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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."
I thought we already decided that WoW is killing the entire game industry...not saving it.
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.
Man, I read this on BitTorrent like, two weeks ago.
Rock is dead. Long live scissors and paper!
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.
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.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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.
Glog!
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.
"Most people who pirate PC games also pirate console games"
I find this hard to believe. It's an order of magnitude more difficult to install a mod chip, hook up your console to a PC, flash the BIOS and copy ROMS images than it is to google for a serial number crack for a PC game.
I would venture that PC game copyright violation (I don't like "piracy") occurs 100 times more often than console game copyright violation; especially if we're only looking at current generation games.
Crappy games is killing sales.
Let's see the latest blockbuster from ID...
Quake4 - Boring.
Half-Life 2 - DRM so restrictive that most people did not bother buying it.
SIMS2 - selling poorly compared to the outdates Sims and the 65,000 expansions packs that sold at the same price.
How about that games suck right now? the few DS games I like are very different from what I can get for the PC.
Piracy is NOT hurting the Gaming industry. Their lack of ability to make a game that people want is.
Granted, I am waiting with baited breath for UT2007 in hopes they add more gameplay fun instead of the stupid graphics and shiney crap that do not make a game more fun to play.
Most lan parties we end up playing ut2004 with one of the myriad of mods for it that make it a major hoot to play. Carball is a blast with 16 people.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
What are you talking about? Console copyright violation is more than just dumping roms... There's modchipping and loading burned games, downloading roms and playing them on emulators, and furthermore, it's just as easy if not easier to jump to your favorite rom repository and grab Chrono Trigger as it is to search whatever "serialz" site you frequent for a working Quake3 key.
+5, Truth
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.
> Not if you're wearing >250 in fire resist.
> School that girl of yours with crappy games,
> this is important information!
Tell ya what. Put on the best body armor you can find, and I'll stand there with a gatling gun like from Superman Returns. We'll see if ya do just as well.
While you're at it, let's see how you do vs. a real flamethrower, too. Somebody forgot to flip the "easy" switch on reality, my friend. And not many people are leaving for other games, I would like to point out...
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
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.
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 don't actually give a dman about piracy. People were copying games when they came on tape, and they're still doing it.
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.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Perhaps sales are slow because the market has started to reach critical mass - too many games! And way too many of them are crappy.
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.
Actually I would like to subscribe to HW requirements part. Hardware requirements have gone 10years retro during the last year. For the most part of the last 10 years all games could run on all PCs and the only thing differing was the speed and sometimes graphical details for 3D games. But in the last year games have started to use DirectX 9 exclusively demanding graphic cards with atleast shader level 2 and often 3. This mean any machine more than a year old can no longer play new PC games!
Last but not least even when they "support" the older cards, they don't test against it and it leads to thousands of crashes.
Of the three games I've tried recently none worked out of the box in a Geforce4 4200Ti
Civilization 4: Should have worked according to requirements, but didn't until a patch 3 months after release
Galatic Civilization: Should work, but still crashes now half a year after release
Oblivion: Shouldn't work as the card is way below minimum requirement, but with the oldblivion patch, this game is the only of the 3 working perfectly!!
Yeah, I think that nails it. Our lan gaming group died not because of pirating, but because there wasn't anything that everyone wanted to play and that half the people that showed up only wanted to play WOW.
I haven't bought any new games in a while for several reasons. I'm a tightwad and can't justify upgrading my PC. Battlefield 2 runs fine on my rig (though the amount of cheating is getting like counterstrike was years ago). I own tons of legal games I haven't finished yet. Son has tons of XBox games (most for $10 to $20). Spending more time farting around in linux. Spending more time on my bicycle.
In a nutshell, I think PC gaming is frozen in it's current state for me. If I ever feel the need to do more modern gaming, it will probably be on a console.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
... surely an increase in piracy will help reverse global warming?
Jolyon
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
So, the rationale for pirating games is "they're crummy anyway"?
No, the rationale for terrible sales is that they're crummy anyway.
Isn't that like stealing a car off a dealer's lot, and then saying "Why's everyone so upset? It was a lemon anyway...."?
