Piracy Killing PC Gaming?

1up reports on comments from Kevin Cloud, co-owner of id, saying that piracy is killing the PC games business. He says that, in most markets, it's hard to sell official products because pirates can beat them to market. From the article: "'It's the primary reason retailers are moving to the console,' Cloud said, continuing on to say that ways to reduce piracy are in the forefront of every PC developer's mind, and citing World of Warcraft's subscription-based nature as an example of a possible solution to the problem."

Comments

WoW is the solution?

[preppypoof]

I thought we already decided that WoW is killing the entire game industry...not saving it.

Re:WoW is the solution?

[marshallbanana6]

Not trying to condemn or anything here, but something I never thought about for a long time, and most people don't think about when they pirate something is kinda also related to how WoW is hurting things: time.

Why should someone who is playing WoW and loving it search for another game to play? They're already filling up their time playing WoW. On the same line of reasoning, when you pirate a game even if you "wouldn't have spent your money on it in the first place" you are spending your time on it. This possibly takes time away from the time you might use to play other games you might actually be willing to spend your money on, therefore maybe not hurting the developer of the game you pirated directly, but certainly hurting the industry they are part of. Now if you would never spend money on any game, then I guess this is a moot point, but somehow I think that if it weren't so easy to pirate games, there indeed would be more people who bought them.

Re:WoW is the solution?

[gutnor]

"the reasons they aren't selling games as they would like to is because of the ever increasing system requirment"

That's a very good reason. I have much less time to play those days with work and family, so I'm buying less games, fair enough.
The problem is for people with low buying rate like me( like 1 game a year ) you almost have to buy a new gaming machine exclusively to play one game if you would like to play the game as it is supposed to be played ( like with at least 50% of the effects enabled ) That drives the cost of gaming to about 500$ per year, minimum.

Compare that to WoW and it doesn't look so expensive after all.

Sure I could play old games on my machine, and they will be very cheap. But that's not working like that, I'm not a dedicated player. If I want to play a game, I ask my colleagues/friends what they play and how they find the game ( so we can share the experience and have a nice conversation at the coffie machine - which is a good added value to the game itself ) Then I check if I can play this game on my machine and if I cannot, well I use the money to go to the restaurant ( which is a topic always working for the coffie machine meeting :-) )and the sale is lost ... forever.

Re:WoW is the solution?

[StormReaver]

Piracy is definitely part of the problem, but only a part. Hell, it may even be a small part of the problem. Here's why I don't buy many games, in decreasing order of importance:

1) Games have stagnated, both on the PC and on the consoles. I have a Game Cube and a PS2. I haven't bought a single game for either of them in about a year and a half. If game companies moved from the PC to the console, this (the single most important reason for me not buying, or playing, new games) wouldn't change one bit.

2) Game makers don't generally port to multiple operating systems. I know I'm in the vast minority of users, but I don't have (or want) Windows. I want and use Linux exclusively. PC games are a luxury item to me, and if they aren't on Linux then I don't play them. If PC game makers would ditch DirectX and move to cross platform development, they would extend their markets with almost no added expense.

3) Games cost too much. I'm sure this is because game production costs have skyrocketed over the years. But that is almost entirely the fault of the game producers themselves. With stagnant gaming ideas (see item 1 above), game producers have focused almost exclusively on increasing the visual appeal of games at the expense of good fun. This is a self-perpetuating spiral that will shrink the gaming market all by itself.

Maybe the gaming industry as we know it today deserves to die off.

Re:WoW is the solution?

[ObligatoryUserName]

You are dead on. Thievery illicitly drains supply, Piracy illicitly drains demand.

Though different, they are of a kind in the damage they do.

Re:WoW is the solution?

[thelost]

I made a comparison between WoW and Napster. Look at the modern file sharing commmunities though, are they anything like Napster? Napster was a great idea but has been superseded by those who would build on its success. WoW is the same. People will take the best parts of it and build upon them.

I personally have no qualms about subscribing to a game. If there was a particular magazine that I wanted I might think about subscribing to it. There are clear benefits to the model.

You are being too literal in your displacement of WoW elements into greater gaming trends. There are jerks everywhere online and off, in WoW or any other game. I might be one of them. That is life, are you surprised? If certain MMO games have not suffered from this problem it may be for a number of reasons including not having the same popular success WoW has had. Companies will eventually ferret out those reasons and include them in their own games.

MMO games are in my opinion going to become the norm. However the basis of the game will be the interesting thing. What about having an MMOG that deals exclusively with sports. In it you can play a number of different sports games, have championships, run leagues. That's all that happens in that MMOG. Another one deals exclusively with puzzle games. The MMOG becomes a backdrop against which a series of subgames are played. I can dig that idea.

Re:WoW is the solution?

[LordVader717]

They might not be entitled to it, but it comes naturally if you create material that becomes popular. They own the copyright to the material, so if it becomes popular, yes, they are entitled to profit from that demand.

Another POV is this: People say they're doing no harm by pirating, because they wouldn't buy it even if they couldn't pirate it. But what would they do with the time they spend playing? Even so, since when has anybody been entitled to free games, even if they "wouldn't buy them anyway"?

Re:WoW is the solution?

[drinkypoo]

The problem is for people with low buying rate like me( like 1 game a year ) you almost have to buy a new gaming machine exclusively to play one game if you would like to play the game as it is supposed to be played ( like with at least 50% of the effects enabled ) That drives the cost of gaming to about 500$ per year, minimum.

Amen to that. On top of that, I've actually had many games run like dogshit on hardware that far exceeds even the recommended specifications, so I have no faith that having enough machine as per the box is actually going to be enough machine.

