Pirates will not get what they want, and neither will many legitimate customers, once publishers figure out the lesson of piracy: pirating the client is easy, pirating the server is hard, divide value accordingly and retool your business model to suit.

I just opened my Kindle today and am having a "Wow, I'm living in the future" experience, so let's roll with what living in the future looks like for gamers:

1) The bestselling American PC game (dominating the industry, with 4 of the top 20 slots) will be a $60 paperweight without a $15 pay-per-month account, verified server-side.

2) There will be an explosion of what is euphemistically called free-to-play games, which are actually free-to-trial and then turn on aggressive monetization within minutes of starting. All content is locked down on the servers. Anything you buy can vanish at a whim. There is generally no maximum price for the game -- they are designed to extract more and more money from you the more you value the game.

1) I suggest that actually the largest-grossing games will be things that run inside of some sort of trusted computing-y system. Right now, the 360 and PS3 fill that role, especially the 360, with its really-pretty-good internal verification systems. I suppose Steam could turn into a setup like that as well. I note MS also pushes the server-side hard, like you suggest, and I agree this has added significant value to their games,making offline play less appealing.

2) Agreed completely, this is happening now, a-la D&D Online. As companies figure out how to forecast revenues from such things, we'll be seeing a lot of this. And, frankly, I think a lot of us won't mind. I kind of like pay-as-you go, personally. It lets me choose how much to spend on the game.

p.s. I love my Kindle.

What are you going to do with the Kindle when there's a competing reader that you like better, but you're saddled with DRM'd content?

I agree with you that putting value in the server is good for businesses, but the corollary is also true: it's bad for consumers.

1) This is why people end up writing server emulators. All the major MMORPGs have at least one.

2) I agree. This goes along with the booming micropayment systems.

And where do you place huge amount of interesting innovative flash games available completely free?

Most flash games aren't created with the purpose of making grandiose amounts of money, but rather for fun or for showing off

Most open source software is created with the purpose of making grandiose amounts of money, but rather for fun or for showing off.

But it's still business and lots people make a lot of money out of it.