They really should have seen that coming. Hindsight and all, but damn. That was stupid.
Like others in the thread, I blame the lack of great success of Titan Quest to no Closed Server Multiplayer. It needed it, and then you can't really bitch about piracy if it's a main part of your game.
This coupled with the no-return policy on software makes for a very difficult market. Players have to know the game is good and runs well on most systems before they can feel safe buying it. You can't chance it, because you can't return it. That's wrong. Obviously you can steal a game just as easily without the original disc these days, so what's the point really?
[edit] Also I had to crack several of my pc games that I bought legitimately in order to get them to run. I wouldn't even know how to pirate games if it weren't for DRM. Talk about self-defeating.
The demo also ran pretty poorly. Doesn't really matter if the full game ran better. A demo is your chance to make a good first impression, and they blew it on that front.
I also seem to remember people here saying it was good, but it was just lacking that spark. I felt it too, there was something... missing, but I can't exactly place my finger on it. But it was the thing that made Diablo addicting. And it just wasn't here.
The Wolfman on
"The sausage of Green Earth explodes with flavor like the cannon of culinary delight."
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KageraImitating the worst people. Since 2004Registered Userregular
edited March 2008
I'm pretty sure the dude said the piracy issue in his essay was tangential to what brought down Iron Lore.
But without hard evidence, it's difficult to make a statement about the state of piracy, no? Developers have more information on the subject than you do, and I'm inclined to believe the guys who have the facts.
That's kind of the exact same thing that I'm saying. Nobody releases "hard evidence" on the state of piracy. Nobody can, because even if you have exact numbers across the various methods of pirating a game, you still have literally no idea how much it affects sales. Holding it responsible for all of the problems with PC gaming sales is irresponsible at best, scape-goating at worst.
My point is that making a hasty assumption without any facts is foolish, no matter who is doing it. Whether or not they (the developers) are lying is a different matter, they have more information about sales than we do.
Your statement of commercially viable is self defeating. They are great games, people love them, they talk about them, and they review well.
They then sell like shit and say that "Huge" numbers of people are playing pirated copies, and you decry them for not making a commercially viable game. It's bullshit logic.
Piracy is a problem, the only developer NOT saying piracy is huge is Blizzard. Everybody else seems to recognize that it's a pretty big damn concern.
No, 10mil people playing WoW doesn't necessarily equal $150mil for Blizzard because the lion's share is in Asia where there are no subscribers and WoW is licensed there to another company.
Do you have any reason to believe that besides "it can't be that high"? I see you in these threads all the time (okay, two threads) decrying piracy alarmists as uninformed, or liars. Why?
No, 10mil people playing WoW doesn't necessarily equal $150mil for Blizzard because the lion's share is in Asia where there are no subscribers and WoW is licensed there to another company.
I didn't say it all went straight to Blizzard, I'm just saying they make an insane amount of money. Piracy doesn't put a dent in the Warcraft machine.
Titan Quest actually looks cool, but I don't want to buy it if it has shitty copy protection. I hate hate hate having to keep my disc in the tray. Also as a primarily Linux user a game has to be reaaally good to get me to boot to windows. (Not enough games have a Linux client or run well in wine) Really the one thing that keeps me from buying more PC games is the fact I have to run a OS I really don't like to play them. I actually prefer the PC over consoles but end up buying more console games because of this. Fuck microsoft and their stranglehold over the PC market..
I’ll tell you what happens in Demon’s Souls when you die. You come back as a ghost with your health capped at half. And when you keep on dying, the alignment of the world turns black and the enemies get harder. That’s right, when you fail in this game, it gets harder. Why? Because fuck you is why.
Titan Quest actually looks cool, but I don't want to buy it if it has shitty copy protection. I hate hate hate having to keep my disc in the tray. Also as a primarily Linux user a game has to be reaaally good to get me to boot to windows. (Not enough games have a Linux client or run well in wine) Really the one thing that keeps me from buying more PC games is the fact I have to run a OS I really don't like to play them. I actually prefer the PC over consoles but end up buying more console games because of this. Fuck microsoft and their stranglehold over the PC market..
You can get Titan Quest and its expansion on steam for $20. No disk, just pay, download and play
LittleBoots on
Tofu wrote: Here be Littleboots, destroyer of threads and master of drunkposting.
He didn't blame piracy for the poor sales. He blamed poor word-of-mouth... because pirates were online bitching about the sneaky copy protection dumping them out of the game.
He certainly did. Why the hell else did he pull out COD4 and Bioshock numbers? Not to mention that his numbers were completely fictional. I can't imagine he's even privy to sales figures for 2K or Activision games.
I'm not saying piracy didn't play a role at all - I just think he took a cheap, parthian shot at a lot of people on his way out the door. Insulting the "stupid people" who bought his game was piss-poor professionalism. Everything else he said was clouded by those statements in my mind. If a non-DRM'd game like Sins of a Solar Empire can make money, then he has nothing to bitch about or Sins would have tanked.
Titan Quest actually looks cool, but I don't want to buy it if it has shitty copy protection. I hate hate hate having to keep my disc in the tray. Also as a primarily Linux user a game has to be reaaally good to get me to boot to windows. (Not enough games have a Linux client or run well in wine) Really the one thing that keeps me from buying more PC games is the fact I have to run a OS I really don't like to play them. I actually prefer the PC over consoles but end up buying more console games because of this. Fuck microsoft and their stranglehold over the PC market..
