I’m going to write more on this later when I’m not so annoyed but I’m REALLY getting tired hearing from game developers who blame piracy for their game’s poor sales.
If you make a game for the console demographic, don’t expect to make huge PC sales, okay? Oh, and if you make your game require hardware that only a couple million users have, guess what? You’re not going to sell a lot of units.
More later.
Never underestimate a buisnessman's lack of understanding of how the market works.
You know actually, it's not the whole process porting of games from console that hurts sales of those games. It's failing to adapt the interface for mouse and keyboard, and maybe to an extent, not optimising it enough for PC hardware, that makes it bomb.
Personally I don't mind too much if a game is better when played with a controller, since I have a chunky old Xbox controller with USB converter just for that. But not having decent mouse/keyboard response and configurability is a disaster for any PC game.
So i take it Brad is not going to have many friends in the game industry now, is he?
If you steal stuff in an MMO, your a ninja. If you steal stuff on the internet your a Pirate. If you steal stuff in 'real life', your a crminal.
Seems to me "Ninjas" and "Pirates" need to be renamed to something less... awesome?
More and more these days it seems anyone who believes in Freedom of Information or anyone who is a forward liberal thinker is deemed a "Pirate" or a "Anarchist" by society in general. A lot of people try to seem "Morally Superior" by condemning pirates and others on the internet who skirt by legal systems by hosting things in countries like China that don't give two sh*ts about American and European copyright laws. In general video game and movie piracy is a bad thing. When it's done for a profit by someone selling bootleg material it's Definitely a bad thing, but, in some cases (more specifically in video games) piracy can and indeed Does help sales.
I'm not gonna lie, I've had pirated games in the past. The first time I played Gal Civ it was given to me by a buddy who downloaded it and burned me a copy. It was awesome but I was frustrated by not being able to apply official patches and game-play fixes so I went out and Bought Gal Civ 2 and All the expansions.
Most pirated games have a lot of glitches and they almost never support multiplayer. I know a lot of people who bought games they pirated first because they wanted to play it online. In some rare cases piracy also helps a game when the company behind it doesn't put out a demo.
As Brad has pointed out multiple times (and personally I think is 100% correct in thinking) anyone who likes a game and wants it Will buy it. When it comes to making money, pirates really don't matter at all. I'm now a dedicated Stardock fan. In the last few years I've bought all the Gal Civ 2 series, Sins of a Solar Empire, and a few other games all because someone gave me a pirated copy of one of their games a long time ago.
I don't even want to think about the ammount of money Stardock has made off me since then...lol.
You should add "can buy the game" to the list of qualifiers. Many people who pirate, especially kids, simply can't buy the game, either because of a lack of money, unavailability of the game or unavailability of a credit card to purchase it online. I don't know if this should be deplored or not, but it is not a loss of sale. Some of them do so once possible. Of course, there are those won't buy it even when they can, and that is reprehensible.
I am buying games simply because I love them and if I can spend scores of dollars on books, movies and TV every year, why can't I do the same for games? Besides, in a small way it also ensures that similar offerings will be available in the future.
In anti-piracy strategy, currently neither the carrot nor the stick is substantially effective, IMO. The stick of law looks big but that's about it. But the carrots are getting tastier - more and meaningful updates, online features available only to the genuine owner and the like. Keep it up!
I've wondered why it took companies this long to break out the common sense. You don't need fascist DRM, install limits, or such measures to reduce piracy. All you need is to limit patches and multiplayer to paying customers. If people like it and want the additional features and fixes, they will eventually break down and buy it.
This of course isn't a green light for publishers to start releasing games with intentional bugs and missing features on release. I'm looking at you day 1 DLC...
Uh, Frogboy...I think you've already written about this!
PC Gaming was profitable before Limited Activation DRM, and it will be again without it, they were still making games in the Don't Copy that Floppy Age, and they were still good games, the problem is, is customers are as fed up with some developers as they are with pirates, I know I will never buy a PC game with Limited Activations if I know about it before hand. But on the bright side they can take there uninspired clones with them when they finally decide the market isn't worth it anymore (a old threat), and maybe make room for some truely innovative developers, and the publishers that support them.