I've all but given up on PC gaming - I should say, I've given up on playing new games on PC. I have an Xbox and a PS2 - no Xbox 360 yet, and it's possible the only next-gen console I'm buying is the WiiWii - and I can pretty well satisfy my gaming urge between some classic PC games (I still play Quake 1 on a fairly regular basis) and a small handful of console games. I think I have about 25 console games now (wayyyyy down from previous) and more than half of them are PS1 games. Obviously I am not highly driven by the glitz and glamor of new titles. Currently I'm working my way through Final Fantasy Origins.

Nonetheless, having to upgrade my video card every year just to play the latest FPS got tiring, and I currently am in a relationship and don't have time to get to the top of a stat ladder anyway, so fuckit. It's a hell of a lot cheaper to not be buying new games, anyway. By the time they're in the $20 bargain bin, I tend to have the hardware to run 'em.

Re:WoW is the solution?

[JesseL]

They are NOT entitled to profit from that demand. They are entitled to TRY to profit from that demand, and they are entitled to decide the terms they will offer to satisfy the demand. Nobody is obligated to agree to their terms, but if they don't, no game for them.

I would never argue that anybody is entitled to pirate games. I will say that the whole idea that "piracy is killing PC games" is overly simplistic and denies the obvious fact that video game demand is highly elastic. I haven't bought a new game since BF1942 because new games cost around SIXTY FUCKING DOLLARS.

Re:WoW is the solution?

[Castar]

Can you "illicitly" drain demand, though? Not trolling, this is a serious question. I see what the GP is saying, and it makes sense. But then it becomes very hard to separate out the different drains on demand - sure, pirated games compete for time with legitimate games, but then so does TV, the outdoors, porn... In fact, pirated games also drain demand from all these other activities. Is that illicit, also? What makes playing pirated games different from the other activities?

If it's the illegality of the action, then does robbing banks also illicitly drain demand from video games? Or watching pirated movies?

Again, not an attack on your position, I'm just curious what your reasoning on these things would be.

Uh, no.

[keyne9]

Unless they plan on, you know, providing a service, additional content, and other such niceties that the MMO genre provides, they need to keep their goddamned hands out of my wallet. Games already cost too goddamned much, and there just honestly has not been a lot of reason to buy many new games (as they've mostly sucked ass lately).

Make a good game, and people will buy it.

Re:Uh, no.

[UbuntuDupe]

Well, I can't quite buy that. I hate to risk my karma after FINALLY restoring it to neutral, but I'm going to say it anyway. People don't pirate games for because the games suck. They pirate them because they're good. Whatever the reason for piracy, it isn't bad games. And frankly the whole, "make good games and I'll deign to pay you" strikes me as being a version of "I'm not stealing because it's their fault they made me want it and charge so much for it!" that you hear out of young shoplifters. Note: I did not just say that piracy is theft, spare me the lecture on semantics so we can get to more substantive issues.

Does anyone know how game devs can recover their costs and make a profit (on good games) without copyright and serious enforcement of it? No, charity generally doesn't work. Subscription models are a great way of doing it, esp if they give the game away, so I don't see why it's so condemned here. I don't think you can deny that one reason devs are shifting to consoles is because it's harder to pirate there.

Re:Uh, no.

[ThosLives]

You're kind of on the right philosophical track here. Here's my take on the discussion (again):

1) Things like software and music are not scarce resources. They can be reproduced almost indefinitely with almost no effort.
2) People like artists and programmers are scarce resources. There is a finite supply.
3) If enough people pay an artist or programmer for producing something so that the artist or programmer keeps producing, it does not matter how many people experience the work of art without paying the artist because the work is already produced and the use of the work does not deprive anyone of anything.

The idea that an artist (or, worse yet, a distributor) is entitled to payment for anything is a serious economic faux pas. For instance, I can sit in my room and sing original songs all night, heck I can even do it on the street corner, but I'm not entitled to receive compensation for it. If people want me to keep doing that, I'll ask for payment so I can stop my current job and do that. Otherwise, they won't get my performance. The same thing applies with software: if I write a game in my spare time, say it takes me 500 man-hours over the course of a year. If folks want me to make another game but in 6 months, I'd have to ask for compensation because I can't spend that much time and keep my current job.

Now, if I invest a bunch of money, quit my job and make a game and try to sell it - if people do not pay me for the game they do not value it, so I will be forced to do something else to make ends meet. It doesn't have anythign to do with theft at all, because it is impossible to steal a service, which is what programming and other forms of "art" are. Now, you can steal a painting because that is a scarce good, but you cannot steal the image itself.

Anyway I'm starting to ramble, so that's all for now.

Re:Uh, no.

[winnabago]

>>Which brings us back to the original problem that Kevin was talking about.

It's not just that the best games are showing up on torrentspy, that will always happen. What is more troubling is the entitlement that many gamers seem to have for new software, especially among the geek community. It comes from, I think, an association of development hours with quality. It is all too easy to raise your standards high enough to not pay for anything.

You might say that the quality level of commercial software just isn't beating out what has come prior and what is available in freeware. Would you pay 50 bucks for Snood? What about a flash based 3d game? Somehow we see sprites and traditional graphics and think, "free software". That is a problem. Some of the blame should fall on the developers too - with high quality open source FPS and MMORPG engines out there, it's not good enough to just be in the market anymore.

Software is no different that music or movies, in that our expectations for games are much different than they were even five years ago. There is real demand for a social network aspect, open source hex data for add-ons, free bug fixes, a nice box, and perhaps access to a strategy guide printed and online. We want something for our money, because if it's just a simple puzzle/strategy/text game, well, that should be free for download anyway, right?

Until this is addressed, the game industry will continue its struggles.

Re:Uh, no.

[UbuntuDupe]

Well, yes, I hope I'm on the right philosophical track, which is why I don't see why you felt the need to remind me of the basics of intellectual works (positive value, high fixed cost, zero or negligible marginal cost). However, you then went on to make some errors:

The idea that an artist (or, worse yet, a distributor) is entitled to payment for anything is a serious economic faux pas

Where to begin.

First, the concept of "entitlement" is a moral one, not economic, so it can't be an "economic faux pas".

