"I don't think it's getting worse, as much as it's getting easier," said the consortium head to Ars Technica. He offered file-sharing trail-blazer Napster as an example to show that pirates strike all forms of media and are not unique to the games industry.

While Stude represents a collective of hardware makers and game publishers, he surprisingly took the side of enraged gamers who took to the Internet with complaints about Spore's DRM limitations. "I think gamers wanted to make their voices known; it was the equivalent of the Boston tea party," he remarked.

Stude asserted his understanding that PC gamers are a unique and diverse bunch, and as such don't do well with limitations. "[PC gamers] don't buy one machine, stick it in the corner, hook it up to the TV, and play it forever. We play on multitudes of machines, and we want the same rights an Xbox 360 purchaser has, to move the game to whatever machine we want to play on."

His understanding of PC gamers notwithstanding, Stude was still pushed onto the piracy issue by the publishers he represents. For their sake, he promises a solution. "The PCGA would like to address the methodology that publishers might be able to take to solve ... the piracy challenge for their substantial investments in content." He reiterated his organization's promise to accurately measure piracy in the wake of wildly varying statistics on the issue.

Above all, Stude sees promise in high-piracy areas like East Asia. "Over half a billion in software revenue was generated in China, Korea, and Taiwan. All the top markets for piracy are also the top markets for revenue," he commented.

Concluding, Stude was characteristically dramatic about the challenge facing the PCGA: "We are the guardians of the PC as a platform for gaming."