You can get Titan Quest and its expansion on steam for $20. No disk, just pay, download and play
He didn't blame piracy for the poor sales. He blamed poor word-of-mouth... because pirates were online bitching about the sneaky copy protection dumping them out of the game.
He certainly did. Why the hell else did he pull out COD4 and Bioshock numbers? Not to mention that his numbers were completely fictional. I can't imagine he's even privy to sales figures for 2K or Activision games.
I'm not saying piracy didn't play a role at all - I just think he took a cheap, parthian shot at a lot of people on his way out the door. Insulting the "stupid people" who bought his game was piss-poor professionalism. Everything else he said was clouded by those statements in my mind. If a non-DRM'd game like Sins of a Solar Empire can make money, then he has nothing to bitch about or Sins would have tanked.
I'm willing to bet as a producer at THQ, he has access to the sales data gathered by the various companies (NPD etc.) as THQ would pay for that stuff. Also he is a producer at THQ. He's not on his way out the door so this is not a "parthian shot." He has a very valid complaint. The most vocal people are always the ones with problems, and when these people are having problems because their pirating the game or because their own computer is broken, it puts those in the PC industry in a tough position. It's just another reason why more and more developers are flocking to consoles and producing less and less original stuff on the PC.
Also, Sins of a Solar Empire was a low budget game that managed an average number of sales.
Rakai on
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]XBL: Rakayn | PS3: Rakayn | Steam ID
Also, Sins of a Solar Empire was a low budget game that managed an average number of sales.
It's also in a completely different genre and caters to a different audience, just like Galactic Civilisations.
These people who use the argument "well just don't use DRM" are speaking bullshit. See what happens if the next AAA title from Epic or iD doesn't have any DRM.
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Zen VulgarityWhat a lovely day for teaSecret British ThreadRegistered Userregular
edited March 2008
Uhh, that AAA title is still going to sell a shit-ton of games.
When was the last time you saw a Titan Quest commerical?
Or a Sins one?
Aggressive marketing can turn even a mediocre game into a good seller. Aggressive marketing on a good game can make it a great seller. I'm not saying anti-DRM is a good or bad thing, but there's more to it than stripping DRM would make those AAA games pirated and no one would buy it.
Because developers use piracy as a catch-all excuse for flagging PC gaming sales.
Why would IW claim that piracy is a problem when, CoD4 is arguably one of the best online shooters? I'm pretty sure the 10:1 ratio of 360 copies to PC copies isn't because the game is terrible. Is it the hardware? No, minimum specs are at least 5-year old tech.
* CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 2.4 GHz or AMD(R) Athlon(TM) 64 2800+ processor or any 1.8Ghz Dual Core Processor or better supported
* RAM: 512MB RAM (768MB for Windows Vista)
* Harddrive: 8GB of free hard drive space
* Video card (generic): NVIDIA(R) Geforce(TM) 6600 or better or ATI(R) Radeon(R) 9800Pro or better
In IW's and Iron Lore's case, piracy directly effected sales. You can bring up Stardock, and their anti-DRM stance, but you are looking at two different parts of the market. It can be said that SoaSE is a game that appeals a niche in the PC gaming, albeit a decent sized niche, but a niche nonetheless. What if a major marquee title such as Call of Duty 4 released without DRM?
Fiziks on
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Zen VulgarityWhat a lovely day for teaSecret British ThreadRegistered Userregular
edited March 2008
This is why there has been a push to subscription-based gaming too. Those are notoriously hard to pirate due to having to pay a monthly fee.
This is why there has been a push to subscription-based gaming too. Those are notoriously hard to pirate due to having to pay a monthly fee.
If anything this just makes the problem worse. A monthly fee would most likely turn off the casual crowd. Even then, if more and more games come out with subscription fees, you are limited to maybe 2-3 games. Who wants to pay 60 dollars a month to play 4 games online? I'm assuming that this methodology is going to be applied to non-MMO titles.
Because developers use piracy as a catch-all excuse for flagging PC gaming sales.
Why would IW claim that piracy is a problem when, CoD4 is arguably one of the best online shooters? I'm pretty sure the 10:1 ratio of 360 copies to PC copies isn't because the game is terrible. Is it the hardware? No, minimum specs are at least 5-year old tech.
* CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 2.4 GHz or AMD(R) Athlon(TM) 64 2800+ processor or any 1.8Ghz Dual Core Processor or better supported
* RAM: 512MB RAM (768MB for Windows Vista)
* Harddrive: 8GB of free hard drive space
* Video card (generic): NVIDIA(R) Geforce(TM) 6600 or better or ATI(R) Radeon(R) 9800Pro or better
In IW's and Iron Lore's case, piracy directly effected sales. You can bring up Stardock, and their anti-DRM stance, but you are looking at two different parts of the market. It can be said that SoaSE is a game that appeals a niche in the PC gaming, albeit a decent sized niche, but a niche nonetheless. What if a major marquee title such as Call of Duty 4 released without DRM?
I'd say it wouldn't make a damn bit of difference because most of this stuff that is distributed is probably already cracked. Requiring little more from the downloader to copy a file into a directory, so for the end user of the pirated software the DRM is already non-existent.