Second, you seem to be claiming the the distributor adds no value, which is false because someone has to inform people of the existence of the intellectual work and bring it within easy grasp, but is doubly false because until the artist, he *can* easily withhold the service of providing marginal units.

Third, if you are referring to the question of who adds value as the basis of entitlement, the artist certainly does, to the extent that people reveal through action that they are willing to spend their own money for access to something that would not exist save for his creative act.

Fourth, the economics on which you based that are in error:

If enough people pay an artist or programmer for producing something so that the artist or programmer keeps producing, it does not matter how many people experience the work of art without paying the artist because the work is already produced and the use of the work does not deprive anyone of anything.

This is totally false. It most certainly does matter how many people experience it without paying. The artist makes his decision what to produce based on what he expects to get for it (plus whatever non-monetary good he sees in doing so, but we'll stick with the case of for-profit production). If e.g. 2 of a million people will respect his copyright on option A and want him to produce A, while 3 of 3 people will respect his copyright on option B and want him to produce B, and he expects this, he will do B. The non-payment skewed his incentives to perform an activity not justified by the demands of the consuming public. It's true that after-the-fact non-payers *can* have no influence -- if they decide they like it long after production, when time discount had obliterated the value of whatever they could have given the artist, and thus could not have affected his incentives, then they would have no influence. But in the general case, they certainly can matter.

it is impossible to steal a service,

False. You promise to pay, you get the service, you don't pay. That is theft in all sigificant respects. (It's not what's happening here, but I'm showing your general statement to be false.)

With the rest of your post, I don't see your point: you labor to make what appears to be a semantic distinction to show how accessing an intellectual work "isn't theft" despite how I said such a distinction bypasses more substantive issues.

Yes, you were rambling.

Re:Uh, no.

[Skye16]

Unlike most people, I generally do buy the games I enjoy.

I haven't bought any games lately.

Why? Because, every time I try them out, whether downloading it 'yo ho ho and a bottle of rum'-style, or at a friend's, I end up hating it. I'll play it halfway through, put on god mode, type 'give all' or equivalent, play a few more levels, then type exit in console, uninstall, and delete.

I guess you can honestly say piracy IS hurting the game industry, but not in the "I'll download it and never pay for it ever and play it every day" sort of way you seem to be implying. It's more along the lines of going to buy an Impreza WRX, test driving a friend's for a few days, deciding that you love the acceleration and handling, but the interior is just too basic and plain for you to want to drive it every single day, so you buy an Audi A4 Quatro instead. To the Subaru dealership, they just lost out on a lot of money. But from my perspective, I did my research and was lucky enough to stop myself from buying something I wouldn't actually want. So, Dude-From-ID; if this is the sort of piracy hurting the industry that you speak of, then you don't have a single bit of compassion from me.

You want to get my money, developing studios and publishers? I have lots of it, and it's burning a hole in my wallet. I'll be thrilled to give it to you, actually. Only meet these simple guide lines.

1: Figure out some engaging multiplayer gameplay. I want to be able to play your for years. Not hours. I don't give a shit about your story. Your Single Player game is a complete afterthought to me. Something I do when I'm bored and the internet is out and it's raining outside, so I can't go play street hockey.

2: Make sure you have object collision, net code, and hit boxes down pat. Nothing is more irritating than getting killed by Tanks/Humvees that aren't even remotely close to your vicinity, but, through some fucked up net code, manage to kill you from 5 meters away.

3: Don't dumb the game down so fucking much. Noobs will always be noobs. The less complex you make the game, the more apt I am to get bored with it in days, rather than weeks, months, or years. Or at least find a way to make the game complex, challenging, and engaging, even after having played it for many hours. Even Counter-Strike can be fun after playing it for years, whereas Doom 3 Death Match is about as fun as gouging your eyeballs out with a spoon. And don't just add capture the flag and think that's the most you have to do. CTF is mind numbingly boring after a while. At least add some quirks to it that add some depth.

Re:Uh, no.

[JohhnyTHM]

4. Do not, under any circumstances, use StarForce or any other draconian malware copy protection that is going to totally piss off your paying customers and treat them like the the pirates that you are desperately trying to avoid.

Re:Uh, no.

[jedidiah]

This "entitlement mentality" is nothing new. It isn't anything the industry already hadn't had to deal with for decades. Pointing to this as some reason to sound the alarms is STUPID.

Broadband is IRRELEVANT. The biggest transfer medium of movies is still sneakernet via the USPS. Sneakernet was more than capable of matching the effectiveness of the net. I can probably copy a DVD now faster than I could copy a floppy back in the day. Media's cheaper too...

Re:Uh, no.

[Sparohok]

3) If enough people pay an artist or programmer for producing something so that the artist or programmer keeps producing, it does not matter how many people experience the work of art without paying the artist because the work is already produced and the use of the work does not deprive anyone of anything.

This is self serving sophistry, not philosopy or economics.

Let's put your statement in economic terms. You seem to be envisioning a supply curve where the supply of certain creative works (music, books, games) becomes inelastic beyond a certain point. That is not plausible. Let me explain.

Clearly, if nobody pays for creative works, fewer works will be produced. This means that supply is at least somewhat elastic. Yet you are saying that once a certain level of demand has been met, people experiencing the work for free does not deprive anyone of anything. Whether or not they pay for the product, the supply is unchanged. This represents a completely inelastic supply curve where artists supply the same creative output regardless of the compensation they receive for their works.

This flies in the face of everything that is known about free market economics, and you have claimed it without a shred of supporting evidence.

It doesn't have anythign to do with theft at all, because it is impossible to steal a service, which is what programming and other forms of "art" are. Now, you can steal a painting because that is a scarce good, but you cannot steal the image itself.

So, for example, let's say I contract a programmer to write some code for me. I promise to pay $50,000 on delivery. He delivers the product, and I do not pay him. You are saying that this is not theft, because it is impossible to steal a service?

