Meanwhile someone who pirates a game probably gets a crack in the .rar, so it’s not only free, it’s simpler.

I’m surprised with so many mentions of Steam and its stewardship of the platform, nobody mentioned Stardock, specifically as it relates to piracy. They shipped Galactic Civilizations II with no copy protection, they were very public about this, and they took a public stand against disruptive copy protection.

The game sold very very well! At one point an employee of StarForce actually posted a link to a pirate torrent as though to say, “Oh, look at these fools, they have left their gates unbarred and the pirates are raping them as we speak!” And Stardock, didn’t f*cking care.

They were making great sales because people liked the product, customers wanted good, timely support of their product also. The product shipped in pretty decent shape and got better and better with patches. Purchasing and playing the product was very easy, no fussing with DRMs or dongles or anything. Want a CD and manual, all that jazz? Sure they can ship it for another 10 or 20 bucks. Lose your CD? No problem, in fact you don’t even have to wait to receive the game in the mail, much like Steam you have an account that has the right to download that game and play it on any machine you log in with.

Stardock has a lot less triple A titles on their market so far, just Galactic Civilizations II and Sins of a Solar Empire (off the top of my head), but to me they’re just as notable as Steam when it comes to saving and honoring the PC platform.

Basically, Steam and Stardock are an easier way to get a game than piracy. It’s just that simple. No invasive Russian bride pop-up ads, no chills running up your spine when you consider all the nasty virii you could be downloading, no burning CDs or rootkit utilities, just checkout, download, play.

Popcap also came up with a notable statistic on the whole piracy spectrum, which I believe I read about here on RPS awhile back. They had to eliminate 10,000 pirate downloads to get just a single additional retail sale on one of their games. So you can infer that for every 10,000 illegal downloads, they lost one sale.

Gametap is also doing a lot more for PC gaming than the PCGA ever will, but I won’t say too much good about them because they bungled their Quest for Glory ports and I can’t run them properly. Grumble grumble. They’ve caused all the honorable abandonware sites to get rid of any title that Gametap offers, which rankles me when Gametap’s emulator can’t effing run a game in a playable state.

If PCGA exists to get people interested and buying hardware, does not simplifying the ability to do so and having an effective software point between the games and the hardware the key component? What they want is to have a service with a polite subscription fee, Xbox live style, so that users pay to have their hardware stats blared all over the net. Feedback is part of the currency users should use to get what they want from these companies.

A completely different alternative would be to have all PC games self contained and that to run them you restart the system with the disk in. Running the game directly from the disk and saving to a USB disk or hard disk drive partition.

@Dinger
The wide range of user ability on PCs I reckon also complicates things. I actually think its easier to crack a game then decipher the difference of 20 similar sounding, looking, and power of graphics card.

(Although Steam, curiously, does its best to make finding the latest video card drivers easy enough to invalidate this).

Hardware manufacturers need games to force people to buy new hardware; they don’t care if you pirate games, because you can’t pirate the hardware needed to run said games.

But if the games dry up, that’s a big problem for them. And right now, developers are less excited working on a platform with perceived runaway piracy.

@steve
Would not meeting pirates on their own terms simply involve tossing partially completed games that they can spend ages modifying and tending like a small rooftop garden?

@Raznor
I agree, piracy is here misplaced in its role of being relevant to the stated goals of PCGA.
PCGA goal#1
Firstly, they intend to fix the flow of information about the PC as a platform
PCGA goal#2
Then they want developers to look at this and get excited about making games for PC

Sure, but you’re still facing the “free” versus “costs money” problem. And free will mostly win.

Today, I can buy cheap MP3s with “one-click” buying at amazon.com. Is that easy enough for people, or will they come up with another excuse why they downloaded that new Britney song?

While I’m with you on the awesomeness of Steam—well, aside from how freakin’ long it takes to load what appears to be a fairly simple app—it has way more anti-piracy stuff than you’re letting on. Like, it requires you to validate your copy online each time it’s loaded, which makes it the most onerous form of protection out there. You have to prove you’re not a pirate before loading the game.

