Ascadia, we must be looking at completely different figures here. First, you're looking at a public torrent site that is not anywhere near the size of some of the others. I also hope you know that there are many underground / locked registration torrent sites out there, one of which is where Fallout 3 leaked from. Additionally, you seem to be looking at seeds as some sort of completed statistic, but it's not at all. Seeds are only the people who are sticking around to share the files after they've finished downloading it. All a torrent needs is one seed, everyone else can pick up the slack to share what's been transferred out.
In terms of the number of seeds, I'd imagine that a lot of people would disconnect right away on a public torrent especially when downloading a high profile game like Fallout 3 in order to not get a complaint filed on them by Bethesda. I'd imagine that Bethesda is logging IPs of people who jump on these public torrents.
On the two public torrents I looked at just now, I saw well over 800 combined seeds total, and around 3000 peers across all Fallout 3 torrents. Also, the torrent site that exclusively leaked Fallout 3 has 100k members, and locked registration. I don't have access to the private sites, but I can imagine that Fallout 3 would be quite popular.
Going even further, you also have to account for things like ftp servers, newsgroups, IRC (the channel I ended up in during my research had 1200 users dedicated to console piracy), and black market transactions in the US and in other countries where physical discs are sold. If I had to make a guess at how many pirated copies of Fallout 3 have already been attained by people out there, I'd say somewhere around 65,000. By the time retail hits, I'd put that number at 125k easy worldwide, and then even more after it's on shelves.
I'm sure some of those pirates will buy it either way, and there are also those that would have never bought it. The grey area though of people who would have but were on the fence will probably lose a lot of desire to buy it at full retail price once they've beaten it a couple of times. I mean, this was an extremely early leak, spoilers are already out there, and most people who downloaded or bought a copy could probably beat it at least once before they could actually buy it on shelves.
With all that said, I think console piracy is pretty big, it has been for awhile, and will only keep growing as time goes on. Also, I don't think PC piracy is as simple as you're making it out to be. The average Joe might know how to download an MP3, but not how to jump through all the hoops that pirated pc games make people go through. Cracks, image utilities, anti-blacklist utilities, etc.
I've discussed this at length with EA in the past year as they've been the victim of several high profile pc and console leaks, and at times I've had to help them hunt the leaks down. It's my honest opinion that those very same PC pirates that developers currently love to hate are the ones who will follow the transition of games to the consoles. The only thing I can see working for consoles is disc based authentication, where the launcher would have to be pulled down the hard drive via a network connection and match the disc's print or serial number encoded during the manufacturing process. Then it would have to check in with a master server on each load, verifying the game. That'd be a tough nut to crack, but it'd also be very inconvenient for the legit customer.
Honestly, the war on pirates is like the war on drugs. I cannot see us reaching day in our lifetime where pirates have been eradicated, just like there will not be an eradication of pot smokers. Each instance involves a criminal act, but it's just not feasible to believe that the chunk of the general public that take part in those activities are just going to wake up one day and stop what they're doing. I mean, how many people have you known in your life that have made a copy of a tape, cd, vhs tape, dvd, or even downloaded a song at least once? What, six or seven out of ten? Now, how many do it actively? Pirates believe that piracy is a victimless crime, just like potheads do. Enough people out there engage in piracy where a very large chunk of the population would have to be punished, or pardoned for what they had done in the past.
Anyways, I can say that I take pride in my collection, and I'd never be happy with a bunch of burned discs or mp3s. I like having physical retail representations of music, games, movies, etc. that I enjoy, or at least thought I would. I have always loved having my game boxes and the manuals or other goodies they come with, and I have closets full of storage boxes and rubbermaid bins which contain all the games I've ever owned. A lot of other people simply don't care about that stuff though, they just want to save money, try before they buy, or simply just want to have the biggest collection of games, movies, or albums ever recorded in history.
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