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."

Re:Umm

[acvh]

"Most people who pirate PC games also pirate console games"

I find this hard to believe. It's an order of magnitude more difficult to install a mod chip, hook up your console to a PC, flash the BIOS and copy ROMS images than it is to google for a serial number crack for a PC game.

I would venture that PC game copyright violation (I don't like "piracy") occurs 100 times more often than console game copyright violation; especially if we're only looking at current generation games.

Re:Uh, no.

[weasello]

Prime example; Galactic Civilizations II. Made headlines for selling so damn many copies. It's a very good game and it doesn't even have copy protection.

They're expectations of sales was doubled within the first month.

Good products rise.

But I suppose the 'industry' isn't intereted in stories like this; the various retailers are more interested in Madden XCXCII or NHL 254,200 (with the latest player skins!).

Re:Umm

[utopianfiat]

What are you talking about? Console copyright violation is more than just dumping roms... There's modchipping and loading burned games, downloading roms and playing them on emulators, and furthermore, it's just as easy if not easier to jump to your favorite rom repository and grab Chrono Trigger as it is to search whatever "serialz" site you frequent for a working Quake3 key.

Re:Nah. Crappy games and HW requirements

[Carewolf]

Actually I would like to subscribe to HW requirements part. Hardware requirements have gone 10years retro during the last year. For the most part of the last 10 years all games could run on all PCs and the only thing differing was the speed and sometimes graphical details for 3D games. But in the last year games have started to use DirectX 9 exclusively demanding graphic cards with atleast shader level 2 and often 3. This mean any machine more than a year old can no longer play new PC games!

Last but not least even when they "support" the older cards, they don't test against it and it leads to thousands of crashes.

Of the three games I've tried recently none worked out of the box in a Geforce4 4200Ti
Civilization 4: Should have worked according to requirements, but didn't until a patch 3 months after release
Galatic Civilization: Should work, but still crashes now half a year after release
Oblivion: Shouldn't work as the card is way below minimum requirement, but with the oldblivion patch, this game is the only of the 3 working perfectly!!

Re:Uh, no.

[hackwrench]

No, not entirely. It's the PC gaming business that they say is suffering, not PC gaming. There are plenty of games that are free from the onset that are fun. http://tuxracer.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
http://www.frozen-bubble.org/ [frozen-bubble.org]
http://asteroids3d.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
http://sourceforge.net/projects/lynn [sourceforge.net]
http://toppler.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
http://blockattack.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
http://source.bungie.org/ [bungie.org]
http://www.secretmaryo.org/ [secretmaryo.org]
http://www.realtech-vr.com/nogravity/ [realtech-vr.com]
http://www.classicgaming.com/worminator/ [classicgaming.com]
http://www.nexuiz.com/ [nexuiz.com]
http://www.armagetronad.net/ [armagetronad.net]
http://www.meatfighter.com/ [meatfighter.com]
http://www.bzflag.org/ [bzflag.org]
http://wesnoth.org/ [wesnoth.org]
http://cubeengine.com/ [cubeengine.com]

Piracy is PROBABLY a secondary problem

[nbuet]

Getting something for free is often great. But piracy does not provide free games. It comes with a package:
-> risks (trojan, virus, police)
-> restrictions (game updates, on line play)
-> effort (find the game, download it, crack it, ...)
Therefore, I would say that piracy is the result of something in games that users don't like.

Let's make a list:
1) game quality: would you trust EA to make good games? no. Can you trust a studio to make a good game? no. The "seal of quality" does not exist in he PC world. Everybody makes crap. The mob does not read the reviews, or the reviews cannot be trused, which does not help. (lack of confidence)
2) how will it run? often, you don't know how a particular game will run on your PC. Sure, with the latest nvidia and athlon 64, it runs and look great. but... (lack of information)
3) Reviews: you always can find someone which didn't like a particular game. You don't trust one source, you compile many of them. And if someone says it's crap, maybe it's best to get for free, or not to get it? (too much information)
4) It's a sequel. It looks sooo much like the first one. (user bored)
5) It will be half the price in no time (user forget)
6) It's too long, too short, there's no enough support, let's wait for a patch, will there be any mods? (too many expectations)

The list could go like that. I believe that players have high expectations, and that it's difficult to sell them the "average" game. But it's not exacly their fault: developpers and magazines does encourage this behavior.
For example "HL2 episode 1 is very short". This was in the column "cons" of the magazine I read. But my habits as a player is that I want short games, because don't have much time.

I believe that games on PC today wants to address the same market as 10 years ago. While those people have aged. The PC games market is probably very segmented. If the market of PC gamers all in all is 50 mio people, the target audience for a high end FPS is maybe 5 mio people only. If we are able to extract these figures, then we will probably realize that games are selling OK, because they address a pretty small user base.

Re:Uhhhh.

[Oktober Sunset]

Well Steam may stop the CD, but he'll have to wait about an hour for it to unlock first. Also, I've played HL2 with steam and I've played the pirate version on my PC and the pirate version didn't stutter and it ran at a higher framerate and took less time loading, so yea, well done steam, way to fuck up HL2. Whats more I was robbed of playing on HL2 for 9 months because I moved into a room with no net connection and offline mode was broken (which it is quite often) when I moved. Also, I notice the pirate version of Farcry comes on 3 CDs instead of 5, and the best fix for GTA3's shitty slowdown was to install the No-Cd patch.

It's the same with DVDs too now, I got a pirate version of 28 days later, I put it in the drive and the movie plays straight away. I decided to be good and buy the genuine artice when it came out and when I put that in the drive I have to sit through a stupid notice telling me not to pirate the DVD and what a dirty criminal I am, and then I have to sit through fucking trailers, ON MY OWN FREAKING DVD! which I CAN'T SKIP! I wish I had stuck with the pirate version now, the fucking cheek of it, fucking weasels don't deserve my money, they can fucking go get it from thier advertising friends, they aren't getting any more from me, I swear to pirate every DVD produced by that distributor for the rest of my life.