Of course it offers an offline mode, but still…

I think you hit the nail on the head here. If a game isn’t great, why pay money for it. If you want to check out a game but you know it’s waaaaay overpriced and don’t expect to play it very long anyways, the way things are now, you either pirate it or don’t play at all. Maybe there is a demo, but has anyone else noticed how much most demos suck? The filesize gets bigger every year, and it seems like they are more and more restrictive about how long you can play for, or they make you create an account, etc etc. UT3 and Audiosurf, I’m looking at you. Just one of my own mp3s before it expires?!? WTF?!?!?

What I would really like to see is something similar to (or a modification of) Steam, where the pricing is based on the demand. If your game sucks, it isn’t going to be priced at $50 or $40 very long. Price drops, more people buy. Simple. When Audiosurf drops to $5, I’ll probably pick it up. That’s all I think it’s worth considering it doesn’t actually have very much at all of it’s own content. Not that I can’t afford the $10 it’s at now, but it’s the principle of the thing, innit?

The PC market does not need gamers to support the kind of AAA fandom driven titles pumped out on both the consoles and pc’s because if a gamer wants to experience those games as the designers want them to, they will have bought the console. People that have the kind of PC to run high end games already recognise the reasons for doing so, graphics, sound, video processing, big work screens, powerful CPUs…. These are the things that consoles are missing and this is why the PCGA has formed, to protect ‘customers’ of hardware – ie them being as freely able to use and exploit their hardware as much as possible and to safeguard innovation within their own (the companies) specialities.

Perhaps a situation like this has existed before, I am unable to counter any such suggestions. My answer directly would be is something like this has happened before, why did it not precede innovation in a much broader scope? Perhaps the technology, perhaps the lack of investment. I think to say that now it is becoming possible to consoles to compete directly with PCs is totally true and the real threat to PC as a platform in the future rather than the notion of the PC as a terminal and application platform. TV’s with sharper resolutions and useful peripherals make it easy for people to surf the internet and work from their TV.

I do not think my solution sees games becoming generic ‘PC GAME’ type format. The notion of having a grading system totally messes that as pop cap games require far less of a system to run than say the Valve games – at higher settings. Instead it is a way to make it easier to have people use their computer effectively, critically without stifling hardware development. To believe that the PCGA exists solely for the benefit of gamers, both console and pc is wrong. The industry has identified a threat or a potential they wish to minimise or maximise. To them having Windows as a foundation is not a perfect scenario but far better than loosing the domain completely.

PCGA can claim fairly that it exists because too many people are put off buying games on the PC because every time a new game comes out they need new drivers, a new CPU, more ram, bigger hard drive, the list goes on. Modern consoles (generally) are not upgraded in the same way you know that by buying a game with PS3 written on it, it will work in a PS3. This is the compatibility I think their aiming for. Does not the PC gamer themself though wish to have a say in how this plays out. Perhaps it is for the benefit of the PC denizens that Windows continues to dominate the market, because that is the most suitable a operating system can be for balancing application use with work with gaming. Perhaps the perceived threat to PCs will not exist until your banker can check your bank statement using his Playstation 4. My issue that were this development to continue would PCs be able to stage a recovery in the future when hardware is simply rolled out every 3-5 years and everyone has to upgrade. It being accepted that this is part of staying up to date and this box does everything you need, internet, work and games, with the benefit of minimal confusion.

My argument is that this is not effective for the market or the end users. It could stagnate development in areas leaving control with firms that pursue their own agenda rather than pursuing avenues they may wish or need to explore to remain a cutting edge technology firm. To bring the example of Commodore 64 Word Processor, would anyone use the application today as a way of getting something done? Presumably not because it does not support other formats, it has no way of talking to modern printers. The central question is how can you make the PC as accessible as a console without taking away what makes it a PC.

The idea of a generic gaming ‘operating system’ should provoke a reaction, primarily because it is a threat to that level of compatibility. Indeed a capable user can make sure their documents on linux load in windows or osx. Would such a system run within a current one, or alongside windows/linux/mac.
@Theory, would this be the solution for someone that wishes to play Flight Sim without restarting the computer?
To replace windows completely would be seemingly out of the question for most people, a target population of very few. A generic compatibility layer does present a strong alternative. Allowing advanced users to do as they wish, simplifying it for beginners. This layer I do not think can be part of Windows because Microsoft would simply seek ownership and only make it available above Windows, this would be a named version of what already exists. A layer as such addresses several problems, the foremost of which is developing a standard for a machine that is essentially modular, providing widespread support for all peripherals and hardware. Windows does not do this directly, but because of a need, spawned by the development of games on the platform rather than itself being pre-geared towards something for people to express themselves with, through games.

