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?

[sumdumass]

It would probably be marketing suicide to admit that a competing product is making your sales slump. Instead, blame something else and create a situation were you can embrace the competitors stratigy in hopes of retrieving/reviving some lost market share.

I dunno, I have pirated some games in the past. I never would have bought them in the first place though. It isn't as if they would have recieved money from the sale on my acount so i cannot be contributing to the loss thier talkking about in the article. (maybe so on a different level though).
Maybe most pirates are like me and the reasons they aren't selling games as they would like to is because of the ever increasing system requirment or maybe the win2000/XP only development approach. Maybe it is all the activation and anti pirating stuff they through on the CD making it dificult to even play in the first place. Maybe treating regular honest users like criminals gave them the idea that they could become one and get buy with it. Kind of like a "sticking it to the man" attitude.

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?

[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.

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.

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

That would totally suck. Where's the hack to disable that?

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.

Old news.

[mhazen]

Man, I read this on BitTorrent like, two weeks ago.

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.

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.

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.

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.

On the positive side...

[jolyonr]

... surely an increase in piracy will help reverse global warming?

Jolyon

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.

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.

Odd thing about WoW

[olddotter]

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.

Another problem: PC platform compatibility

[aussersterne]

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.

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.

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.