No. It's more like borrowing your friend's car to drive around the block in, and then saying "Why's the car dealership so upset?"
Getting something for free is often great. But piracy does not provide free games. It comes with a package: ...)
-> risks (trojan, virus, police)
-> restrictions (game updates, on line play)
-> effort (find the game, download it, crack it,
Therefore, I would say that piracy is the result of something in games that users don't like.
Let's make a list:
1) game quality: would you trust EA to make good games? no. Can you trust a studio to make a good game? no. The "seal of quality" does not exist in he PC world. Everybody makes crap. The mob does not read the reviews, or the reviews cannot be trused, which does not help. (lack of confidence)
2) how will it run? often, you don't know how a particular game will run on your PC. Sure, with the latest nvidia and athlon 64, it runs and look great. but... (lack of information)
3) Reviews: you always can find someone which didn't like a particular game. You don't trust one source, you compile many of them. And if someone says it's crap, maybe it's best to get for free, or not to get it? (too much information)
4) It's a sequel. It looks sooo much like the first one. (user bored)
5) It will be half the price in no time (user forget)
6) It's too long, too short, there's no enough support, let's wait for a patch, will there be any mods? (too many expectations)
The list could go like that. I believe that players have high expectations, and that it's difficult to sell them the "average" game. But it's not exacly their fault: developpers and magazines does encourage this behavior.
For example "HL2 episode 1 is very short". This was in the column "cons" of the magazine I read. But my habits as a player is that I want short games, because don't have much time.
I believe that games on PC today wants to address the same market as 10 years ago. While those people have aged. The PC games market is probably very segmented. If the market of PC gamers all in all is 50 mio people, the target audience for a high end FPS is maybe 5 mio people only. If we are able to extract these figures, then we will probably realize that games are selling OK, because they address a pretty small user base.
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.
The odd thing about WOW is they still charge for the software. I was discussing this with a friend. WOW software should be free with a free 2 week trial period. This really came about because I was trying to convince him to try WOW on a Mac, and he thought it was just too expensive to buy to try on his mac. Once you have a WOW subscription you should be able to get the software for free or near free for all supported platforms.
Think Deeply.
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.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
[Taken from todays gamespot PC game rankings]
1 Warcraft III : The Frozen Throne
2 The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
3 The Sims 2
4 World of Warcraft
5 Dungeon Siege II: Broken World
6 Age of Empires III
7 Titan Quest (Shameless Diablo clone)
8 Prey (Generic FPS Game #2412)
9 Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (GTA3 part 3)
10 Counter-Strike: Source
World of Warcraft is the only 'new' game on there and that is still somewhat debateable.
Id is more responsible than anyone for the situation that they are in. They are poster children for boring clones that whose feature set is 90% new features on video cards instead of gameplay.
Don't forget the increasingly obvious general unfitness of the PC for long-term gaming.
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 by as well. Probably these total 200 games. Despite the fact that I have a modern PC and the ability to multi-boot into Windows 2000, Windows 98, and Fedora Core, the total number that actually operate today is probably 15.
Many have copy protection that (apparently) runs afoul of my Thinkpad's DVD and/or CD-RW drive. They either won't install or won't run, prompting me to insert the "original" disks. Firmware upgrades to the drives haven't solved the issue.
Others aren't happy with my sound or graphics hardware, including some using big name game engines like the id (i.e. Quake) engines. They might run for two or three minutes and dump me back to the desktop, or textures come up unrecognizable (and unplayable), or sound doesn't work and is necessary to play.
Still others have expiry dates (no kidding!) About five of my games pop up messages about the license having expired and asking me to get a new CD key by calling the manufacturer. Naturally, all of them are long gone and/or not supporting the game. Am I really expected to set my date back every time I want to play?
Some were written for alternative graphics systems (i.e. glide) and while they had some DirectDraw/X compatibility back then, they don't seem to be happy with and/or find today's versions.
Some also don't seem to like modern display hardware, even when I boot into Windows 98. They complain about incorrect numbers of colors (no matter whether I set to 8-bit, 16-bit, or 24-bit depth) or about incorrect desktop resolution (no matter whether I set to 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, or 1280x1024).