Piracy is a problem, yes. But I'd love to see numbers that show DRM actually puts any kind of sizable dent in it. The better and more hyped the title the more its going to be "warezed" IMO, DRM or not. I agree something needs to be done about it but I don't think current DRM methods are the way to go. It (DRM) can cause problems for legitimate purchases like the people the who have provided personal examples earlier in this thread.
LittleBoots on
Tofu wrote: Here be Littleboots, destroyer of threads and master of drunkposting.
Because developers use piracy as a catch-all excuse for flagging PC gaming sales.
Why would IW claim that piracy is a problem when, CoD4 is arguably one of the best online shooters? I'm pretty sure the 10:1 ratio of 360 copies to PC copies isn't because the game is terrible. Is it the hardware? No, minimum specs are at least 5-year old tech.
* CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 2.4 GHz or AMD(R) Athlon(TM) 64 2800+ processor or any 1.8Ghz Dual Core Processor or better supported
* RAM: 512MB RAM (768MB for Windows Vista)
* Harddrive: 8GB of free hard drive space
* Video card (generic): NVIDIA(R) Geforce(TM) 6600 or better or ATI(R) Radeon(R) 9800Pro or better
In IW's and Iron Lore's case, piracy directly effected sales. You can bring up Stardock, and their anti-DRM stance, but you are looking at two different parts of the market. It can be said that SoaSE is a game that appeals a niche in the PC gaming, albeit a decent sized niche, but a niche nonetheless. What if a major marquee title such as Call of Duty 4 released without DRM?
I'd say it wouldn't make a damn bit of difference because most of this stuff that is distributed is probably already cracked. Requiring little more from the downloader to copy a file into a directory, so for the end user of the pirated software the DRM is already non-existent.
Piracy is a problem, yes. But I'd love to see numbers that show DRM actually puts any kind of sizable dent in it. The better and more hyped the title the more its going to be "warezed" IMO, DRM or not. I agree something needs to be done about it but I don't think current DRM methods are the way to go. It (DRM) can cause problems for legitimate purchases like the people the who have provided personal examples earlier in this thread.
I have no idea who they are nor have I played any of their games. But everytime a games studio closes its doors a kitten dies and that makes me sad.
Stop with the kitten killing!
They made the best hack-and-slash game I've played that weren't made by Blizzard. The game had flaws, but most of them were "not enough money to correctly patch," and "not enough money to do more than token advertisement."
Get Titan Quest and the expansion on STEAM. It's cheap as all hell, and will last you months.
Hey, is it possible to combine Steam-Expansion with retail-disc-TQ?
Unfortunately, no, but I believe the Steam package with both is $30 (if not $20 by now).
$19.99 on Steam.
But if you buy it now, won't 100% of the profits go into THQ's pocket, and not to the actual developers?
eobet on
Heard the proposition that RIAA and MPAA should join forces and form "Music And Film Industry Association"?
You know, just maybe, not that many people liked titans quest? Especially with the whole open b-net thing going on(basically)?
Or the fact that it ran like shit on even nice computers when it first came out?
I'm sure piracy hurts games, but I simply don't believe sales would change that much if piracy were drastically reduced. Piracy still isn't the whole package. Often have trouble patching, can almost never play with regular users online, etc. Which reminds me.
If piracy is so incredibly larger than actual purchasers, why then do "cracked servers" always seem to have about 1-5% as many players as paid players? I doubt the rest of these pirates are just playing CSS with bots, or what have you.
Game developers can easily get an idea how rampant piracy is. If I sell 2,000 copies of a game, but 8,500 people download the patch or the free additional content, then its a pretty good guess that there is a lot of piracy.
People who claim you can't tell anything from numbers like that are just trying to justify their own behaviour.
Piracy *is* killing PC gaming, we just saw this developer shut its doors, and an indie dev I know has just started looking for a job.
Every time people pirate a PC game, they are just encouraging us PC devs to fuck off to consoles.
You download game, and for 3 months have to pay a monthly fee to play it.
Then the fee goes away.
The fee is equal to what you would otherwise have to pay if you bought in a store.
So basically, instead of paying upfront, you pay like a subscription fee and have to log in like an MMO.
Its not perfect, but it might help a bit.
I'd like things to go this way. In Australia the cost of a new release game is often $110, which is ridiculous. Not all games have well produced demos (in fact I'd much rather a developer does not prioritise a demo until after the release, which kind of defeats the purpose of a demo), and this kind of system would be preferable. Maybe not the specifics, but this general concept.
As the internet becomes more and more integrated into our lives, I believe things will start going this way. Steam would have most of the backend capacity to do this already, and I know XBL can do it.
Game developers can easily get an idea how rampant piracy is. If I sell 2,000 copies of a game, but 8,500 people download the patch or the free additional content, then its a pretty good guess that there is a lot of piracy.
Not that I'm trying to "justify" anything, but there are tonnes of times that I've had to download patches 2,3 heck, even 4,5,6 or more times just trying to get my game frigging working. Crappy servers, disconnects, simply uninstalling and re-installing the game (which aside from other things, is always what you're told you have to do when your game isn't working at first), stupid multi-patch schemes where you have to download in a certain order. I wouldn't say it can't be used as an indicator, but frankly I would say that's a pretty vague one. Patches are never going to have a 1-to-1 correlation with actual sales, and you know this as well, but anything beyond 1-to-1 is potentially piracy. Heck, it can very easily be argued that even a 1-to-1 ratio is piracy (why should all customers patch their game after all?). So then it becomes a question of trying to figure out how many of those patches are going to legitimate customers, and how many aren't. The most people can say is "I think something is wrong here", but I have yet to see any information about the expected number of patch downloads per paying customer. And if it really is expected at 1-to-1 then I'm going to hit the first guy to give me that data with my bandwidth bill.
