The declining PC Sales/Piracy thread (and something about Iron Lore closing down)

ChewyWaffles · February 2008

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/titanquest/news_6186848.html

Eight years and two games later, Iron Lore Entertainment has announced today that it has closed its doors and will no longer pursue game development. The studio, which was cofounded in 2000 by ex-Ensemble cofounder and Age of Empires cocreator Brian Sullivan, is best known for its work on the 2006 action role-playing hybrid Titan Quest and its 2007 expansion, Titan Quest: Immortal Throne, both of which were published by THQ.

In a post to its Web site, Iron Lore said that financial issues were the primary cause of the studio's abrupt shuttering. "It is with great regret that we must announce that as of close of business Tuesday, February 19, 2008 Iron Lore Entertainment has ceased active game development," reads the post. "Several unrelated events occurred which resulted in Iron Lore being unable to secure funding for its next project."

Iron Lore has also been credited as codeveloper of THQ's third expansion to the Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War series of real-time strategy games, Soulstorm. It is unclear whether the game's release, which is currently scheduled for March, will be affected by Iron Lore's closing, and THQ had not responded to requests for comment as of press time.

Not much more to say. I really enjoyed Titan Quest - enough that I rebought it on Steam a while back instead of digging my discs out of a box in the closet.

stranger678 · February 2008

That's a damn shame, Titan Quest and it's expansion were solid as hell.

Evangir · February 2008

Really big shame here. The game's only real problems were caused by THQ telling them to go to hell when they wanted money to release more patches.

Big Classy · February 2008

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!

Evangir · February 2008

Big Isy wrote: »

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.

tbloxham · February 2008

Titan Quest was pretty good, although its loot system was a bit bland compared to D2. Still, it was a well made game. However I hadnt heard any announcements for new games from them, so I imagine they had an idea, it turned into a money pit and now they're all just moving on to new projects.

Mahnmut · February 2008

This is too bad. Titan Quest was a solid game.

Evangir wrote: »

Big Isy wrote: »

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?

polaris314 · February 2008

Mahnmut wrote: »

This is too bad. Titan Quest was a solid game.

Evangir wrote: »

Big Isy wrote: »

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).

Shens · February 2008

polaris314 wrote: »

Mahnmut wrote: »

This is too bad. Titan Quest was a solid game.

Evangir wrote: »

Big Isy wrote: »

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.

LewieP · February 2008

At least they weren't bought by EA

Xtarath · February 2008

This makes me very, very sad.

I loved lobbing fireballs at the cat people in Titan Quest. Loads of fun(not for them)

Me-ow!

Basil · February 2008

Xtarath wrote: »

This makes me very, very sad.

I loved lobbing fireballs at the cat people in Titan Quest. Loads of fun(not for them)

Me-ow!

People like you are the reason catgirls are an endangered species.

Goomba · February 2008

Screw Titan's Quest, think of the future of DoW.

Cherrn · February 2008

I love Titan Quest. I was a big fan of Diablo 1, but I was never able to stand Diablo 2, so TQ filled the void quite nicely. Its excellent class system is practically unparalleled. It's a shame, since they didn't even get to make any other games.

Xtarath · February 2008

Basil wrote: »

Xtarath wrote: »

This makes me very, very sad.

I loved lobbing fireballs at the cat people in Titan Quest. Loads of fun(not for them)

Me-ow!

People like you are the reason catgirls are an endangered species.

That brings up a good point. I only saw female cat people :winky:

GoodOmens · February 2008

Goomba wrote: »

Screw Titan's Quest, think of the future of DoW.

I'm looking forward to Soulstorm, and I'll be bummed if it's delayed. I haven't found anything conclusive one way or the other. I even made the mistake of trying the gamefaqs board.

Pray for me.

Houk the Namebringer · February 2008

LewieP wrote: »

At least they weren't bought by EA

I'm sure that's the exact thoughts of the recently unemployed.

LewieP · February 2008

Houk wrote: »

LewieP wrote: »

At least they weren't bought by EA

I'm sure that's the exact thoughts of the recently unemployed.

Well, I hope they all find employment elsewhere, and if hopefully their talent should speak for itself.

I was mostly joking though.

Pugnate · February 2008

Titan Quest - Frustrations of a PC Developer
by Dhruin, 22:22

Michael Fitch - one of THQ's producers on Titan Quest - has let rip with frustrations on PC game development in a post at QT3. Clearly, the closure of Iron Lore is driving the anger but it's still an interesting read:

Greetings:
So, ILE shut down. This is tangentially related to that, not why they shut down, but part of why it was such a difficult freaking slog trying not to. It's a rough, rough world out there for independent studios who want to make big games, even worse if you're single-team and don't have a successful franchise to ride or a wealthy benefactor. Trying to make it on PC product is even tougher, and here's why.

