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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.
Man, I read this on BitTorrent like, two weeks ago.
Rock is dead. Long live scissors and paper!
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.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
I don't actually give a dman about piracy. People were copying games when they came on tape, and they're still doing it.
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.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
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.
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.
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