People who claim you can't tell anything from numbers like that are just trying to justify their own behaviour.
Instead of the ad-hominems, perhaps you could consider that maybe, just maybe, the people saying it's difficult-to-impossible to tell here aren't "justifying their behaviour" (and perhaps you should consider what it is exactly you're accussing the people you're debating with of doing when you say that) and actually believe the positions they're holding?
Piracy *is* killing PC gaming, we just saw this developer shut its doors, and an indie dev I know has just started looking for a job.
We saw this dev shut its doors. Few people here are trying to argue that piracy wasn't an issue. However, some of us feel that there are also other issues affecting the PC industry right now that can be linked to this closure, and which may or may not have been just as if not more important. Harping on constantly about piracy is tunnel thinking, it's always the reason given for sales that the devs see as poor, irrespective the surrounding circumstances.
Note, I am not saying that piracy isn't an important issue to be addressed. It is an important factor in lost sales, let's be clear. But like it or not, it's become the catch-all scapegoat. That doesn't automatically mean it's false, but I'm not going to consider it as automatically true either. There are a metric frag-tonne of other issues all relating and equating to poorer PC sales, but the closest we seem to be addressing those is this PCGA thing that frankly, I would be utterly impressed if they managed to pull off more than a short and crappy ad-campaign. Meanwhile...
Without looking around at the other issues all you get is the same problems happening again and again, with more idiotic attempts at DRM affecting home users even more. And if you've been following this thread so far you know that DRM is pretty much the heart of what's been discussed here so far. When I'm in-store why should I buy Bioshock PC instead of 360 for example? I'm automatically treated like a criminal and limited to two frigging installs of that game (not as simple as that, but we've discussed this more in-depth previously). Someone, somewhere thought "if this guy installs it more than twice he's automatically a pirate and we should prevent him from doing so". I refuse to put up with that kind of crap.
Every time people pirate a PC game, they are just encouraging us PC devs to fuck off to consoles.
I'm pretty amazed at the amount of people going "the government must keep the internet under lock and chain and intrude upon everyone's privacy to stop piracy!" in this thread.
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
edited March 2008
In IW's and Iron Lore's case, piracy directly effected sales. You can bring up Stardock, and their anti-DRM stance, but you are looking at two different parts of the market. It can be said that SoaSE is a game that appeals a niche in the PC gaming, albeit a decent sized niche, but a niche nonetheless. What if a major marquee title such as Call of Duty 4 released without DRM?
People always bring this up, but it fascinates me in a way that people want to ignore the continual example of Stardock being successful, when Stardock make games that most publishers today don't really want to publish (Pure turn based 4x strategy games like Galactic Civilisations II). Are people who like turn based strategy games and RTS games like Sins of a Solar empire just more honest and less likely to pirate? It can't be that these games manage to make themselves difficult to pirate as they have no copy protection what-so-ever.
Personally, I think Stardock succeeds not just because they know how to appeal to a niche market, but they also treat their customers with respect (something other developers have forgotten, like with Bioshock) and have set up a successful business model on the PC. I would venture that people who buy these games respond well to Stardocks policy of having non-stupid copy protection and that ultimately stardock make great games. Stardock proves you can be profitable on the PC making games that appeal to relatively hardcore gamers (Niche markets).
Surely if piracy was crushing everyone in the PC market and Stardock with no copy protection were appealing to a niche set of gamers, they would have gone down the toilet faster than anyone right?
I'm pretty amazed at the amount of people going "the government must keep the internet under lock and chain and intrude upon everyone's privacy to stop piracy!" in this thread.
Eh? I can't remember anyone saying that. Care to link me a few quotes? I must've missed it (I'm being serious here).
Well in any case, the standard saying applies, "the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it". You can't realistically keep control of everything online, I'm not even going to bother to explain why since that would be going way off topic, and I figure most people here probably agree that you can't
I think also part of the problem is that with all the shit thrown at customers, we ourselves have "fucked off and gone to consoles."
I know on my computer I pretty much only play older games and WoW now. I won't be upgrading for gaming. I'll buy a new console for that.
This is the same for me. I've given up on bothering with PC games after Bioshock (some exceptions of course, Sins of the Solar Empire being one: you can guess why for yourself). I can buy a game for my Wii, my DS, my PS2 or 360 go home and play it without any stupidity or jumping through hoops at all. It's got to the point with PC games where some of them I'm certain want me to donate blood and tissue samples to the developer before I can play them. Something I cannot be bothered with anymore.
I'm pretty amazed at the amount of people going "the government must keep the internet under lock and chain and intrude upon everyone's privacy to stop piracy!" in this thread.
Eh? I can't remember anyone saying that. Care to link me a few quotes? I must've missed it (I'm being serious here).
Well in any case, the standard saying applies, "the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it". You can't realistically keep control of everything online, I'm not even going to bother to explain why since that would be going way off topic, and I figure most people here probably agree that you can't
Check around page 3-4.
And no, that's not what they're saying. It's what the effect of their suggestions would be though.
