Interesting video by writer Gaiman on web and piracy of books.
I thought he has some really valid points.
I found it a nice mental exercise to compare the situation with games and their own piracy - I think there are at least a few relevant ones.
One of which is the concept of favorite author translates poorly to games of the lack of "authorship" (barring very few examples like Kojima) that games as a medium "suffers" from (this has been discussed in the forums a couple of times but I didn't go hunt the links).
Another one, and correct me if I am wrong, is that from what I know writers and game developers that are funded by publishers in a qualitatively different way.
In any case it is interesting that some game devs did run the same type of trial giving games for free as a way of advertising - and still do, particularly so in the case of Android and iOS games although certainly there were examples prior to that.