Piracy. Yeah, that's right, I said it. No, I don't want to re-hash the endless "piracy spreads awareness", "I only pirate because there's no demo", "people who pirate wouldn't buy the game anyway" round-robin. Been there, done that. I do want to point to a couple of things, though.

One, there are other costs to piracy than just lost sales. For example, with TQ, the game was pirated and released on the nets before it hit stores. It was a fairly quick-and-dirty crack job, and in fact, it missed a lot of the copy-protection that was in the game. One of the copy-protection routines was keyed off the quest system, for example. You could start the game just fine, but when the quest triggered, it would do a security check, and dump you out if you had a pirated copy. There was another one in the streaming routine. So, it's a couple of days before release, and I start seeing people on the forums complaining about how buggy the game is, how it crashes all the time. A lot of people are talking about how it crashes right when you come out of the first cave. Yeah, that's right. There was a security check there.

So, before the game even comes out, we've got people bad-mouthing it because their pirated copies crash, even though a legitimate copy won't. We took a lot of shit on this, completely undeserved mind you. How many people decided to pick up the pirated version because it had this reputation and they didn't want to risk buying something that didn't work? Talk about your self-fulfilling prophecy.

One guy went so far as to say he'd bought the retail game and it was having the exact same crashes, so it must be the game itself. This was one of the most vocal detractors, and we got into it a little bit. He swore up and down that he'd done everything above-board, installed it on a clean machine, updated everything, still getting the same crashes. It was our fault, we were stupid, our programmers didn't know how to make games - some other guy asked "do they code with their feet?". About a week later, he realized that he'd forgotten to re-install his BIOS update after he wiped the machine. He fixed that, all his crashes went away. At least he was man enough to admit it.

So, for a game that doesn't have a Madden-sized advertising budget, word of mouth is your biggest hope, and here we are, before the game even releases, getting bashed to hell and gone by people who can't even be bothered to actually pay for the game. What was the ultimate impact of that? Hard to measure, but it did get mentioned in several reviews. Think about that the next time you read "we didn't have any problems running the game, but there are reports on the internet that people are having crashes."

Two, the numbers on piracy are really astonishing. The research I've seen pegs the piracy rate at between 70-85% on PC in the US, 90%+ in Europe, off the charts in Asia. I didn't believe it at first. It seemed way too high. Then I saw that Bioshock was selling 5 to 1 on console vs. PC. And Call of Duty 4 was selling 10 to 1. These are hardcore games, shooters, classic PC audience stuff. Given the difference in install base, I can't believe that there's that big of a difference in who played these games, but I guess there can be in who actually payed for them.

Let's dig a little deeper there. So, if 90% of your audience is stealing your game, even if you got a little bit more, say 10% of that audience to change their ways and pony up, what's the difference in income? Just about double. That's right, double. That's easily the difference between commercial failure and success. That's definitely the difference between doing okay and founding a lasting franchise. Even if you cut that down to 1% - 1 out of every hundred people who are pirating the game - who would actually buy the game, that's still a 10% increase in revenue. Again, that's big enough to make the difference between breaking even and making a profit.

Titan Quest did okay. We didn't lose money on it. But if even a tiny fraction of the people who pirated the game had actually spent some god-damn money for their 40+ hours of entertainment, things could have been very different today. You can bitch all you want about how piracy is your god-given right, and none of it matters anyway because you can't change how people behave... whatever. Some really good people made a seriously good game, and they might still be in business if piracy weren't so rampant on the PC. That's a fact.

Enough about piracy. Let's talk about hardware vendors. Trying to make a game for PC is a freaking nightmare, and these guys make it harder all the time. Integrated video chips; integrated audio. These were two of our biggest headaches. Not only does this crap make people think - and wrongly - that they have a gaming-capable PC when they don't, the drive to get the cheapest components inevitably means you've got hardware out there with little or no driver support, marginal adherence to standards, and sometimes bizarre conflicts with other hardware.

And it just keeps getting worse. CD/DVD drives with bad firmware, video cards that look like they should be a step-up from a previous generation, but actually aren't, drivers that need to be constantly updated, separate rendering paths for optimizing on different chips, oh my god. Put together consumers who want the cheapest equipment possible with the best performance, manufacturers who don't give a shit what happens to their equipment once they ship it, and assemblers who need to work their margins everywhere possible, and you get a lot of shitty hardware out there, in innumerable configurations that you can't possibly test against. But, it's always the game's fault when something doesn't work.

Even if you get over the hump on hardware compatibility - and god knows, the hardware vendors are constantly making it worse - if you can, you still need to deal with software conflicts. There are a lot of apps running on people's machines that they're not even aware of, or have become such a part of the computer they don't even think of them as being apps anymore. IM that's always on; peer-to-peer clients running in the background; not to mention the various adware and malware crap that people pick up doing things they really shouldn't. Trying to run a CPU and memory heavy app in that environment is a nightmare. But, again, it's always the game's fault if it doesn't work.