"More laws against this"
"ISPs should be able to kick out people who use tons of bandwidth since they obviously pirate stuff"
I think also part of the problem is that with all the shit thrown at customers, we ourselves have "fucked off and gone to consoles."
I know on my computer I pretty much only play older games and WoW now. I won't be upgrading for gaming. I'll buy a new console for that.
This is the same for me. I've given up on bothering with PC games after Bioshock (some exceptions of course, Sins of the Solar Empire being one: you can guess why for yourself). I can buy a game for my Wii, my DS, my PS2 or 360 go home and play it without any stupidity or jumping through hoops at all. It's got to the point with PC games where some of them I'm certain want me to donate blood and tissue samples to the developer before I can play them. Something I cannot be bothered with anymore.
Pretty much. I'm going to be honest here and say PC gaming is definitively more inconvenient than console gaming. Now whether that's just part of the nature of the PC market, or whether it's actually something that can be changed I'm going to sidestep for a moment (for the record I feel it's something that we can and should be improved upon), the only reasons I've stuck with PC gaming are:
(1) The genres and styles of game I'm into are still largely PC based. RTS, 4X, a lot of the indie stuff etc. And whilst I feel there are some good console shooters out there, I feel that some control well on joypad, some I'm craving a keyboard and mouse after 5 minutes.
(2) I'm bloody minded enough to put up with the inconvenience that's currently inherent in PC gaming for the sake of being able to play those games.
Devs, retailers and manufacturers need to realise that whilst there are still plenty of number (1)'s out there who like playing games on their PC, they're fast running out of number (2)'s.
subedii on
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KageraImitating the worst people. Since 2004Registered Userregular
I'm pretty amazed at the amount of people going "the government must keep the internet under lock and chain and intrude upon everyone's privacy to stop piracy!" in this thread.
Eh? I can't remember anyone saying that. Care to link me a few quotes? I must've missed it (I'm being serious here).
Well in any case, the standard saying applies, "the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it". You can't realistically keep control of everything online, I'm not even going to bother to explain why since that would be going way off topic, and I figure most people here probably agree that you can't
Check around page 3-4.
And no, that's not what they're saying. It's what the effect of their suggestions would be though.
"More laws against this"
"ISPs should be able to kick out people who use tons of bandwidth since they obviously pirate stuff"
And so on.
ISPs do have the right to put limits on bandwidth usage but they fucking suck because they never say anything about it to the customer.
But then the assholes know no one would want their uber-cable package of doom if they knew they could only download 50 MB before hitting the cap too.
Anyway I like the 3 month fee idea, but it would suck for those who aren't online.
And yeah, when Bioshock is selling 5 to 1 console to PC and COD4 selling 10 to 1 there's gotta be a big problem with piracy I mean obviously PC versions are going to sell less but they are also priced lower too.
And yeah, when Bioshock is selling 5 to 1 console to PC and COD4 selling 10 to 1 there's gotta be a big problem with piracy I mean obviously PC versions are going to sell less but they are also priced lower too.
Are there any figures to actually back these up. Because although they get thrown around a lot, I always wonder where they come from. e.g. The Crysis figures that get thrown around was 80,000 for a long long time, and then suddenly it's 1 million world wide, which is quite a leap.
Given that a) european market is just bigger than the us market, and b) pc retail is very strong in europe c) we've never known sales figures for steam and d) that despite barely featuring in the npds Orange Box PC sold significantly more than the console versions I'm always a bit dubious about the claim of 10:1
And yeah, when Bioshock is selling 5 to 1 console to PC and COD4 selling 10 to 1 there's gotta be a big problem with piracy I mean obviously PC versions are going to sell less but they are also priced lower too.
Are there any figures to actually back these up. Because although they get thrown around a lot, I always wonder where they come from. e.g. The Crysis figures that get thrown around was 80,000 for a long long time, and then suddenly it's 1 million world wide, which is quite a leap.
Given that a) european market is just bigger than the us market, and b) pc retail is very strong in europe c) we've never known sales figures for steam and d) that despite barely featuring in the npds Orange Box PC sold significantly more than the console versions I'm always a bit dubious about the claim of 10:1
Given that COD4 outsold Crysis in both territories, and Crysis reached 1 million I think it's fairly safe to say that the 10:1 ratio is a pretty clear obfuscation of the actual picture with a real figure being much lower.
Rook on
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
Nice read, but jesus, he pretty much just blames everybody for his problems. He's right on most points, but he sure comes off as a whiny runt at times.
Because people aren't allowed to get angry or feel defeated when bad shit happens. I mean, clearly.
That monthly fee for the first three months, by the way, is a pretty neat idea.
Edit - I just read the letter on page 1 in its entirety, aside from the bolded points, and will say I not only agree with his points, but I think he's taken the correct tone on this. If he had tried to speak of these things with the neutral "I'm a PR guy and don't want to look bad" tone, nobody would give a shit or pay attention. I think mostly because people wouldn't believe those sort of things aren't upsetting. Though, I see some people feel that he shouldn't be upset at the shit that makes things hard for PC game developers.
I'm pretty amazed at the amount of people going "the government must keep the internet under lock and chain and intrude upon everyone's privacy to stop piracy!" in this thread.
Eh? I can't remember anyone saying that. Care to link me a few quotes? I must've missed it (I'm being serious here).
