Piracy Killing PC Gaming? 584
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."
Nope. (Score:2, Interesting)
Let's see the latest blockbuster from ID...
Quake4 - Boring.
Half-Life 2 - DRM so restrictive that most people did not bother buying it.
SIMS2 - selling poorly compared to the outdates Sims and the 65,000 expansions packs that sold at the same price.
How about that games suck right now? the few DS games I like are very different from what I can get for the PC.
Piracy is NOT hurting the Gaming industry. Their lack of ability to make a game that people want is.
Granted, I am waiting with baited breath for UT2007 in hopes they add more gameplay fun instead of the stupid graphics and shiney crap that do not make a game more fun to play.
Most lan parties we end up playing ut2004 with one of the myriad of mods for it that make it a major hoot to play. Carball is a blast with 16 people.
Re:WoW is the solution? (Score:5, Interesting)
I dunno, I have pirated some games in the past. I never would have bought them in the first place though. It isn't as if they would have recieved money from the sale on my acount so i cannot be contributing to the loss thier talkking about in the article. (maybe so on a different level though).
Maybe most pirates are like me and the reasons they aren't selling games as they would like to is because of the ever increasing system requirment or maybe the win2000/XP only development approach. Maybe it is all the activation and anti pirating stuff they through on the CD making it dificult to even play in the first place. Maybe treating regular honest users like criminals gave them the idea that they could become one and get buy with it. Kind of like a "sticking it to the man" attitude.
Re:Nah. Crappy games and HW requirements (Score:3, Interesting)
I haven't bought any new games in a while for several reasons. I'm a tightwad and can't justify upgrading my PC. Battlefield 2 runs fine on my rig (though the amount of cheating is getting like counterstrike was years ago). I own tons of legal games I haven't finished yet. Son has tons of XBox games (most for $10 to $20). Spending more time farting around in linux. Spending more time on my bicycle.
In a nutshell, I think PC gaming is frozen in it's current state for me. If I ever feel the need to do more modern gaming, it will probably be on a console.
Re:Same ol', same ol'. For reference, see the MI (Score:2, Interesting)
Now, you need a phone or internet access to run most games. Forget taking a laptop with you on vacation along with some new games you just bought - it probably won't work.
The irony is that using pirated software is getting easier while legal games are becoming harder to install and mantain.
Re:Nah. Crappy games and HW requirements (Score:2, Interesting)
No, the rationale for terrible sales is that they're crummy anyway.
Isn't that like stealing a car off a dealer's lot, and then saying "Why's everyone so upset? It was a lemon anyway...."?
No. It's more like borrowing your friend's car to drive around the block in, and then saying "Why's the car dealership so upset?"
Re:Uh, no. (Score:3, Interesting)
A game worth buying is a game worth not pirating, so to speak. For those games with online services, such as any FPS, RTS, MMO, eieio, buying the game is often the "only real option" due to key-checks and whatnot, and frankly, the average consumer isn't intelligent (or tenacious) enough to attempt to crack the various portions repeatedly until something works. Offline games of course are a different animal, but that doesn't change the idea (that the average consumer is a moron), but rather, points out that the average joe buys good games and makes do without during times of terrible releases. It isn't safe to assume that if a person does not buy a game, they will pirate it.
And let's not get into the whole "Disc-protection ate my babies" preference to cracking/pirating. You know, when companies install or incorporate difficult-to-run anti-pirate protection measures that FUBAR the program enough that many people can't play without bypassing said counter-measure, even if they legally bought the damned thing.
Odd thing about WoW (Score:5, Interesting)
Whatever could it be? /vomit (Score:3, Interesting)
1 Warcraft III : The Frozen Throne
2 The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
3 The Sims 2
4 World of Warcraft
5 Dungeon Siege II: Broken World
6 Age of Empires III
7 Titan Quest (Shameless Diablo clone)
8 Prey (Generic FPS Game #2412)
9 Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (GTA3 part 3)
10 Counter-Strike: Source
World of Warcraft is the only 'new' game on there and that is still somewhat debateable.
