Who's making bad arguments exactly? I'm genuinely wondering who your talking about...
Also yeah, no shit, the forum rules say no discussing cracks, so, don't?
Very few people don't get that, and those that post about them get dealt with fast, including by the Klango cracking community, since many of them are members here as well.

Also your post before didn't make it seem as though you thought they were two separate issues, but I do appreciate that you can be at least somewhat understanding about this...
And yeah, I agree, all their doing is getting something they want in the short term, while insuring that their favorite dev gets burnt out faster and stops making games sooner in the long term. Though I do have to say that their have been some pretty pathetic excuses for licensing systems in the audio gaming community, from people that really should have known better, even within the last few years.
If they really cared you think they'd put more work and thought into it... Not that I'm saying they deserve to lose the money, but still.

Also, I really don't see any problem in cracking abandonware, they aren't making money by selling the product any more as it is, so when companies make an issue of it, it just seems spiteful.

Yeah, I see your point, though I bet people who understand economics better would be able to tell you exactly why commercial pirating is just as bad.
Your right about owning it if your going to do it, though I don't think many people are (deliberately) trying to hurt the community, either they don't think about it, or they don't care enough to do what's right, so, both still pretty bad, particularly the second one.

That said though, I think most people, at least I was, were just laying out why it happens.
I'm fully aware of how damaging it is, but you need to accept the reasons that it happens in order to better combat it. After all, if people feel they have literally no other way, they need to be taught otherwise, but if you don't even know what their problem is, than where do you start your dialog?
At least 70 percent of them are just regular people not trying to hurt anyone from what I've seen, and many of the other 30 percent are only angry do to ignorance. Discount them all as selfish assholes, and you cut your self off from much of what could help turn many of them around. You may even make it worse.

Still, it's hard to convince most people, especially kids, that at the end of the day, they can go without. And no, they don't deserve any sympathy for it either, because you could nearly always be giving them something more useful if they are using it as an escape anyway.

The issue of cracking always generates interesting discussions.
I believe that when most people try to crack a game, they believe they are entitled to it or just feel bad about asking someone to purchase them a coppy of the game.
Still, cracking can't be justified..
Do you really want the game? Really? Just ask someone to buy it for you..
I myself am looking for someone that would be kind enough to purchase AHC for me.. My country currently is going through economic problems and I myself can't afford the game.
Has cracking it gone through my mind? Despit my situation, No. Because, in the long term, it is what ruins developers and stops new audiogames from being created.

@liam I can imagine, Liam. The thought that someone just doesn't care about all your hard work and is totally ok with not paying for something they should pay, isn't a nice one.. Especially here.. We are, after all, a small community.

LordLundin, I mark a difference between, say, cracking Jaws and cracking an audio game. Both are still wrong in the stealing sense, and I can't kid myself or anyone else about that. But given the insane cost of Jaws vs. the reasonable cost of most audio games, and given the scope involved in both? Well, there's a difference there. I'm not encouraging people to crack stuff just because the company's huge, or to go use peer-to-peer software to snag copyrighted material just because the victim won't know/won't get hurt. I'm simply saying that such things complicate the question. We're talking about audio games here, and why the arguments and qualifications about why some people want to crack them all fall to pieces. I have no patience for any of them. None.
To your point about PsychoStrike? Well, you bought the game five minutes after release. That was your first mistake, and not the developer's fault in the least. You could've waited to see what people said about it. This is, in point of fact, what caused me to delay on both PsychoStrike and The Gate. The prices asked vs. what I was getting did not interest me enough to support the developer, particularly not after demoing The Gate and playing all the way through Paladin. I've bought both Paladin and Manamon and don't precisely regret them, though it would've been nice to see both games get a really hard polish and touch-up for the amount being asked, particularly Manamon with its $40+ price tag. But anyway, I digress. It is never a developer's fault if you bought their game and then regretted it. I just hope it taught you something. lol

Personally, I think the best system would be the one where your licenses are tied to an account, and each license can be allocated to one machine. That way, you know who has what game, and where and when they're being activated. It would also cut down on score cheaters, if an account was required to post scores. It's much easier on the gamer, too. They just enter a username or email address and password to log in, and the game does the rest. Also possibly a builtin account management interface to manage your licenses, so you don't have to go to a website to do it.
I was thinking about trying to implement this myself, but I was using BGT at the time, and BGT has no SSL support, so it never happened.

@drack Thats exactly the problem.. This system could cause a bigger issue:
Say the developer is unable to support the server or just loses interest?
If sucha  thing happens, the game will be theoretically lost as it won't even be able to go into abandonware status.

