs at Ritual and who only has a finite amount of time to spend on each. Responses he has received when attempting to troubleshoot problems have laid painfully bare which users are playing the game illegally. "What's Steam?" one asked. "I don't have one," replied another when asked for his Steam ID. "Oh, my copy didn't come with an installer," replied yet another user, "it's in a folder on a DVD. I just drag it to my machine and then run the game." For an independently funded developer such as Ritual, these time sinks and lost sales have a clear and measurable impact on the company's income and, thus, its long term self-sufficiency.
Bethesda Softworks, makers of The Elder Scrolls series and most recently Fallout 3 had this to say on the issue of the scale and costs of piracy-related tech support:
The amount of times we see stuff coming through where it’s like, the resolution to the problem was [the] guy had a pirated copy of the game… The amount of money we spend supporting people who didn’t pay us for the game in the first place…it’s f–ing ludicrous. We talk to other developers, guys who are [like] ‘Yeah, it’s a third, it’s 50% of our [customer] support.’
Similarly the developers of a popular free mod called Portal: Prelude also speak out about the level of piracy of the game Portal which they've witnessed:
Seriously guys, stop sending us emails because you can't install the game, because you can't launch the game, or because you have weird errors everywhere. We're not going to help you make the mod work on pirated versions of Portal or without Steam. This mod needs an original and legit Portal because it also uses some of the content of Half-Life 2 that extends Portal. Of course, this content doesn't seem to be included in the pirated version of Portal.
In fact piracy of Portal is an interesting case to examine. A quick search on Mininova currently reveals around 30 active torrents for The Orange Box, a game package released in November 2007 of which Portal was a part. For those who don't know, The Orange Box is famous for being one of the best gaming deals of 2007/2008 - five major games in one package (Half Life 2, HL2: Episode 1, HL2: Episode 2, Team Fortress 2, Portal) all for the price of a standard game, distributed via Steam with no intrusive DRM, and receiving nothing but praise from reviewers and gamers alike. Yet here are people who not only pirated this game, but are also requesting support for it.
Update: The game Batman: Arkham Asylum incorporated a deliberate glitch which prevented users from successfully using Batman's glide functionality, but this only occurred on pirated copies of the game as reported here. Many people made forum posts requesting support for this "bug", only to discover that they had inadvertantly exposed themselves as pirates. Similarly, the game Aliens vs. Predator had several issues unique to the pirated version, and once again forum posts such as this one revealed that pirates are not above requesting support for their illegitimate games. It also goes to demonstrate how pirated copies can damage the reputation of developers, because glitches and bugs in pirated versions are often being blamed on the game itself rather than the piracy groups which made these illegal cracked copies.
I've saved an excellent example for last. As an indication that not only is the scale of piracy generally high across all types of games, but more importantly, that it seems to have little to do with DRM, big greedy game companies, or the high price of games, let's take a look at a game called World of Goo, recently released by a small independent developer called 2D Boy consisting of a team of 3 people. It's available as a digital download, selling for less than $20 on Steam, it has no intrusive DRM, and it's received nothing but praise, reflected in a Metacritic Score of 90%/95%. This should be precisely the recipe for preventing piracy according to some, but unfortunately the truth is less convenient: the developer of the game has stated that World of Goo has an approximate piracy rate of 90%. Regardless of the precise level of piracy, the key point to consider is that World of Goo addresses every single item on the checklist of excuses which people usually present for pirating games - yet it is still being pirated quite heavily.
Update: Just to show that World of Goo wasn't an isolated case, there is yet another example of the irrelevance of DRM, big greedy companies and high prices to piracy. The independent game Machinarium, released by a small Czech developer and priced at $20 with no DRM also has the dubious honor of a 90% piracy rate.