Quote Originally Posted by Akka
Why the useless rant ?
I DO buy every game I like. I consider that good creation MUST be rewarded.

But I fail to see the link with marketing garbage or the hypocrisy and lies of the publishers ("games are expensive because we're ruined by pirates *cries* We don't want to, but we're forced to recoup our losses due to evil, evil pirates", but funnily enough, the prices racks up when there is no piracy, and decrease when there is...).
I'm glad that we both agree on that then.

Exactly how are they supposed to get their money back with piracy rates that high? Of course the price will go down on a product like RTW, unlike Office or Windows it only has a very short shelf life and has to make as much money as possible as fast as possible. If there is loads of piracy they need to try and compete with that supply of free games, so prices go down.

You don't quite get the point about the marketing do you? If it wasn't for them the only people playing this game would be history nerds like us.
The game would have significantly worse production values and be a lot worse to play. You've got to get a wide audience playing the game for it to get the kind of resources RTW has had. It's also another cost to be recouped.