Well in any case, the standard saying applies, "the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it". You can't realistically keep control of everything online, I'm not even going to bother to explain why since that would be going way off topic, and I figure most people here probably agree that you can't
Check around page 3-4.
And no, that's not what they're saying. It's what the effect of their suggestions would be though.
"More laws against this"
"ISPs should be able to kick out people who use tons of bandwidth since they obviously pirate stuff"
And so on.
That's not what I was saying at all, personally, and I don't remember reading anybody else saying that either.
The view I expressed was that big name developers and publishers should get together and bring lawsuits against individuals who own places like BitTorrent sites which host torrents for stolen software; also, the advertisers that support them. Failing that, yes, lobby the government to do something about at least the most egregious offenders (the high traffic P2P sites).
OremLK on
My zombie survival life simulator They Don't Sleep is out now on Steam if you want to check it out.
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
The view I expressed was that the developers should get together and bring lawsuits against individuals who own places like BitTorrent sites which host torrents for stolen software; also, the advertisers that support them.
That's a good idea, but would it really be worth spending money for the cases? Sites will get closed down and new ones will continue to open, however brief or lengthy their 'reign' and it'll be somewhat of an endless cycle. Some form of legislation will have to pass to prohibit the operation of such sites, but how many countries would have to agree on that to make it effective?
Edit - I'll just outright say that, while peer-to-peer stuff is a great idea, I don't think it's worth keeping around with the problems that have resulted due to it. I myself haven't grown reliant on it in any way.
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The demo also ran pretty poorly. Doesn't really matter if the full game ran better. A demo is your chance to make a good first impression, and they blew it on that front.
I also seem to remember people here saying it was good, but it was just lacking that spark. I felt it too, there was something... missing, but I can't exactly place my finger on it. But it was the thing that made Diablo addicting. And it just wasn't here.
It didn't help that's for sure.
My point is that making a hasty assumption without any facts is foolish, no matter who is doing it. Whether or not they (the developers) are lying is a different matter, they have more information about sales than we do.
They then sell like shit and say that "Huge" numbers of people are playing pirated copies, and you decry them for not making a commercially viable game. It's bullshit logic.
Piracy is a problem, the only developer NOT saying piracy is huge is Blizzard. Everybody else seems to recognize that it's a pretty big damn concern.
We know more than you think. There are ways to get ballpark figures from the limited data available to us.
Do you have any reason to believe that besides "it can't be that high"? I see you in these threads all the time (okay, two threads) decrying piracy alarmists as uninformed, or liars. Why?
I didn't say it all went straight to Blizzard, I'm just saying they make an insane amount of money. Piracy doesn't put a dent in the Warcraft machine.
Let me tell you about Demon's Souls....
You can get Titan Quest and its expansion on steam for $20. No disk, just pay, download and play
Tofu wrote: Here be Littleboots, destroyer of threads and master of drunkposting.
He certainly did. Why the hell else did he pull out COD4 and Bioshock numbers? Not to mention that his numbers were completely fictional. I can't imagine he's even privy to sales figures for 2K or Activision games.
I'm not saying piracy didn't play a role at all - I just think he took a cheap, parthian shot at a lot of people on his way out the door. Insulting the "stupid people" who bought his game was piss-poor professionalism. Everything else he said was clouded by those statements in my mind. If a non-DRM'd game like Sins of a Solar Empire can make money, then he has nothing to bitch about or Sins would have tanked.
Damn that is so tempting.
I'm willing to bet as a producer at THQ, he has access to the sales data gathered by the various companies (NPD etc.) as THQ would pay for that stuff. Also he is a producer at THQ. He's not on his way out the door so this is not a "parthian shot." He has a very valid complaint. The most vocal people are always the ones with problems, and when these people are having problems because their pirating the game or because their own computer is broken, it puts those in the PC industry in a tough position. It's just another reason why more and more developers are flocking to consoles and producing less and less original stuff on the PC.
Also, Sins of a Solar Empire was a low budget game that managed an average number of sales.
It's also in a completely different genre and caters to a different audience, just like Galactic Civilisations.
These people who use the argument "well just don't use DRM" are speaking bullshit. See what happens if the next AAA title from Epic or iD doesn't have any DRM.
When was the last time you saw a Titan Quest commerical?
Or a Sins one?
Aggressive marketing can turn even a mediocre game into a good seller. Aggressive marketing on a good game can make it a great seller. I'm not saying anti-DRM is a good or bad thing, but there's more to it than stripping DRM would make those AAA games pirated and no one would buy it.
Why would IW claim that piracy is a problem when, CoD4 is arguably one of the best online shooters? I'm pretty sure the 10:1 ratio of 360 copies to PC copies isn't because the game is terrible. Is it the hardware? No, minimum specs are at least 5-year old tech.
In IW's and Iron Lore's case, piracy directly effected sales. You can bring up Stardock, and their anti-DRM stance, but you are looking at two different parts of the market. It can be said that SoaSE is a game that appeals a niche in the PC gaming, albeit a decent sized niche, but a niche nonetheless. What if a major marquee title such as Call of Duty 4 released without DRM?
If anything this just makes the problem worse. A monthly fee would most likely turn off the casual crowd. Even then, if more and more games come out with subscription fees, you are limited to maybe 2-3 games. Who wants to pay 60 dollars a month to play 4 games online? I'm assuming that this methodology is going to be applied to non-MMO titles.