Oh by the way I'm fully aware that games cost alot more then the Don't Copy that Floppy era games, but I think that has more to do with a mass emphasiation of graphic art, and you don't need jaw dropping realism to enjoy a good game. I guess I'm one of those gamers that would care less then being control of a character in a movie theater.
P.S On the off chance it comes up, I pay for all my games.
I mostly agree, except for one point. PC games ARE profitable. If companies are spending millions on graphics, IP and marketing and putting nothing in gameplay, it doesn't sell like the shovelware you can get for the Wii and other consoles. I love my Wii, don't get me wrong, but for a holidays or a b-day, my family is 10x more likely to wind up getting me shovelware for the Wii than they ever would for the PC because it's sitting on a shelf in every department store with a colorful picture on it. Same with my sister, she get's games from extended family who never ever would have tried to get her a PC game, and we've had the Wii for a couple of years now, but we've been PC gaming for decades now. Buying games for the PC is too scary for most people.
Limited Activations... 100% pass here and definitely something that would fuel people who don't typically pirate, to pirate.
You know, I do think availability is a huge factor behind most piracy... every single game on my computer was gotten legally, most through Steam or Impulse but a few others through retail. But over half of my PS2 game collection is "pirated", simply because the titles were never available here in my country, and I'm not paying $60+ in shipping, handling and import taxes just to play a game (if I can at all, many titles are region-locked and so I'd have to import another PS2 as well, with all the troubles importing electronic equipment entails).
Stardock in that respect does it the right way: GalCiv 2 isn't available anywhere in my country (believe me, I looked), but I bought it through Impulse without a single problem, no need to resort to "piracy" or any such thing to play it. Sure a few people may still pirate it but chances are it's because they're unsure they'd like it and those that do would probably end up buying it sooner or later anyways.
The only reason I thought PC games might be loosing in profit is limited activations and the brick and mortar stores have limited them from there glorious golden age to just a shelf in some cases, because they can't resell PC games, and I think this is funny, that this is such a big issue, because the Developers that whine the most about Pirates, hate game stores reselling there console games as well, its like PC gaming is caught in between a war between Developers and Brick and Mortar Shops, and they are fighting through PC Games Territory to get to each other, while there was a day I would never give up having physical media, I truely think because of this war between game shop resellers and publishers, that download shops like Impulse may certainly be the future, and the salvation of PC Gaming.
I wouldnt have bought GalCiv II if it hadnt been for promotions like this one. Kudos to Stardock!
i cant WAIT to hear this story Frogboy.
im guessing some cheesy dev house doesnt want to use impulse for some piracy nonsense. i will be happy to hold off not spending my cash on their stuff in the future.
No Stardock does allow there store Impulse to have games with other forms of DRM in it, I my self was going to get a game but it was hooked up with a limited number of installs via TAGES.
Note that I "Pirate" stuff internationally all the time without breaking the law. With digital media if you don't have a U.S. copyright it won't be enforced. So yeah, availability has a lot to do with it.
While I don't download domestically copyrighted stuff I have played stuff others have for the same reason. A fair number of pirates aren't "pirates" such much as demo-ers. Most adults who pirate will gladly put the money down if the game warrants more than a half a dozen hours of gameplay.
I seriously think piracy is a lame executive's excuse because they were too busy playing golf and couldn't be bothered to actually take the time to run their company and be responsible for the product they ship out.
just by looking at the title.....i thought frogboy was scolding the diplomacy beta players who were complaining that the pirates are too strong now, ........lol
btw, frogboy, are u reffering to any patricular article related to pc piracy??
bet you I can make a million off pirating.
