Campaign Creations

This is sort of an interesting point to read about in the ongoing stupid PC vs. Console Online Debate (somewhere above Star Trek vs. Star Wars but still not as bad as the Microsoft vs. Apple vs. Linux one).  

Many PC game developers are blaming piracy as a reason for why they're either going out of business or moving on to the console market.  Since most of us here grew up in the PC Gaming Era just after Arcade/Ataris but before console gaming made it big, I figure it's an interesting debate as to why the market is bottoming out into ports of console games (It used to be the OTHER way around) and free-to-play MMOs.

Only Blizzard and a few other developers are staying loyal to the PC market and even that may not be a given for much longer.

The requirement to login to Battle.net to even play Singleplayer will help counter such things, I'm sure. Obviously people will be able to reroute it to hosted servers, but that'll be little to no competition compared to full pirating. People simply don't take the effort if it's not a cracked EXE to replace only. I know I don't.

80% piracy rate... if everyone moves to the consoles and closed platforms its going to get over saturated just look at the Iphone.

Well, just the relatively low cost of making a PC game will keep the PC market alive, but thriving is another question. I think we're approaching the point where online console multiplayer might finally be better than online PC multiplayer solely because of the money being pumped into it.

Yes, Xbox Live is worse than wading into an entire ocean of Youtube comments and the Sony multiplayer is mostly garbage, but if all we have for PC multiplayer is Hamachi, Gamespy, and Bnet, we're still screwed.  The only solution might be to make everything MMO-like to make piracy useless.

.. Game piracy has been at those levels since the beginning of PC gaming... 

These kind of articles tend to embellish the issue that they're losing sales through piracy, when a good percentage of pirates would never buy certain games even if they couldn't download them. If my pirated copy of Civilization IV suddenly imploded and I were forced into the dilemma of either buying it or not having it, I wouldn't miss it all that much.

Mucky wrote: These kind of articles tend to embellish the issue that they're losing sales through piracy, when a good percentage of pirates would never buy certain games even if they couldn't download them. If my pirated copy of Civilization IV suddenly imploded and I were forced into the dilemma of either buying it or not having it, I wouldn't miss it all that much.

See, I'm a bit different about this: I wouldn't play a game if I had to pirate it. I mean, seriously, what's the point? If you weren't going to buy it in the first place why do you want to play it so much?

Because I've bought too many games that ended up sucking.  If I play a game that I really enjoy by about the halfway point, I buy it.  Why should I rent it when I can just DL it?

I mean, I've bought every game I played over the past year, but tbh, I haven't played that many games.

Okami
Dragon Age
FF4DS
Chrono Trigger DS (I've bought this game before, but w/e, it's worth owning on DS)
Mario and  Luigi: Inside Bowser or w/e it's called

Do you also buy all of your music, RCX?

RazorclawX wrote: See, I'm a bit different about this: I wouldn't play a game if I had to pirate it. I mean, seriously, what's the point? If you weren't going to buy it in the first place why do you want to play it so much?

because internet downloads are fast and gamers only have a finite supply of money to spend on games & other things

It has been proven that a bulk of the people who pirate music never intended to buy in the first place and you can apply that to gaming too so you can't really claim 80% lost profits there but I do wonder how much of them pirate to demo, then buy later.  That'd be the same thing as that leaked Wolverine movie turning out to boost publicity and revenue.

I've also noticed that most of the people you catch playing pirated versions of games happen to be under 18.  You only get that very small hardcore fringe of older gamers who will go through every single possible annoying hoop to not pay for a game they love.

I would say that number is wrong, I want lots of hard data and complicated graphics and pie charts before I take what they say without a grain of salt. Good games always make good money. End of story.

Sensationalist bullshit.

Also, the only reason some developers are switching to consoles is because the console market is still stupid enough to buy the same old recycled garbage over and over again. I'm glad they're going. Epic showed that they forgot how to make something that was practically perfect - Unreal Tournament - and skipped out on features and functionality. In return, the game failed. It's their own fucking fault.

Negi wrote: Because I've bought too many games that ended up sucking.  If I play a game that I really enjoy by about the halfway point, I buy it.  Why should I rent it when I can just DL it?

You can rent PC games?

Whiplash! wrote: I would say that number is wrong, I want lots of hard data and complicated graphics and pie charts before I take what they say without a grain of salt. Good games always make good money. End of story.

Well, there's also a difference between a good PC game and a good console game.  A good PC game either has to have lots of content or the ability to be modded/have custom content made for it while a console game can be 48 hours of singleplayer content with a hookup to a mediocre multiplayer mode that will force people to buy additional DLCs which would be free for a PC port.

Maybe customers would be more apt to buy the game if:
a) they respect the developer
b) the game is worth the price, and the developer has a record of making games that are worth the price

Things like this used to be good business sense. It's why I buy Blizzard games legit, not because of any threat from the League of Lawyers or invasive DRM. The same principle applies to music.

Insulting the customer by making it harder to install the game legitimately than pirating it because of DRM, or by unleashing rabid hordes of lawyers on potential customers, only serves to erode respect for the developer. Then there's EA games... enough said.