Uhhhh.

[Drachemorder]

If pirates can beat the official product to market, why can't the developers just speed up their release process to match them? If the game is ready there's no real reason not to go ahead and release it, except perhaps to try to create artificial anticipation for it. I consider that a below-the-belt marketing tactic anyway; if one of the side-effects of piracy is to undermine its usefulness, that would be a good thing.

Re:Uhhhh.

[Aladrin]

Because there's a physical component to the release process. They can't press the CDs/DVDs fast enough to beat the copy stolen from the pressing plant onto the internet.

The obvious alternative is something like Steam, where they provide a download of the game. It's quite a bit harder to beat that.

Someone else mentioned after-sale services... Most games that I play, I don't WANT further services from the company other than bugfixes. I don't even plan to play them again and I certainly don't want to have to play more money if I do. I'd much rather put that same money towards a new, fresh game.

Re:Uhhhh.

[TheRaven64]

The problem isn't that pirates provide a faster product, it's that they provide a better one. I used to game a lot. Sometimes, I would get a pirated game and then buy the real thing after I had tried it (more often I would play the game on someone else's machine first). Over the years, I noticed that the pirated game was often better than the official one. Usually it would not require me to hunt for the CD, for example. When I moved to being laptop-only, the requirement to have the physical CD in the drive was a total show-stopper; it dropped the battery life by half, meaning I couldn't play games while mobile (I also didn't want to have to carry the CD around with me).

For a while, I would buy a game and then download the no CD crack. Then I realised something. I didn't want to pay money to a company that was spending money making my life difficult. I didn't even want to support them indirectly by pirating the game and increasing its popularity. I just stopped playing them. I used to play Half Life a lot before the introduction of Steam; now I don't play it at all, and I haven't bought Half Life 2.

Galactic Civ

[Enderandrew]

That's odd. Galactic Civilizations was released as a downloadable game with no copy protection, and it sold extremely well.

Perhaps the secret to selling a game is releasing a good game in the first place, listening to your customers, marketing it well, and offering real incentive to pay for it.

I find the best way to combat piracy is offer exclusive content, or multiplayer modes that require validation. Hell, let people pirate the game for it's single player and sell them on it. Watch them turn around and then buy the game for the multiplayer, and other downloads.

Re:Galactic Civ

[Malevolyn]

I find the phrase "Digital Rights Management" fundamentally flawed. If I have a right to whatever they're trying to regulate, then they shouldn't be regulating it. The correct term would be "Digital Privilage Management."

Disagree

[Mirkon]

I must respectfully disagree. Consoles have always been more attractive to developers than the PC platform due to the "moving target" dynamic - when you make a game for a home console, there are no system requirements, you don't have to develop for a lowest common denominator (unless you're marketing a game on multiple consoles at once), and you don't have to keep a tech support log of what works and doesn't work with every possible make and model of video card.

Years ago, this was a pipe dream to most developers because of the immense difficulties involved in developing for a home console (usually requiring a full knowledge of the hardware's machine code). But today, they're practically as easy to develop for as a PC. The royalties are a small price to pay for the numerous conveniences a console offers to developers.

sigh..

[tont0r]

Its always great when people see problem as piracy, and not the fact that almost every game just isnt good. Wow is a great example. It was a game that was done properly, and now it holds everyones interest. If a game is only going to hold me interest for 2 weeks and they want $50 or up to $65 for a game, I'm not going to buy it. More so, companies are more concerned with added some amazing physics into the game and forgetting about the story/gameplay. This is what plagues hollywood right now. Also, its not 'World of Warcrafts subscription based nature'. Thats every MMO's subscription based nature.

So, to save PC gaming we pirate console games?

[Anonymous Coward]

At least that's the message I got from that.

Anyway, it's a pretty stupid comment. He's complaining that he can't sell PC games to the 70% of the world that can least afford to pay for them. You're not going to sell many $50 games in Malaysia, dude. Of course they'll get $2 pirate copies - I did too when I was a schoolkid with no cash.

Status Quo in Asia

[ObligatoryUserName]

This is why the typical model in Asia is to give away the client software and charge for subscriptions. Piracy destroys the economic foundation of our high-production stand-alone mass media.

It's hitting PC games first because PC gamers are by definition going to have better access to pirated software.

DRM is actually the best hope if we want to keep having the same sort of entertainment that we can get now, unless the culture changes to shun pirates and piracy. I'd bet DRM is the reason that Square/Enix is looking into creating their own hardware.

I don't like DRM or subscription services, but when the government can't/won't enforce the laws and the people don't respect them it's inevitable.

What Next?

[ggKimmieGal]

First, it's MMORPGs.
Now it's pirates.
What next? Will the gaming world be blaming ninjas?

Face it, most games for today's market suck. People are looking for either a quality game (such as Mario Tennis, which will keep you and your friends entertained for hours) or something different (MMORPGs still fit the different category, but probably not for long). Video games are also too expensive. $50 is a lot of money to spend all at once. Personally, I buy a new game about once a month, which equates to about $600. These games have to be a worthy investment.

Yeah, maybe, or maybe not...

[Anonymous Coward]

I have not bought a number of recently-released games that I would have otherwise found interesting enough to buy because:
1) they cost too much
2) they have onerous copy-protection schemes that require a network connection to phone home regularly, or
3) they stop working if you don't keep paying a subscription fee.

For example, Half-life 2 would have been interesting, but #2 means I haven't bothered. It isn't worth the hassle because I have a relatively slow network connection.

Instead, most of my recent game purchases have been vintage games from the "bargain bin" that are cheaper and don't require a network connection or subscription fees. Most also have "no-cd" patches so I can install them and play without having to dig out the CD and wait for them to spin up and the copy protection to validate (which it sometimes doesn't on certain CD drives -- one game I have validates fine on an old, plain CD drive, but fails on a newer DVD/CD drive. Don't ask me why).