I would say Stardock has some pretty darn high requirements for its games. Being a low-profile game publisher and developer, seems like other developers don't have much to complain about. Priacy is a big issue, but it depends on with what games. Like it didn't affect the sales of Mass Effect, but it sure did one in for Titan Quest because the leaked copy had bugs and those lived with the game even past release. The game wasn't all that good, but it sure was pirated a lot by most of its projected audience. Steam, Impulse, and D2D weren't around in the same form either.
The console argument is one I've been saying for a while now. There are more people buying 360 and PS3 games these days than PC games unless the game only comes out on PC or is specifically a high profile first-person shooter.
I am sure I was part of the Titan Quest target audiance, being a lover of D2, and I saw his rant, was it Michael Fitch that did it, blaming pirates and people not updating their motherboard drivers. I don't typically buy at the front of the wave for most my hardware so I almost never update a motherboard driver as it's pretty finalized when I get it and extra support is usually for new CPU's or specific RAM which I wouldn't need.
Anyway, I demo'd Titan Quest and was pretty unhappy with the inventory system right off the bat, and I was surprised how much like D2 it was considering the years between the two. Overall it felt too limited for the price it sold at. I mean I've played Torchlight and one day might pick it up, but that game wasn't released at a full price. I was expecting more from Titan Quest, so when the game came out, I bought other games, plus TQ was released with the typical buggy as hell status that so many publish their games as these days. It was too easy for him to blame pirates for the studio's closure. If the game had been good, I mean real quality work, and well supported and certain issues not addressed and fixed in the expansion, which usually doesn't sit well with me, the game would have sold better and moe of us would have been eager for what else they released.
The consoles had nowhere to go but up, so they are taking more market share which they had lost when they pretty much screwed up and lost it to PC games early on. As a PC gamer, I have no intention of switching. I love playing on PC.
Yeah, 3d D2... Well, no, I think it was less entertaining. I'm a terrible person to comment on them, oh how the genre bores me.
It's a pretty engine, but that's wasted on the grainy, low res surface textures that make the ground fluctuate as you move across it. The system requirements were high, the visual appeal was low, and the game itself is too generic for me to get through it. I'm assuming I'll eventually try again, but I doubt I'd ever get even halfway through it. I thought they did pretty well considering they hosed themselves with a stupid method of DRM.
Spending that much money on something that's already been done and rarely sells well was a major blunder. The typical Diablo clone doesn't even make the store shelves.
Game budgets keep going up, came content stays flatlined and customer paying power isn't going anywhere. So its no wonder companies can't make good profits with anything less than a total smash hit. It's becoming like in the movie industry. They spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the production of a game, shove it into an oversaturated market, usually with little attention paid to actual entertainment value (focus these days seems to be on the "bling", not on the actual content) and then expect to cash in big time?
I keep saying, cut the juggernaut budgets, focus more on content and gameplay and less on audio/visual extravaganza, and drop the prices. A cheap, good, original, but visually average game will sell much better than superbly looking game with rehashed and done-to-death content. Developers need to be freed from the yoke of massive budget payoffs and let loose to be creative. Its difficult to go for the "road less travelled by" when you don't know if your experiment will be a hit or a flop. Its much safer to just slap on a new shiny coat of paint onto content so worn out its practically not there anymore.
Pretty sure as long as game companies and other software manufacturers require disk in drive to play/run there will always be pirates. Regardless, I can't think of one game company that has lost its fortune because of pirates. What has happened over time is that game companies used to deliver full game demo's. Then demo's were pulled out and had to start paying money up front for something that you hoped was good and then many times failed. Pc user's in general felt swindled by new corp pc gaming dynamic(give us $ first then maybe we will get game to work) So those of us who have played these games for while have a different attitude than you younger crew about what software piracy really means. If you get stuck in the rut of saying pirating is just bad then you probably have no historical perspective to software piracy. Gaming piracy is just a facet of intellectual software/hardware control. I'm sure Mr. Wardell and several other's at Stardock could give a better sumation to what I have said. By the way, I don't steal. I own all the games and other software through purchasing.
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