In case you’ve not caught the news, download site The Pirate Bay – a name that’s become almost synonymous with bittorrent and illegal filesharing – has been bought out for a princely sum, and its new owners have announced their intention to go legal. A little laughable, given this is a site with ‘pirate’ in its name, and also likely to be the end of TPB’s world-straddling popularity. No doubt it’ll hang around for a while, as the similarly born-again Napster does, but it seems highly unlikely the bulk of its existing audience will continue to visit if they can’t get stuff for free. The question for us chaps is whether the potential effective closure of the internet’s leading filesharing hub will have any effect on what’s so often accused of being PC gaming’s smoking gun. In other words: are we about to witness a sharp decline in PC game piracy?
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