So, is it piracy, or is it because the schemes to slow it down end up costing more and degrading the experience of the the legitimate consumers? Or have game manufacturers simply priced themselves out of the market?

I work for a games company

[91degrees]

I don't actually give a dman about piracy. People were copying games when they came on tape, and they're still doing it.

Re:Nope.

[MBCook]

I don't know what the deal with this week is, but I've seen so many non-sensical comments on /. it's amazing.

Quake4 - Boring - I haven't played it, so I can't comment (although I seem to remember reading reviews saying it was nothing special).

Half-Life 2 - DRM so restrictive that most people did not bother buying it

Yes. That's why Half-Life 2 is one of the best selling games of the past few years. Because people didn't buy it because of the DRM. That's also why they are not making two expansion packs. That's why they aren't releasing new mods for it (no one plays, after all). That's why it's not getting put on consoles (tentativly scheduled for this fall). Oh wait...

SIMS2 - selling poorly compared to the outdates Sims and the 65,000 expansions packs that sold at the same price

Really? It's not quite as innovative as the last (after all, there was no Sims before Sims) but it's still a very nice game. My little sister and all her friends rushed out to buy it. They are churning out money making expansion packs as fast as they can. Again, my little sister and all her friends rush out to buy them. So Sims 2 isn't as successfull as the first (according to you). Well since Sims is the best selling game of all time, that might be a little hard to live up to (considering how long the two have been on the market).

How about that games suck right now? the few DS games I like are very different from what I can get for the PC.

Newsflash, different platforms have diffent games! Film at 11! The DS has some of the most innovative games on the market, and many games currently made are terrible. But if you look at the PC, it has them too. The problem is the signal-to-noise ratio.

Piracy is NOT hurting the Gaming industry. Their lack of ability to make a game that people want is.

If they made games no-one wanted, why are they being pirated? If they made games no one wanted, why is the industry making so much money? Piracy hurts. If the games were better, people may be less inclined to pirate.

But your entire post reeks of hyperboly and your points get lost in it.

Same ol', same ol'. For reference, see the MI

[Opportunist]

It's just the same problem the MI is facing. It's not the copying. Copying is as old as the computer game industry. Granted, it's now easier than it was in the days when you had to travel around with your floppies (or have them sent across the country), and it's easier to get online access than it was in the days of BBSs. On the other hand, the market grew considerably since the old days of the C64. Gamers ain't no more just a few kids aged 12-18, more and more people discover computer games as a hobby, and the age bracket opened to something akin to 9-40 (i.e. the C64 kids didn't stop playing).

The market grew. Copying grew, too, but the number of people willing to buy did certainly not shrink. If anything, it grew.

The problem is the games offered. Yes, I would buy a game if it interested me. No, currently there isn't anything that screams "BUY ME!". Actually, currently there's little on the market that I would copy willingly either. Waste of bandwidth, if anything.

Sure, the expectations grew since the days of the 64. On a C64, you had a 3 colored sprite that resembled vaguely something that could be considered a human shaped something if someone told you it was so and you didn't look too close. Today, this better was true color and smoothly animated! But what really makes or breaks a game, at least for me, is its gameplay and the fun I have when playing it.

Most games today are more a chore than fun, though. MMORPGs aside, which are by their very definition a chore accompanied by the dangling carrot, games today become more and more a burden. Many games, even in the days of the 64, had something "in store" for you if you did well. If you practiced long enough in this platformer, you went on and saw the next level. If you knew the patterns of the enemies in that shoot-em-up and if you knew when and where the boss was vulnerable, you'd see the next powerup. But today, it doesn't feel like you "get" anything when you invest time. You get to see... a new character outfit in this beat-em-up game, or a new cutscene if you assembled enough thingamajigs in that RPG.

The carrot is getting too small for me.

This aside, many studios start releasing the same ol' game over and over and over again. New (better?) graphics, a few new toys, maybe one or two new kinks and presto, it's Unreal2006. Or Command&Conquer Generals. Stripping the fluff, it's the same game as the predecessor. And don't make me start ranting about the EA sports line. Did ANYTHING change between NHL2004 and 2005?

So the games industry faces the same problem the MI is facing. Your offer became very, very bland, incredible uniform and indifferent, and generally not really interesting anymore. 10 companies competing by making essentially the same games, each with a little flavor and a bit of spice added, but it's FPS or RTS, RTS or FPS.

Re:Nah. Crappy games and HW requirements

[Achoi77]

Haven't they been saying that piracy's been killing the PC gaming industry for like the past decade? I used to pirate games during the 90's as a poor student, but now I have an income so I purchase everything. I think back to all the games that I've pirated back in the day - and I remember a lot of games generally being terrible.

Perhaps sales are slow because the market has started to reach critical mass - too many games! And way too many of them are crappy.

Do not confuse leeches for pirates

[aadvancedGIR]

ID more or less created the FPS genre 15 years ago and it was good for their business. Now everyone, including ID, is doing crappy FPS because that is what is supposed to sell.
Try to innovate from time to time, maybe you'll fail (for major studio, it should not be that a big deal) but it the long run, it's the only way out of slow decay.

Re:Nope.

[SatanicPuppy]

I don't know, I'm a pretty serious game buyer, and I've been affliced with a serious case of "meh" when looking at the new release section. There is certainly nothing out there right now that I feel like throwing money at.

The industry is always quick to yell "Piracy!" whenever something doesn't sell as well as their market research suggests it ought to be selling, but they haven't really gotten it with games yet. They think like the MPAA..."This game is like that game, and that game sold x million copies so if this one isn't selling x million copies...PIRATES!" People are much less likely to impulse buy a crappy game as opposed to a crappy movie. You've got to give your market a good product. A lot of people have mentioned Galactic Civ II. Excellent game, no copy protection, excellent sales. If piracy was that much of a scourge, you'd be seeing the worst effects of it on games like that, and yet they don't seem to be there.

