gamedev :
Regarding a drastic drop in price--the cost for all materials for a retail PC game is roughly $2. Currently, the cost to digitally deliver that same size game is roughly 10 cents per gig at best or roughly 20 cents. Your justification just does not hold water regarding a drastic change in costs as most of the costs are not the goods themselves.
As far as entitlement--honestly, just want to see new and exciting PC games that do well in the market so that publishers keep investing in them and developers can afford to make them and profit by them.
And theft is theft even if you feel better about stealing a 'digital' version versus a chunk of metal ie. a car and it does not matter if you are stealing a BMW or a piece of junk like a Lada. Millions of dollars are spent on the development of that car and in fact, that is the biggest part of the expense of creating new cars (not the manufacturing). Same is true with video/PC games. Supply is changing (being driven down) but demand is arguably not but is being more and more filled by stealing (and shifting to console as mentioned already).
For movies, as stated previously, they already have a exclusive and captive channel with the box office and then they have established deals with movie studios on buying rental DVDs including profit sharing beyond the bulk sale of the actual movie although that is changing somewhat over the past number of years. But movie studios (publishers) can afford to break even with box office and profit from DVD sales as an almost worst case scenario. They are not affected by 'used' movies at this stage. They have your money even if it is a crappy movie. As well, their hardware is one format most of the time meaning ubiquitous hardware ie. a standard--not a fragmented market like the current console market. Yes, innovation would possibly be affected but 3DO had the right idea even if the wrong execution. We could then afford to sell games for $20 or less and sell to a massively bigger market. Making games for multiple platforms is expensive and wasteful. But now we are getting pretty off topic 😉
But basically, if we did have a common platform (and some would argue that is what a PC could be), and prices were driven down to more mass market pricing such as $20 across the board, would piracy still continue at the same rate? I believe based on the attitude above which I believe to be prevalent that the answer is yes, it would. People would still steal at the same rate even when the argument about protecting themselves against crappy games wasting their $50 is drastically reduced or even eliminated. People just don't see the harm in it but don't realize that they are participating in harming families nationwide through their actions. It is a shame, the PC has the opportunity to be truly mass market and be the one platform that no one company owns especially as hardware power and prices continue to be inversely related. The ones that are going to profit are the companies like Apple, or Steam or others that have the most stringent DRM as part of their channel delivery and we did it to ourselves.
We both obviously care about PC gaming but we are coming at it from opposite sides, I don't want to buy bad games because I think that will just encourage more bad games. I know most every developer out there wants their game to be the best and actually cares about the gaming experience, but I also know that the publishers couldn't give two shits less about gaming and they would shill whatever steaming pile they thought they could sell with a clever commercial or two.
I don't even think of steam as being DRM, it always works, works if I'm offline or on, gives me benefits like online storage and I can even apply mods to the games as long as I disable the auto-update feature for that game. With steam I still feel like I control how and when I play. The only way it could be better is if the "steam" part of valve was a separate non-profit organization that ALL developers could use to easily and cheaply distribute their games.
You think it's theft, I don't, not much more to say about that. It may be that each disc costs about $2 to distribute, but don't forget, gamestop wants their 20% as well and I get a disc/manual etc. Movies do have a different business model, I don't actually support that one either, I usually hate the theater and only go very rarely, Iron Man, and Avatar are about it. They use a "window" model to enforce scarcity and add artificial value to their content, their own little DRM scheme. Every year I think people will stop going but it never happens? Heh I have spent WAY WAY more money on PC games than movies.
I know that games take money to make, too much money, and as the costs have gone up so has the publishers power to dictate things like release windows(crunch), DRM requirments, platform support, and whatever other features they deem desirable. I think it used to be a partnership, creativity on one side and money on the other, but that's not the case anymore. Now it's just money money money and I personally don't really like it. DLC, microtransactions, subscription models, EA's "project ten dollars(costs $15?) god I hate it.
Man I suppose we are both way of topic, but that's what happens when people are passionate.
I love the idea of the PC as a common platform,the PC can do ANYTHING if the software is written. I have played 2 player Smash Bro's on PC via the dolphin emulator(used xbox remotes though) and it was awesome. Slow and buggy but tons of fun. Any game ever made could be played on computer if it was only written for it. Unfortunately It will probably never be mainstream in the way consoles are. "Gaming" computers sold by OEM's are stupid expensive so only home-built makes sense and the average couch jockey just isn't capable of hooking a computer up to their tv, or building a modest gaming rig. I have spent the last decade working computer support in various industries and I promise you, most people are not only incapable of learning how to maintain their computer, worse they don't even WANT to learn how. MS sure isn't going to make it any better for gaming, not with all the juicy licensing fees they collect from xbox. It is getting better, I can envision gaming capable HTPC's, and once enough people have them they will start making games for the living room and then there will be no need for another box(I can dream can't I?). Now I'm gonna go home and play some Bad Company 2
I bought ME2 twice just to support PC gaming, and nearly a hundred other games on steam last year, but sometimes you just need a demo 
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