I'd say it wouldn't make a damn bit of difference because most of this stuff that is distributed is probably already cracked. Requiring little more from the downloader to copy a file into a directory, so for the end user of the pirated software the DRM is already non-existent.
Piracy is a problem, yes. But I'd love to see numbers that show DRM actually puts any kind of sizable dent in it. The better and more hyped the title the more its going to be "warezed" IMO, DRM or not. I agree something needs to be done about it but I don't think current DRM methods are the way to go. It (DRM) can cause problems for legitimate purchases like the people the who have provided personal examples earlier in this thread.
Tofu wrote: Here be Littleboots, destroyer of threads and master of drunkposting.
They could always go back to using StarForce.
But if you buy it now, won't 100% of the profits go into THQ's pocket, and not to the actual developers?
Or the fact that it ran like shit on even nice computers when it first came out?
I'm sure piracy hurts games, but I simply don't believe sales would change that much if piracy were drastically reduced. Piracy still isn't the whole package. Often have trouble patching, can almost never play with regular users online, etc. Which reminds me.
If piracy is so incredibly larger than actual purchasers, why then do "cracked servers" always seem to have about 1-5% as many players as paid players? I doubt the rest of these pirates are just playing CSS with bots, or what have you.
3ds friend code: 2981-6032-4118
People who claim you can't tell anything from numbers like that are just trying to justify their own behaviour.
Piracy *is* killing PC gaming, we just saw this developer shut its doors, and an indie dev I know has just started looking for a job.
Every time people pirate a PC game, they are just encouraging us PC devs to fuck off to consoles.
You download game, and for 3 months have to pay a monthly fee to play it.
Then the fee goes away.
The fee is equal to what you would otherwise have to pay if you bought in a store.
So basically, instead of paying upfront, you pay like a subscription fee and have to log in like an MMO.
Its not perfect, but it might help a bit.
I'd like things to go this way. In Australia the cost of a new release game is often $110, which is ridiculous. Not all games have well produced demos (in fact I'd much rather a developer does not prioritise a demo until after the release, which kind of defeats the purpose of a demo), and this kind of system would be preferable. Maybe not the specifics, but this general concept.
As the internet becomes more and more integrated into our lives, I believe things will start going this way. Steam would have most of the backend capacity to do this already, and I know XBL can do it.
Not that I'm trying to "justify" anything, but there are tonnes of times that I've had to download patches 2,3 heck, even 4,5,6 or more times just trying to get my game frigging working. Crappy servers, disconnects, simply uninstalling and re-installing the game (which aside from other things, is always what you're told you have to do when your game isn't working at first), stupid multi-patch schemes where you have to download in a certain order. I wouldn't say it can't be used as an indicator, but frankly I would say that's a pretty vague one. Patches are never going to have a 1-to-1 correlation with actual sales, and you know this as well, but anything beyond 1-to-1 is potentially piracy. Heck, it can very easily be argued that even a 1-to-1 ratio is piracy (why should all customers patch their game after all?). So then it becomes a question of trying to figure out how many of those patches are going to legitimate customers, and how many aren't. The most people can say is "I think something is wrong here", but I have yet to see any information about the expected number of patch downloads per paying customer. And if it really is expected at 1-to-1 then I'm going to hit the first guy to give me that data with my bandwidth bill.
Instead of the ad-hominems, perhaps you could consider that maybe, just maybe, the people saying it's difficult-to-impossible to tell here aren't "justifying their behaviour" (and perhaps you should consider what it is exactly you're accussing the people you're debating with of doing when you say that) and actually believe the positions they're holding?
We saw this dev shut its doors. Few people here are trying to argue that piracy wasn't an issue. However, some of us feel that there are also other issues affecting the PC industry right now that can be linked to this closure, and which may or may not have been just as if not more important. Harping on constantly about piracy is tunnel thinking, it's always the reason given for sales that the devs see as poor, irrespective the surrounding circumstances.
Note, I am not saying that piracy isn't an important issue to be addressed. It is an important factor in lost sales, let's be clear. But like it or not, it's become the catch-all scapegoat. That doesn't automatically mean it's false, but I'm not going to consider it as automatically true either. There are a metric frag-tonne of other issues all relating and equating to poorer PC sales, but the closest we seem to be addressing those is this PCGA thing that frankly, I would be utterly impressed if they managed to pull off more than a short and crappy ad-campaign. Meanwhile...
Without looking around at the other issues all you get is the same problems happening again and again, with more idiotic attempts at DRM affecting home users even more. And if you've been following this thread so far you know that DRM is pretty much the heart of what's been discussed here so far. When I'm in-store why should I buy Bioshock PC instead of 360 for example? I'm automatically treated like a criminal and limited to two frigging installs of that game (not as simple as that, but we've discussed this more in-depth previously). Someone, somewhere thought "if this guy installs it more than twice he's automatically a pirate and we should prevent him from doing so". I refuse to put up with that kind of crap.
I'm not going to disagree with this statement.
People always bring this up, but it fascinates me in a way that people want to ignore the continual example of Stardock being successful, when Stardock make games that most publishers today don't really want to publish (Pure turn based 4x strategy games like Galactic Civilisations II). Are people who like turn based strategy games and RTS games like Sins of a Solar empire just more honest and less likely to pirate? It can't be that these games manage to make themselves difficult to pirate as they have no copy protection what-so-ever.