Count in all the major game companies that got duped by their own damn system, and you have an indirect answer as to why some game devs don't do a server. Also,

It's not a matter of can they do it, it's do they really want to, all things considered or otherwise? It's not just that hour of code that's factored in. What if a dev doesn't really have time to maintain the server on a regular basis should there be a fallout? This is why many devs turn to already existing drm solutions. The problem with those is that a lot require absurd payments, and are very intrusive. Armadillo was as good as it got, for a very reasonable price at the time, and you had full control over it and weren't relying on some outsourced server to go off of. The point is that they don't have to code it themselves with time they otherwise may not have. Bgt can only do so much, I mean look at the registration key data. Stored in plain site in the registry, under a folder of the software itself. Does that hold true for other software? Absolutely. But is it at least well hidden? Yes.

That's what I was thinking. Kind of like temporary keys you get after some software purchases before the actual key is given out, i.e upon order validation. I remember some older applications had a run-meter instead of days, so it would count how many times the application has been executed. Maybe, for further piece of mind, the application could have a running counter of how many times it phones home, which you may be able to partially see in a license manager, i.e once it reaches the maximum times allowed to phone home, it license manager could say, permanent license, so that people would know that it no longer needs to call the server. Developers could choose how many times they wish their application to phone home, thus the need for a universal drm system so it wouldn't need to be coded into each individual application. This is the kind of potential Armadillo could've had if Digital River didn't come in and screw the project over.

What I was thinking of is a system where:
1: Your game calls out to the server, telling it the username/email address, password, game ID and machine ID, and requests an activation code.
2: If the account information is valid, the game ID refers to an existing game, and if the server finds a license that is allocated to the machine with the specified machine ID, the server uses the game ID, machine ID, and possibly other sources, to create an activation code that is only valid for that game running on that machine, using some method to encode an expiration into the activation code, and then returns that code.
3: The game receives the code from the server and performs validation, and also makes sure that the expiration data in the code isn't set far in the future, stores the code somewhere on the computer such as in the registry, and then activates itself.
When the game starts up again, it checks the computer for an existing activation code and checks if it's still valid, and if not, goes back to step 1.

