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The State of Piracy and DRM In PC Gaming
VideoGamer sat down with Randy Stude, president of the PC Gaming Alliance, to talk about the state of piracy and DRM in today's gaming industry. He suggests that many game studios have themselves to blame for leaks and pre-launch piracy by not integrating their protection measures earlier in the development process. He mentions that some companies, such as Blizzard and Valve, have worked out anti-piracy schemes that generate much less of a backlash than occurred for Spore . Stude also has harsh words for companies who decline to create PC versions of their games, LucasArts in particular, saying, "LucasArts hasn't made a good PC game in a long time. That's my opinion. ... It's ridiculous to say that there's not enough audience for that game ... and that it falls into this enthusiast extreme category when ported over to the PC. That's an uneducated response." Finally, Stude discusses what the PCGA would like to see out of Vista and the next version of Windows.
Okay, to back up the original post, I used to contract for Epicgames on the Unreal series. When developing for the main PC market, we were constantly rolling our specs and expectations forward and backwards, gain some here, lose some there, roll up with this new tech etc. When porting to consoles everything was set in lovely stone. This is the amount of memory you have, this is how much transfer you have. It is amazingly much easier to do development work when you have limits like "Your textures for this level/environment cannot be more than xxx megs total" or "your level has to be under xxx megs in file size to load properly". This is black and white. You know the performance you will get, you won't see a shift here or there. On the other hand, working with the PC development, it's not black and white, it's all a shifting gradient.
Let me use a slashdot friendly car analogy.
Working with a console is like buying a little hatchback and keeping it factory standard. You know how fast it goes, you know how much you can pop into the back before it gets too much. Working with PC's is like going to a custom car show. Each one is different, you don't know how fast they go and you don't even know if there is space beside the subs in the back to fit any luggage.
Which one can potentially be better is a no brainer, but which one is easier to plan around is just as plain.
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The democratic nature of FOSS is its main weakness, and in the context of games, makes FOSS nearly impossible to pull off.
Unlike most FOSS projects I've seen, which is basically a core developed by a handful of developers, consistently added on and improved by additions and fixes from the community at large. This works great for enterprise software and web apps, where iterative development on top of ever-changing demands demands this sort of development - whatever features are most needed tend to make it into the next release, etc etc.
Games don't work like this. Games do not have evolving feature sets. They have a spec'ed scope, and the development team executes it, end of story. They also require vision and centralized leadership - something FOSS projects find very difficult, since the voluntary nature of the whole thing makes it such that "unsexy" features never get worked on. In a game, unsexy features that don't get coded = game that never ships.
Oh, and games require extensive amounts of art. I would argue that for most games, more artists are needed than coders, by at least a 2:1 margin. I don't see that many capable artists in the FOSS scene, do you?