Which brings me to the audience. There's a lot of stupid people out there. Now, don't get me wrong, there's a lot of very savvy people out there, too, and there were some great folks in the TQ community who helped us out a lot. But, there's a lot of stupid people. Basic, basic stuff, like updating your drivers, or de-fragging your hard drive, or having antivirus so your machine isn't a teetering pile of rogue programs. PC folks want to have the freedom to do whatever the hell they want with their machines, and god help them they will do it; more power to them, really. But god forbid something that they've done - or failed to do - creates a problem with your game. There are few better examples of the "it can't possibly be my fault" culture in the west than gaming forums.

And while I'm at it, I don't want to spare the reviewers either. We had one reviewer - I won't name names, you can find it if you look hard enough - who missed the fact that you can teleport from wherever you are in TQ back to any of the major towns you've visited. So, this guy was hand-carting all of his stuff back to town every time his inventory was full. Through the entire game. Now, not only was this in the manual, and in the roll-over tooltips for the UI, but it was also in the tutorial, the very first time you walk past one of these giant pads that lights up like a beacon to the heavens. Nonetheless, he missed it, and he commented in his review how tedious this was and how much he missed being able to portal back to town. When we - and lots of our fans - pointed out that this was the reviewer's fault, not the game's, they amended the review. But, they didn't change the score. Do you honestly think that not having to run back to town all the time to sell your stuff wouldn't have made the game a better experience?

We had another reviewer who got crashes on both the original and the expansion pack. We worked with him to figure out what was going on; the first time, it was an obscure peripheral that was causing the crash, a classic hardware conflict for a type of hardware that very, very few people have. The second time, it was in a pre-release build that we had told him was pre-release. After identifying the problem, getting him around it, and verifying that the bug was a known issue and had been fixed in the interim, he still ran the story with a prominent mention of this bug. With friends like that...

Alright, I'm done. Making PC products is not all fun and games. It's an uphill slog, definitely. I'm a lifelong PC gamer, and hope to continue to work on PC games in the future, but man, they sure don't make it easy.

Best,
Michael.

urahonky · February 2008

Ugh... God damn it.

Goomba · February 2008

Stupid dumb stupid I hate people fuck.

Rakai · February 2008

Producer has negative comments on piracy.

Countdown to people decrying Michael Fitch...3...2...1...

KrunkMcGrunk · February 2008

Nooooooooooooooo!!!

Honestly, I know it's probably going to blow up in our faces, but here's hoping that the PCGA gets that hardware bullshit worked out.

urahonky · February 2008

I'm going to shit in a person's mouth every time they pirate a game now. I swear! I will!

Daemonion · February 2008

Article was a nice read.

TheKoolEagle · February 2008

can't wait til i'm in his position

but i agree with him entirely. PC gaming is dying because too many fuckheads just pirate games now. Its great that you can play a game for free but why do you want to dick the developers, they spent years of their lives building this for you, the gaming consumer, and what do you do? you throw shit right into their faces.

fuck pirating.

Kid Presentable · February 2008

That was an interesting read. Refreshingly candid at the very least.

I feel bad for them and I feel like I have to go purchase Titan's Quest now.

devoir · February 2008

Just as a note, the Dawn of War expansion was released to distribution. I think it was in the big post from Mitch, but I've been reading up around the 'net and wasn't sure.

Pugnate · February 2008

I feel like buying a second copy of Titan Quest. On STEAM with the expansion for $20.

RainbowDespair · February 2008

Titan Quest is a great hack & slash RPG, the only one that I enjoyed more than Diablo 2. I highly recommend picking it up if you like that sort of thing. It's rather sad that Iron Lore won't be able to follow it up with a sequel or further patches.

Interesting and depressing article. I knew piracy was big, but wow. Piracy is really making a mess of a lot of creative media: besides PC games, I know that the US anime industry is falling to pieces and I daresay that piracy (mostly downloaded fansubs) is the #1 cause.

tofu · February 2008

It's kind of funny that Stardock, an independent company that doesn't use DRM, doesn't seem to be in any danger of going out of business.

Goomba · February 2008

Honestly, I don't think piracy is as big as a few people think it is, but it's big enough that it hurts and then there's the dumb users and idiot reviewers that don't help anything. I just hate people so much.

The Wolfman · February 2008

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.

RainbowDespair · February 2008

Goomba wrote: »

and idiot reviewers that don't help anything.