Where would we be without piracy?

[Thanatos69]

I just don't get it why everyone has to blame piracy. They aren't really losing money as most people who pirate games just won't buy them anyways. I'm not going to go out and spend $60 on yet another Spiderman game. I will however, download it and try it out, if it's good I will buy it, if not, I'm not wasting money. I wouldn't have bought the game to begin with. When Starcraft came out, I had a pirated copy, played it for a bit then bought it. Someone else had a pirated copy, didn't like it, didn't buy it. That same person wouldn't have bought it to begin with. Same as movies, I'm not going to pay $50 (two people, popcorn, softdrinks...) to go see some crap movie, ie. Jersey Girl. It's not that I started out this way of downloading everything under the sun to try it out first, they caused it by releasing crap game after crap game.

Re:Nah. Crappy games and HW requirements

[ArmyOfFun]

For me personally, the barrier has always been HW requirements. I was a heavy PC gamer from the mid 90s to the early oughts. I really like the keyboard+mouse combo for gaming, and the mod communities are fantastic. It simply became too expensive to keep upgrading my machine every 2 years just to be able to play games.

With consoles, you have an upfront cost of $200-400 and then you're set for the remaining lifetime of the console which could be around 5 years. With an investment of $200-400 in PC parts, you'll be to play the latest games for another year, 2 max, before you have to invest more money.

PC game developers really limit their available market when they target the latest hardware and don't bother trying to scale things to older machines. It's pretty rare to see a high quality title that can run well on a 2-3 year old machine, let alone the majority of PCs out there. This is one reason why casual games are in much better shape, as they can run on 10 year old machines just fine.

Re:Nope.

[monopole]

If they made games no-one wanted, why are they being pirated?
Cost/benefits ratio. People are willing to watch a marginal movie on cable or from bittorrent for "free" (already paid for the movie channel) but wouldn't bother to see the same movie in the cinema or buy the dvd because it isn't worth that much. In the same fashion, a game that costs $50 isn't worth the cost or effort of buying it, while a "free" version of the same game might be worth a look.
Of course, a sufficently good product will shift the balance. While I first saw a black market version of Howl's Moving Castle (complete with people getting up in front of the screen etc.) before the American release, I also ran out to the cinema (El Capitan in Hollywood) to see it and own two kosher copies(region 1 & 2). Why? Because it's an excellent film that deserves the best quality of reproduction and I feel allegance to Studio Ghibli because they produce the best product possible. Same thing with Appleseed.
On the other hand, while I saw Revenge of the Sith in the cinema, had I seen the pirate edition with the timecode counter and the rest, I'd have certianly avoided bothering with any other viewings.
In the same manner, I always buy CDs and rip them myself to ensure proper encoding, and to allow for future re-rips as formats change.

It's crappy games.

[Rotten168]

How many 3d FPS games do we need? All games seem to be the same now, they are all 3d, more effort is put into smoothing out textures than actual gameplay. I haven't played a worthwhile game since Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (a game I still play).

So ID releases the same old boring game time and time again with prettier eye candy and complains about piracy? Doom was like the most pirated game of all time and they did just fine off of it. This is like the music industry blaming piracy for poor sales when it's the fact that, maybe, music just sucks now?

We need somebody to do something different. EA killed the games industry, all games are now idiotic, all graphics and no gameplay, they appeal to our worst nature and they are all clones.

as a long time gamer...

[scronline]

Keep in mind that I will never own an Xbox, and doubtful that I will buy a PS3. I don't mind consoles, but they don't give you the same type of gaming you get from a PC. Consoles are good for certain types of games, but without mouse and keyboard you're entirely too limited by my own personal opinion. However, my opinion on the PC gaming industry issue is this.

Hardware: Yes. That's definitely an issue, but at the same time people are getting too picky about what it looks like while playing. I usually go on a 2-3 year upgrade cycle. I buy a new vid card every 2 years, and upgrade CPU every 3. Never really have too much of a problem but before I upgrade the video I'm down to 800x600 resolution.

Titles: There are a huge amount of titles out there for a gamer to choose from and our economy still isn't the greatest. There's a finite amount of money to buy games. Which also causes part of the next one....

Poor Games: Many games don't have the "attraction" they should. They don't seem creative or keep you drawn into it. Doom 3 anyone? I installed it, even used the duct tape mod. I just couldn't enjoy the game. Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge Id fan, but Doom 3 was pretty, but WAAAAAAAAAY too dark. It didn't scare me, just annoyed me. However, I really am waiting for Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. That's going to be awesome!

Poor Value: Many games are getting rather poor for game play. Very few games are played single player for longer than a week. It's hard to justify spending $60 for a game that will only give you a week's entertainment. This leaves multiplayer to cover the remainder of the cost.

Horrid Protection: More and more games are causing system problems. I don't mean to get into the StarForce debate, but every single game I've bought with SF protection has given me serious stability problems on 3 different machines. I currently have 8 games that I paid $39.95 or more for sitting on my shelf that can't be played for several reasons. SF is the biggest cause of that, but there are 2 that "don't like being played in any kind of drive that can write CDs".

Poor Quality: Aside from the above problems many games are seriously rushed to market. Tribes 2 is an excellent example. It took months before I was able to play that game without it locking up my system. By that time I completely lost interest. Of course it didn't help that every server could be configured differently and every player felt the need to use the in game voice crap constantly without any way to mute them. Similar problem with Diablo 2. $70 for it on the release day, I played it for 2 hours after spending 4 hours making it run on my system. It's never been installed again.

Business Model: I won't bash Vivendi even though they need it, it's probably all been said already. But games like BF2, that's just rediculous. I wanted to run a server for it but unless I handed a huge amount of additional $ to them, I couldn't. So even though I kind of liked the demo and wanted to try out the full thing, I didn't buy it since I couldn't maintain my own server(s) for it.

