Slashdot Mirror
Players Furious Over Buggy GTA IV PC Release
Jupix writes "It took Rockstar most of a year to port Grand Theft Auto IV to the PC, and while they claim this was because they wanted polish and quality with their PC release, it appears the result has been less than satisfactory. Players all over the internet are furious over numerous bugs in the release, ranging from nonfunctional internet registration and graphics glitches to completely inoperative installations. One of the game's largest retailers, Steam, has reportedly gone so far as to start handing out refunds to hordes of unsatisfied (and no doubt uncomfortably noisy) customers."
As a modern geek, you should realise that CPU architecture doesn't matter a lot when coding in modern languages.
It's the DRM. Many of the crashing problems seem to be Securom crashing, which causes the game client to exit to desktop imediately. It also needs you to upgrade to the latest Games For Windows release, which doesn't support Vista64 at the moment. So that's all the hardcore gamers with 4GB+ of ram out of the picture.
Only cost them $200k to inconvenience players to such a high degree.... I hope everyone who's having problems returns it to the store. High levels of returns make the distributer very uneasy, which in turn should send a message to the publisher.
I only buy pepper spray that's been tested on anti-vivisectionists.
Seriously, so many developers and publishers have been complaining about the huge rate of PC title piracy (e.g. http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=20567 or http://www.videogamer.com/news/18-10-2008-9693.html) and how much more they love their locked-down consoles. Isn't this move the smartest thing Rockstar could have done?
I mean If I made 400$m with my latest game on the consoles alone and I feared I wouldn't sell as many PC copies as I could have I just make the PC version the shittiest experience you can have. Horrendously high hardware requirements, terrible online components, cluttered with spy/mal/adware. That will turn off as many PC customers as possible and make it less attractive for pirates.
I bet the console sales figures of GTA IV will go up again now that many PC gamers have realized that they'd rather buy this for their console than deal with all the crap. Watch for the spike!