Id is more responsible than anyone for the situation that they are in. They are poster children for boring clones that whose feature set is 90% new features on video cards instead of gameplay.
Another problem: PC platform compatibility (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:WoW is the solution? (Score:1, Interesting)
As far as easy to pirate - I don't know about that. I'll admit I tried to pirate fear when it came out. However, it was hardly easy. Getting the game - well, okay, pretty simple. Getting the cracks and cheats and 3rd party software required to play it - a huge hassle.
Now, I just troll the bargain bins
Re:WoW is the solution? (Score:2, Interesting)
It has been a long time since I swapped the no-day, but from what I remember, about 90% of the releases just flat out sucked. They sucked so bad that even though I had them on my hard drive I never played them. And when I did bother to install them, I wondered why I wasted my time. If I had bought them, I would have been mad about wasted time and money and would have never bought another game from that developer ever again.
I looked at piracy as "Try before you buy." I actually spent money on games that I really liked because I wanted to support the developers, and I liked the packaging, manuals, etc. In the end, it didn't matter though because EA bought out all of my favorite developers whose games I really did legally purchase and made them the sux0rz. =/
Re:WoW is the solution? (Score:3, Interesting)
If I understand it correctly, I think I now understand why the PC game industry is hurting. It's because I'm playing fewer PC games -- instead, I'm spending more time with my family, and more time flying R/C planes and helicopters (which is sort of like games, but I end up tan, in better physical shape and when you screw up, it's harder to fix than just reloading your last saved game.)
So, they should just sue my wife, kids and Tower Hobbies.
Why not just rent PC games? (Score:2, Interesting)
I've found I rarely buy video games at all anymore, aside from making sure I'm equipped for a multiplayer DS rumble. But I do still pay for games. WoW, like the article mentioned, gets my money directly.
But then there's GameFly. I tend to only play console games nowadays, because I can rent what I want, play them, and send them back for the next in line. As so many others have pointed out, so many new games these days are just incremental improvements over what came out the year before. In that light, there's not much incentive to keep the game, because if you get a hankering to play it, well, just grab the sequel or the knock-off and at least get some marginally different levels and eye candy out of it.
Back in the day, I used to pirate every game I played, console games included. The publishers got exactly $0 from me. Then I came to my senses, and started actually paying these folks for their time and effort. That got expensive, and I got burned a few times (though you do make a much more concerted effort to like and/or beat a game you paid real money for). Every couple of months, I would clean out the game rack and trade in the stuff I was never going to play again (which, let's be honest, was most of it) for credit to buy new games. This didn't make much sense, but if you weren't into this year's sports and racing lineup, you weren't going to find what you wanted at Blockbuster. If you did find an RPG, you had to power-play that sucker or it'd be cheaper to buy it.
Then along came GameFly, and much like NetFlix, they offer not only convenience and unlimited rental periods, but a library more extensive than your local Game Stop (especially if you want something that's been out a while). So now they get my money every month, and some of that money gets paid to the publishers. They don't make as much off of me as a sale, but it's certainly more than the $0 they got from me in my days as an IRC-faring scallawag.
But guess what? The PC publishers aren't getting their cut. I can't rent their games. If piracy's such a loss to them already, why not just rent your games out? If people want to just try out your game, it's a heck of a lot faster and easier to put it on your GameFly list than spend a week or two pulling it off BitTorrent. And you get paid for it.
Sure you'll get the same type of tools who rent everything Netflix has to offer and rips them to DVD-R, but like I said, you'll probably make out better in the long run. And I refuse to belive it's impossible to create some sort of solution to discourage that behavior. Nothing as odius as StarForce--after all, you don't need to make it impossible to copy (and it's not like StarForce does that anyway), just sufficently more difficult than renting. When the rental is essentially free through an online service, there's not nearly as much incentive to hack around.