Well as a now x pirate I can tell you a few things that really got my goat, still do by the way.
1.  if company x thinks they have the market, yes ms sadly still has it for businesses, office is to high priced for what it is, sure if all of it was used but rarely do anyone reall use all of it.
The home version is reasonable, but there is no email client for those that want, and the version just above is still slightly out of price range, the pro version is nuts!
There may be other software where the companies charge a lot for it, some software complex its justified some is not, our screen readers and devices are one example but there are probably a lot of others.
Point is, before opensource, company x has software everyone uses, and you require it, but you can't afford it but you require it else you can't do anything.
Even with opensource there are those that will charge a lot for their product and the user may or may not get their money's worth.
2.  drm
I can see why you use it, honestly I do, but to simply say that your users can play x content on a restricted number of devices is beyond me, you can't share it easily but I bet 100 bucks that while yes some users would share it with their friends which is actually alegal, in fact making any copy of anything bar for backup is alegal, well fact is I do find drm to restrictive.
Next is what a poster pointed out before in this thread, its no good if the developer of question goes poooooofffff! and dissapears.
Look at darkflier.
They had issues they are back now, oh but look the game is online, thats nice, here, have a useless crappy game that is total crap because it can't run without the server.
Or lets have program x not register or run because your net is offline and you really need to use it.
I understand with audiogames most ag devs are small devs the big ones seem to get unreasonable.
For them its basically we are right, fuck the customer or at least some of them can be like that.
The fact you are big doesn't mean you can push people about yet some make you think they have the right to do what they want and you don't.
What saved me from a life of piracy was more software changes and lifestyle rather than laws themselves.
The fact I had a new system made me stopped having k1000 for example, 7zip was superior to winzip and winzip changed their interface.
Getright and flashfxp got privacy protection and I decided to buy them outright.
I had cracks for goldwave and dvd audio extracter but when they upgraded to one version I was detected as using cracked software so I just brought it outright.
However I was only dealing with 20-50 dollar software.
The challenge is when its more than that.
Look at windows pro vs home.
Why do you buy pro when you are a home user.
You do it because in home you loose a bit more control you would really like over your home system and office could be just as bad.
To be honest if you can afford the software then you shouldn't crack it.
Its when you are dealing with 300-10000 up where I can see the big guys muscling in to get what they want.
I am also against hardware activation.
Several issues happen with this.
The biggest, if you loose your system you may need to get another code.
If you loose your code or it expires unless you fib about it you may have to buy another coppy of whatever it is because of a stupid reason.
Hardware activation codes are just well it depends how you use them.
In games you can retrieve if its done right.
But what if things go down.
Usernames and passwords well that may be better as long as you get what you payed for ofcause.
The other issue is if for whatever reason something goes wrong, say you buy something that may have been dodgy or got scammed or something.
The big guys don't care, the crime is transfered to you, they don't care, I have had friends that got scammed.
And while in most cases if lagit yeah it can be fixed there have been cases where it just isn't.
Thankfully bar ms, for os anyway, you can avoid amost things if you are in fact a home user.
My email and web software, is free.
Thats a big stepup from where I was.
My security software is free, I still have friends on norton for everything.
I have a free office program but don't need much of that, I have a lightwaight30 dollar word program, low cost recording software and a few other things.
The fact I don't have to use high priced software is probably why I no longer need to fight the system.
Its not for everyone though.
There have been 2 times I had to bite the bullet, the first was my ocr software I just couldn't find a free one that worked.
The next was sadly my conversion for youtube and other software, for videos, some free stuff is bundled with stuff and I had to go the comercial root even though I now use free sites to convert my youtube and other vids because they are easier.
I hardly use an ftp client or download manager but they are there.
Most of my pirating was music,  but depending where you go you can at times get your music for reduced prices if you know where to go.
Things are better than they were and that is a major difference.
And in some countries like china and even to some extent in indonesia its actually ok to pirate and even sell stuff.
However if its to good to be true, ie cheap or free it usually is.
Look on ebay at office programs all that stuff costing 10 bucks is in fact probably pulled keys from other places.
They may be dead machines but a lot seem to be lined to schools and other businesses not you.
So that 10 dollar key may actually not be yours at all.
My dad and I once got some converter which we don't use much for vhs tapes.
THe converter works but the software that came with it is old software, and its going to cost more than we payed to upgrade that software.
The software isn't even legal, its fine for what we need but to get a legal upgrade of that software well it costs.
In that case we got what we payed for and we are happy with it but what if we were not.
You buy software privately, ie ebay, facebook, etc the protections are not there just as if you torrent or download your stuff from a questionable source you get extra risks.
Some like me were and still are ready to take whatever risk they want.
That was before the bad guys got nasty.
If it was on an ftp that is one thing but a torrent, don't know.
Even a sync folder can have its issues if used badly.
Another thing that I have never understood, if you buy x device or x dvd then while the content online is a licence, the fact you have a physical object, ie a disk say means you can do whatever you want with your coppy.
That includes crack your copy of your software for expressly your own use.
I don't know how that stacks up, but yeah extracting the audio of my own dvds which I brought with my cash is cracking aparently.
A 1 size fits all approach doesn't fit.
Another thing I really hate is timed demos suppose I  download software x run it and say am undecided after the trial ends, or fall sick and miss the small trial.
I have done this with several bits of software, I run them, but get nag screens to buy it, they get in the way.
I want to use x software.
So I get a crack for it to make the issues go away.
A couple months later, I decide I either like software in which case I do buy it.
Or I don't so I kill it.
I could have shared it or sold it I guess but chose not to.
Ofcause you can't well calculate intention but still.
Its also sad but true that the big companies do not want to talk they see a pirated something, so they handle the issue as ruthlessly and brutally as possible they generally do not talk.
On a list I am on a bit of software was pirated, someone from the maker came online and asked why.
Many people said why, the company nagotiated a deal that all users were happy with, they were a small one though.
But when someone asked for a crack they were told that there was a deal and how to take advantage of that.
In that case though the software was not being sold because the demand was small and it was just they needed to pay the rights holder something but it didn't have to be anything.
The fact the makers or agents talked though was different.
Thats changed some what.
There are a lot of little guys to medium guys out there.
And most of them will be happy to talk.
While the big guys do exist depending on what you need, its possible you may not have to deal with them, or even own or use their software pirated or otherwise.
For businesses a few have programs like ms that allows the user to basically get a free program or basically really cheap for the time they work in that business.
It goes without saying though that your stuff will work after that as long as you don't share it and or are carefull about it.

If you're talking about the system I suggested, it's true that it wouldn't be a quick solution, but I believe that it would be worth it in the end. Gamers would only have to keep track of their username and password, which could easily be saved in a password manager. If their hard drive dies, no problem. They can just reallocate their licenses to another machine.
As the developer, you can keep track of when and where the licenses are used.