Personally, I think Stardock succeeds not just because they know how to appeal to a niche market, but they also treat their customers with respect (something other developers have forgotten, like with Bioshock) and have set up a successful business model on the PC. I would venture that people who buy these games respond well to Stardocks policy of having non-stupid copy protection and that ultimately stardock make great games. Stardock proves you can be profitable on the PC making games that appeal to relatively hardcore gamers (Niche markets).
Surely if piracy was crushing everyone in the PC market and Stardock with no copy protection were appealing to a niche set of gamers, they would have gone down the toilet faster than anyone right?
Eh? I can't remember anyone saying that. Care to link me a few quotes? I must've missed it (I'm being serious here).
Well in any case, the standard saying applies, "the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it". You can't realistically keep control of everything online, I'm not even going to bother to explain why since that would be going way off topic, and I figure most people here probably agree that you can't
I know on my computer I pretty much only play older games and WoW now. I won't be upgrading for gaming. I'll buy a new console for that.
This is the same for me. I've given up on bothering with PC games after Bioshock (some exceptions of course, Sins of the Solar Empire being one: you can guess why for yourself). I can buy a game for my Wii, my DS, my PS2 or 360 go home and play it without any stupidity or jumping through hoops at all. It's got to the point with PC games where some of them I'm certain want me to donate blood and tissue samples to the developer before I can play them. Something I cannot be bothered with anymore.
Check around page 3-4.
And no, that's not what they're saying. It's what the effect of their suggestions would be though.
"More laws against this"
"ISPs should be able to kick out people who use tons of bandwidth since they obviously pirate stuff"
And so on.
Pretty much. I'm going to be honest here and say PC gaming is definitively more inconvenient than console gaming. Now whether that's just part of the nature of the PC market, or whether it's actually something that can be changed I'm going to sidestep for a moment (for the record I feel it's something that we can and should be improved upon), the only reasons I've stuck with PC gaming are:
(1) The genres and styles of game I'm into are still largely PC based. RTS, 4X, a lot of the indie stuff etc. And whilst I feel there are some good console shooters out there, I feel that some control well on joypad, some I'm craving a keyboard and mouse after 5 minutes.
(2) I'm bloody minded enough to put up with the inconvenience that's currently inherent in PC gaming for the sake of being able to play those games.
Devs, retailers and manufacturers need to realise that whilst there are still plenty of number (1)'s out there who like playing games on their PC, they're fast running out of number (2)'s.
ISPs do have the right to put limits on bandwidth usage but they fucking suck because they never say anything about it to the customer.
But then the assholes know no one would want their uber-cable package of doom if they knew they could only download 50 MB before hitting the cap too.
Anyway I like the 3 month fee idea, but it would suck for those who aren't online.
And yeah, when Bioshock is selling 5 to 1 console to PC and COD4 selling 10 to 1 there's gotta be a big problem with piracy I mean obviously PC versions are going to sell less but they are also priced lower too.
Are there any figures to actually back these up. Because although they get thrown around a lot, I always wonder where they come from. e.g. The Crysis figures that get thrown around was 80,000 for a long long time, and then suddenly it's 1 million world wide, which is quite a leap.
Given that a) european market is just bigger than the us market, and b) pc retail is very strong in europe c) we've never known sales figures for steam and d) that despite barely featuring in the npds Orange Box PC sold significantly more than the console versions I'm always a bit dubious about the claim of 10:1
edit: Having looked at the figures
http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/50951
NPD US, COD4 PC 380,000
NPD US, COD4 360 3,000,000
Activision Third Financial Quarter 08
http://investor.activision.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=292694
#1 PC game in units and dollars in the U.S. and Europe for the quarter ended December 31, 2007, according to The NPD Group, Charttrack and Gfk.
Given that COD4 outsold Crysis in both territories, and Crysis reached 1 million I think it's fairly safe to say that the 10:1 ratio is a pretty clear obfuscation of the actual picture with a real figure being much lower.
Because people aren't allowed to get angry or feel defeated when bad shit happens. I mean, clearly.
That monthly fee for the first three months, by the way, is a pretty neat idea.
Edit - I just read the letter on page 1 in its entirety, aside from the bolded points, and will say I not only agree with his points, but I think he's taken the correct tone on this. If he had tried to speak of these things with the neutral "I'm a PR guy and don't want to look bad" tone, nobody would give a shit or pay attention. I think mostly because people wouldn't believe those sort of things aren't upsetting. Though, I see some people feel that he shouldn't be upset at the shit that makes things hard for PC game developers.
That's not what I was saying at all, personally, and I don't remember reading anybody else saying that either.
The view I expressed was that big name developers and publishers should get together and bring lawsuits against individuals who own places like BitTorrent sites which host torrents for stolen software; also, the advertisers that support them. Failing that, yes, lobby the government to do something about at least the most egregious offenders (the high traffic P2P sites).
That's a good idea, but would it really be worth spending money for the cases? Sites will get closed down and new ones will continue to open, however brief or lengthy their 'reign' and it'll be somewhat of an endless cycle. Some form of legislation will have to pass to prohibit the operation of such sites, but how many countries would have to agree on that to make it effective?
Edit - I'll just outright say that, while peer-to-peer stuff is a great idea, I don't think it's worth keeping around with the problems that have resulted due to it. I myself haven't grown reliant on it in any way.