Over all, after more than 15 years of gaming, I get a bad vibe from the industry as a whole. I understand their need to protect their property so I do understand copy protection. But that doesn't mean it needs to damage a system and it needs to take into consideration that systems have burners in them...period. There are other reasons the industry is having a problem. Not because of piracy, if anything that helps the strong games because the gamer decides they like it and buys it. More often than not it is because of poor business decisions. Rushing to market, bad copy protection, stifling creativity.

Oh, and Steam....SUCKS! Valve, you've really gotta learn how to manage your software better. Every patch breaks something else. Your software acts....odd at times. Oh, and while you're saving money by doing everything from the 'net instead of pressing CDs, I'd rather have the disk in my hand. Plus, I don't like having things preloaded on my system. Particularly when I own the CD already and "uninstalled" the preload twice before. If I wanted HL/CS installed on my system, I would put in the CD, I don't need Steam to do it for me.

Re:Nah. Crappy games and HW requirements

[tukkayoot]

Yep. :\ Upgrading your PC to keep pace alone will cost you more than many people are willing to spend on games. $250 for a decent graphics card, $200 more for a processor, $100 more for a perhaps necessary motherboard upgrade, and you're already near to the much maligned $600 PS3 price point. For many, after spending that much money on a PC, the temptation to just grab the games (many of them mediocre and not worth $50 anyway) for free is just too great.

Heck, many of the games I've played recently, even those that have received generally favorable reviews aren't worth the download and hard drive space, let alone the retail price they are supposed to be selling at.

Make a good game, make it available

[crossmr]

As always, there is that misconception that every download is a lost sale, or that by someone downloading something they've taken something from you. Downloading costs them nothing, the bandwidth is provided by those other people, the game is released by someone not on your payroll (possibly, unless there is a new marketting plan to create buzz about little known games by getting them out on the p2p networks). So whats being taken? A copy.

Allegedly they're taking your business, but the p2p users certainly aren't making a buck on it. There is a difference between someone using P2P and someone burning copies and selling them for profit.

There's never been any concrete evidence given to show that this is indeed harming the business. Why these articles are even given the time of day boggles my mind.

Here is a hint:
1) Make a game people want and they will enjoy.
2) Make it available.

I spent years trying to get Silent Storm. While the original was available in Canada, the expansion never was. So I downloaded it. Played it several times. Even years later, I went to ebgames multiple times to request it. Seems the company finally got an NA publisher (for the gold edition containing original and expansion), but ebgames never bothered to bring it to Canada. They sold it in the US only. I asked them several times to find out why, they never got back to me. Finally after almost a year, I had to buy it from some guy on ebay.

If there are good games out there that people want to support, they'll go to great lengths to do it.

Produce crap and they won't.

You offer no rebate policy on the shit your shovel out the door, and don't support your customers when there are problems with it.

Awesome business model. When it fails, blame the pirates.

Same Old Song and Dance

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember back in the Commodore 64/128 days, companies were screaming they were losing money and had to make up for it by charging high prices for their games. Along came Nintendo and others, who decided to put the program on a chip, instead. Prices continued to soar even though it was near impossible to pirate the hardware chips containing the code. Since then, I've taken the whole "high prices due to piracy" talk as complete BS.

Piracy isn't killing PC gaming

[bberens]

PC gaming is killing PC gaming. The entire gaming industry hasn't come up with anything new since Wolfenstein 3d. How many times can I run through a dark hallway and blast an alien/terrorist? Dreamcast had some interesting ideas with their fishing pole controller thing. I hope that Wii can take some of the mistakes of the past generations and turn them into something truly revolutionary in gaming because looking at their MS and Sony brethren is depressing. There's a saying about money and employees. Money won't make people stay, but without the money nothing else matters. The same can be said to a certain extent about graphics. Without decent graphics people won't buy your game. At the same time, it won't make players stay. What makes players stay is game depth, interesting story line, gameplay, etc.

Re:Nah. Crappy games and HW requirements

[plantman-the-womb-st]

I think you and I read the post a tad different. I think he was saying that the game industry failing is because the games are crappy and no one is buying them. Frankly, that's why I don't buy games anymore. The games suck. I don't pirate them or play them either. Because they suck.

I think that's what he was getting at, I know it's true for me. If these companys made games that were more interesting and had things like plots instead of just being "here's a gun/sword/magic shoot stuff till everything is dead" then maybe the sales would go back up.

Exactly What you said -

[gadlaw]

I would buy a game when I knew I could find a no-cd crack for it. It just annoys the hell out of me that I can buy and load other programs up on my computer but this 50 dollar game is so important that it needs me to feed it the install disk every time I want to play it. I've read here about the evil thing called 'Steam' and I've not put anything on my computer that has that. I'm thinking all new games have this crap or a variation of this crap and so I don't even look at PC games anymore. If PC game sales are down it's because of this sort of thing. You developers make it hard for me to enjoy and play a game by wanting to infiltrate my computer with your software protection stuff and phone home features and you know, I don't need it. Wake me up when they start advertising games without the copy protection and which allow me to actually load them up without having to keep track of the install disk. Im not holding my breath on that one though.

