Michael Russell from Ritual Entertainment is not only the Quality Manager behind the source-powered SiN Episodes: Emergence, but he's also a keen blogger.

The latest entry on his blog details his frustration with the piracy issues surrounding the first person shooter as he believes that these fraudsters are stealing his time as well as his money.

He talks about how the tech-support desk has been inundated with gamers phoning up with bug-related issues. When they're questioned further it often materialises that some of these people haven't even signed up to STEAM, but are running illegal copies. The cheek of them!

Only last week he says that the number of people phoning the helpdesk with pirated copies outnumbers those people who have bought the game by 5 to 1!

Whilst the majority of us will sit back and have a giggle at the audacity of these people, it's a serious issue for Russell and Ritual. He concludes his rant by saying, "The copies of "SiN Episodes: Emergence" that you buy pay my salary. Retail copies of Windows are more expensive partly because Microsoft has to factor support costs into those sales. More and more companies are moving to console games, not only because they make more money (they do because there's less piracy in the console space), but because they save major bank on support costs.

There are companies that love the PC and will stick with it for richer or poorer, but until we can find a way to better reduce piracy in the PC space, I'm afraid that it's only going to be for poorer.

Will this mean a shift on focus from PC to console for Ritual Entertainment? Back in May they were rumoured to be bringing SIN Episodes: Emergence to the PS3 and it's looking as though this might just be the way forward for these relatively small developers who are losing out to the escaulating piracy problems.

Source : Russell's blog via Voodoo Extreme