The Loki games for Linux continue to hobble along by and large better than the Windows games, but installing them is more and more difficult (alternate library folders, editing launch scripts, game updates that no longer run without applying them by hand on the command line, or no longer run at all) and they tend to crash a lot. I can't dual boot to an older Linux OS because many of the drivers required for my current hardware haven't been backported to the 2.4 kernel and 2.6 won't compile with the gcc/glibc versions in question, and I'm not willing to try to hack together/roll my own obsolete distro just to get a few games to work really well.
In short, I have buckets full of games that I spent good money on once upon a time, some of which I'd love to play now and then--but they simply don't work anymore. The only way to get them to work appears to be to maintain a separate system frozen in time--a period PC running a period operating system in addition to the PC I actually use to get things done.
I'm not proposing a solution of any kind to this state of affairs, I'm just posing the following rhetorical question: if I *have* to maintain an entire separate gaming system to play the games I buy, why not just buy a console and completely avoid the compatibility headaches, additional power and space requirements, extra cost, and so on? This provides the added benefit of being more survivable, i.e. you can still pick up a working PSOne, Sega Genesis or NEC TurboGrafx on eBay for not that much money. Good luck having such an easy time assembling a working ca. 1992 PC for a game that will only work with EGA, Pro Audio Spectrum 16 sound, and a 1.2MB floppy drive, much less finding the drivers to make all of the obsolete hardware work again.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
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.
Say bad words about my book, in cold oatmeal, or I shall sue!
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.
I'm the odd man out in an even number of participants
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.
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.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Dead on, in fact the following quote bears this out:
... 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."
"Destineer President Peter Tamte
Reread that sentence: more people tried to play the game with a single hacked serial number than paid for it in the first place.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
I've found I rarely buy video games at all anymore, aside from making sure I'm equipped for a multiplayer DS rumble. But I do still pay for games. WoW, like the article mentioned, gets my money directly.
But then there's GameFly. I tend to only play console games nowadays, because I can rent what I want, play them, and send them back for the next in line. As so many others have pointed out, so many new games these days are just incremental improvements over what came out the year before. In that light, there's not much incentive to keep the game, because if you get a hankering to play it, well, just grab the sequel or the knock-off and at least get some marginally different levels and eye candy out of it.
Back in the day, I used to pirate every game I played, console games included. The publishers got exactly $0 from me. Then I came to my senses, and started actually paying these folks for their time and effort. That got expensive, and I got burned a few times (though you do make a much more concerted effort to like and/or beat a game you paid real money for). Every couple of months, I would clean out the game rack and trade in the stuff I was never going to play again (which, let's be honest, was most of it) for credit to buy new games. This didn't make much sense, but if you weren't into this year's sports and racing lineup, you weren't going to find what you wanted at Blockbuster. If you did find an RPG, you had to power-play that sucker or it'd be cheaper to buy it.
Then along came GameFly, and much like NetFlix, they offer not only convenience and unlimited rental periods, but a library more extensive than your local Game Stop (especially if you want something that's been out a while). So now they get my money every month, and some of that money gets paid to the publishers. They don't make as much off of me as a sale, but it's certainly more than the $0 they got from me in my days as an IRC-faring scallawag.
But guess what? The PC publishers aren't getting their cut. I can't rent their games. If piracy's such a loss to them already, why not just rent your games out? If people want to just try out your game, it's a heck of a lot faster and easier to put it on your GameFly list than spend a week or two pulling it off BitTorrent. And you get paid for it.
Sure you'll get the same type of tools who rent everything Netflix has to offer and rips them to DVD-R, but like I said, you'll probably make out better in the long run. And I refuse to belive it's impossible to create some sort of solution to discourage that behavior. Nothing as odius as StarForce--after all, you don't need to make it impossible to copy (and it's not like StarForce does that anyway), just sufficently more difficult than renting. When the rental is essentially free through an online service, there's not nearly as much incentive to hack around.
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.
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.
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.