Piracy not the problem, DRM and Intel Graphics are

[Carlyle]

Since I was a kid with a Commodore 64, there has always been prevalent pirating (I used to copy commodore 64 games as a kid, cause my allowance didn't allow me to buy them). The piracy rate has been consistent over the years. The gaming industry thrived despite the piracy. What has changed, at least for me, is the use of invasive DRM. I always try to find out what kind of DRM is used on the games I buy, and it has become a major part of my buying decision. I buy all the games I own, I do not pirate them. Therefore, I hate being treated as a thief. I hate having my machine compromised by the malware they call DRM, like the starforce drivers. I hate having to use activation codes to use my game. I hate having my CD/DVD drive burn out, because the game keeps it constantly spinning to ensure I have the disk in the machine. If I'm done with a game, I want to be able to transfer the rights to the game to a friend or a used game store, just like a book. I don't want to have it tied to me forever. I love PC Gaming, but I hate the road blocks that the industry has put in the way of me enjoying a game. I think part of the reason Console gaming has become more popular is that you put the game in the machine and it works, you don't have to enter codes to get it to work, or any of that other crap. DRM does not stop pirates; it just inconveniences, and infuriates legitimate users. The other problem with PC gaming is the majority of people out in the world are not PC enthusiasts, like slashdot's readers. When they buy a PC they look at the implied speed of the processor, and that's it. They'll buy a dual core processor machine, but not realize that it contains an Intel graphics chipset (used by 40 percent of the market). When they then buy a game for their new PC, they are disappointed by poor graphics, poor performance, and a poor experience. When these same people buy a game console, they get a gauranteed gaming experience, that you can't get with a PC. Perhaps the ATI/AMD merger will improve this situation. Combine Intel Graphics with DRM, and it's no wonder PC Gaming is declining. People who can afford games, but choose to pirate them will not change their stripes. The game industry is so focused on turning these people into paying customers, that they are alienating their legitimate paying customers. That's my rant for the day. Cheers.

Time

[mangu]

when you pirate a game even if you "wouldn't have spent your money on it in the first place" you are spending your time on it. This possibly takes time away from the time you might use to play other games you might actually be willing to spend your money on

The same can be said about gardening, reading, going to the church, playing golf, etc. All these activities make you spend time that you could be spending on games. You could say that if there didn't exist so many gardens, churches, libraries, and golf courses people would be more likely to spend money buying computer games.

Try Getting Best Buy To Stock 2m Units of Freeware

[patio11]

There is one simple reason they do this: Blizzard *needs* retail shelf presence to achieve Robot Jesus mindshare among gamers, because shockingly enough there are people who would balk at downloading a teensy itsy witsy 5GB demo. Retail wants 40% of a nice fat number to keep your product stocked on shelves next to other games which are giving them 40% of a nice fat number, and to pay for advertising which gets suburban housewives (who don't know Onyxia from Nelly but who still probably purchased about a million copies of WoW) to the store.

Re:Odd thing about WoW

[Salden]

At one point, you were able to download and play wow for free for 10 days before ever buying anything. I suppose since this is not available anymore that Blizzard feels it wasn't working. There also might be a sense of "If I bought the game for $45 then I'd better enjoy playing it for a few months." Whereby people actually wish to support the investment they made. If you do a 10 day trial and aren't hooked, they've lost you forever.

Re:Another problem: PC platform compatibility

[LazyBoy]

I have a CD case full of Windows games from 1998-2002 and a CD case full of Linux (Loki, mostly) games from years gone ... the total number that actually operate today is probably 15.

Compatibility over time is is not a problem for the industry. It is your problem. It may even be a benefit for the industry, as you will go on to consume more products.

An exception might be the online games with a monthly income model. But I haven't seen one of them fail yet because the OS or graphics technology left them behind.

Dead on.

[shmlco]

Dead on, in fact the following quote bears this out:

"Destineer President Peter Tamte ... said that when his company shipped its squad-based first-person shooter First to Fight last year, it found within a few weeks that more people were trying to log on to multiplayer servers with a single banned serial number than the total number of copies Destineer had sold combined."

Reread that sentence: more people tried to play the game with a single hacked serial number than paid for it in the first place.

Re:Another problem: PC platform compatibility

[aussersterne]

It's a problem for the industry if it kills the industry because it leads to a decrease in sales.

Don't copy that floppy!

[beoswulf]

Most of us have seen this old anti-piracy ad campaign from the early 90s.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afuc8TmU2Rg

We heard this line about piracy killing the entertainment industry for 2 decades. What has changed?

Production costs of new games keep rising while in my opinion, the fun factor is dropping. I rarely pirate games because so few of them are worth playing. I don't see how the industry has an edge in the console market, my friends that own consoles rarely buy new games, they do buy their games used or trade them. Lots of them use modchips too, but the vast majority of them rent. Why can't we rent computer games?
I wish I could rent computers games for a fair price and without all the copyright protection hastle of past rental schemes.

Just my two sense but easier, quicker and cheaper development is what's needed to breathe new life (and sales) into the gaming industry. Right now there are too many industry bottlenecks for creative designers to get their games produced. Instead all we get are cookie cutter clones of whatever game is popular at the moment.

Piracy is killing the PC?? Pull the other one.

[Cythrawl]

The whole Piracy is killing the PC debate is dead as far as I am concerned. As well as the whole "we are going to move to consoles becuase they dont suffer from piracy" excuse too.

Just a quick look (google) and I found ALL the latest Xbox 360 games available (Prey, Battle for Middle Earth II, Tomb Raider, Burnout,... need I go on) via ISO format. So going to THAT console isnt going to fix the Piracy issue.

Oh look its the same for the PS2 (Ant Bully, Sensi Soccer, etc etc etc) again all available in ISO format. So THAT console is out...

Hell theres pirate games available (all latest releases) for the PSP, PS1, Xbox, Dreamcast, Gameboy Advance. All available on all major P2P networks all around the world.
So what point is he trying to make exactly??? No matter WHAT platform you develop on someone is going to pirate it, period.

I remember discussing this very issue with Peter Moylenuex and Les Edgar when we was trying to get a game published by Bullfrog (They were actually trying to get into the publishing game until EA bought them out... little known fact). Peter said that the Amiga was being killed by Piracy and that the consoles would take over. The sad fact is that the Amiga didnt die from piracy, but from lack of innovation from commodores part and was trounced upon by the fast developing PC hardware.

The same can be said for the PC games market.. its the lack of innovation thats going to kill it rather than piracy that exists on ALL formats ALL the time.

Anti-Piracy measures are part of the problem.

[bareman]

Some of the things that paying customers have to go through in order to use software they've paid for may drive them to piracy. It's unbelievably annoying to be punished for being a legitimate user of software.