That's my big problem: reviewers that don't know what they're talking about. A lot of the reviews online for Omega Five and (now) Triggerheart Exelica were written by people who obviously don't know anything about shmups with complaints about lack of story (which is actually considered a pro by most shmup fans), or length (well done shmups have some of the highest replay value of any games out there due to their difficulty and intricate scoring systems). Similarly, a lot of the reviews for Lost Odyssey were written by people who didn't care for JRPGs: being similar to old Final Fantasy games but on a relatively new console with all the fancy graphics that entails is something that most JRPG fans would consider a pro and yet many reviews seemed to consider it a fatal flaw.

Seriously, what's with reviewers thinking that they're qualified to review every game out there regardless of whether or not they're familiar or even enjoy the genre?

OremLK · February 2008

Man, this sucks. I hate to see another developer go, and Titan Quest was great.

randombattle · February 2008

Call me crazy but it seems to me like what killed Titan Quest more was the fact that it got like no advertising or anything at all.

Also the fact that they made Titan Quest and.. Titan Quest.. In the span of 8 years might of factored in too.

devoir · February 2008

randombattle wrote: »

Call me crazy but it seems to me like what killed Titan Quest more was the fact that it got like no advertising or anything at all.

Also the fact that they made Titan Quest and.. Titan Quest.. In the span of 8 years might of factored in too.

They also made the Dawn of War expansion and were working on other games.

The point about Galactic Civilizations doesn't take into account the fact that they were an established company, with a niche audience who were more likely to go ahead with that kind of thing. If Stardock did a D2-style action RPG, I guarantee that their piracy percentage would go through the roof.

KrunkMcGrunk · February 2008

randombattle wrote: »

Call me crazy but it seems to me like what killed Titan Quest more was the fact that it got like no advertising or anything at all.

Also the fact that they made Titan Quest and.. Titan Quest.. In the span of 8 years might of factored in too.

They were a pretty small development house. It's almost on-par for a developer of ILE's size to turn out that many games in that amount of time. But you're right, they didn't turn out much. I think they just couldn't reach the critical mass of money/production that a lot of gaming companies need to survive.

xgalaxy · February 2008

I'm going to get slammed for saying this. But this is exactly why copy protection schemes don't work and why developers shouldn't bother putting that crap in their games.

In the case of TQ, if they didn't have that silly copy protection, the people pirating their game wouldn't have gotten crashes and word of mouth about the game would have been better.

I know it sucks that people were stealing their game, but putting in copy protection that doesn't work obviously isn't helping AT ALL, so why bother? Especially when the end user experience can suffer (legitimate purchase or not) because of it.

KrunkMcGrunk · February 2008

xgalaxy wrote: »

I'm going to get slammed for saying this. But this is exactly why copy protection schemes don't work and why developers shouldn't bother putting that crap in their games.

In the case of TQ, if they didn't have that silly copy protection, the people pirating their game wouldn't have gotten crashes and word of mouth about the game would have been better.

I know it sucks that people were stealing their game, but putting in copy protection that doesn't work obviously isn't helping AT ALL, so why bother? Especially when the end user experience can suffer (legitimate purchase or not) because of it.

It seemed like that copy protection worked exactly how they wanted it to.

DiannaoChong · February 2008

their demo killed alot of their business. For some reason, it ran really shitty on any computer, but the full version ran really well. I would blame that before piracy. Just because a game is selling 10 to 1 dosent mean that ratio of 10 would want that game on the pc, or that the 9 to even it out even exist, or pirate/go without instead.

Not to blow things out of proportion, which I believe is done alot when it comes to piracy talk, but piracy has been a elephant in the corner for a while now, and its been almost an entire console generation (AT LEAST!) where pc developers should realize theres other places to go, and to see where thing were going in the current state of the industry. We are JUST NOW starting to see alternatives to stop piracy, battlefield heroes following the korean free game pay for extras strategy, EA releasing older games (I felt this was a test for response) for free and adv supported games, MMOs, multiplayer only games that require a key.

The industry needs to stop whining and hoping someone will save them, realize they need to innovate, meet demand with corrected supply (game price), and realize that theyve been losing to consoles for almost a whole generation now. The only hope at this pace, is that theres an overflow of events into console gaming that is repeats of history from pc gaming, games bricking consoles/devices/peripherals, games submitting to the "get it out the door, patch later" syndrome causing an influx of console games that require patches to be able to play, making anyone without an internet connection SoL on their 60$ purchase they cant return. I think these events have slowly been coming to the surface, but it would have to come alot faster, and across several different consoles around the same time for there to be an abandonment in the console market back to PC.

Im sorry if the above is a bit incoherent, but im sick of people complaining about piracy like its some new big problem.

It sucks these guys closed down, titan quest from what Ive played of it, was really fun but not worth it in the end for me to buy.

Penny Arcade

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The declining PC Sales/Piracy thread (and something about Iron Lore closing down)

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