Tim Edwards is cool, but that statement wasn’t. Some companies really need to look at the past sometimes to see what has changed for the worse. A properly worked out boxed copy can have so much added value it’s ridiculous to suggest a future without retail, thinking everyone can or wants to buy online is just as naïve. Offering a choice should be everything, especially in terms of how a product will be sold.

This alliance does not represent people that make games.

Here lies the nugget. They do not make games (for the most part), but they want to encourage development of high-volume AAA games for PCs. For processor and graphics card manufacturers, the reason is absolutely clear: gamers are one of the major consumers of the high-end stuff, where the profit margins are huge. Crysis and Bioshock don’t just earn money for the development houses.
For Microsoft, people like to point at “Games for Windows” and the DX10 debacle, and claim that “state-of-the-art” games serve Microsoft as yet another way to sell the latest flavor of Windows.
Okay, fine, and all that. Here’s another possibility:

Computers are consoles, consoles are computers.

Consider 1982. (or was it 83?) You had three tiers in the home computing market: consoles, 8-bit machines, and 16-bit machines. Consoles played games. 8-bit machines (mostly 6502s with a few Z80s thrown in) played games and did more serious computing tasks. 16-bit machines sucked at games, but were the only route for semi-professional computing tasks.
Yeah, I used my Commodore 64 as a Word Processor, and I’m sure many other people did too, but it wasn’t pretty. That thing was there for gaming.
In 1990, things weren’t much different: NES was still around, the Sega Genesis and like consoles took up that segment. The Amiga and the Atari ST were still the gamers’ choice, and heck, AmigaOS was the last perfect PC OS. Those Macs could do a few things, mostly in monochrome. But in the office, the 286s and 386s started sporting VGA cards and soundblasters. They were starting to compete.

So in the next couple years, the “Gaming PC” line failed and we wound up with Microsoft ruling the roost.
But as Sony and Microsoft now duel for the “hardcore console”, they’re heading back in that territory. We can talk about Sony or even Nintendo not wanting to slap a keyboard on their toys — until now, Sony’s effort to put Linux on their PSs has been largely to dodge EU tax law. But will that always remain so? Consoles are sufficiently powerful that they can do a lot of the things that gamers need a PC to do (including home theatre), and without the hardware configuration nightmare of the Windows environment. On the other side, like the Apple ][s and Amigas of old, the current crop of consoles plays games better than most entry-level MS-running desktops do. All we need is a keyboard, a mouse, and maybe support for some cool peripherals.

So if gamers abandon Windows for the consoles, Microsoft would be vulnerable to gamers abandoning Microsoft altogether. They need gamers.

But making Windows games more like console games is not the answer. Console games are more like console games than Windows games can ever be. Specific identity trumps generic identity and superficial likeness every time.

IMO, that would help developers at the expense of the players. I never enjoyed having to reboot my computer to play Flight Simulator.

PC’s lay between this feeling of flexible hardware that the xbox was and the fact that it is an ‘uncontrollable’ hardware medium. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo, despite simplified software, chip hardware and tutorials available on the net are able to maintain a good grasp of their platforms. Despite the great things hackers were able to do with the xbox, it all remains strictly illegal in Microsoft’s eyes. The opening and modification of the hardware is a direct contravention of the policy you accept by buying the console in the first place.

The PCGA is a good idea, but its goals are contorted. Is it a method to unify the market and give greater access to hardware for games, in the way a ps2 is geared towards graphics and polygon chomping might (in its time) or is it a way of starting to restrict and control what some one can do with their pc for the greater goal of simplifying computer hardware in the future.

Software and hardware form the backbones of consoles and PC’s. Currently Windows dominates the market, lets turn the PCGA on its head. Would it not be better to aim at a more operating system type environment in which all games could be installed. This ’shell’ could be then within or alongside any OS on any system (intel/amd/powerpc/mac/…). A good example of this environment is steam, but I would suggest a freeware environment that sleeps like Steam but that would actually have steam installed within it, like a compatibility layer in linux for running windows type programs. This ’skin’ would provide all the resources for running games, with bias towards graphics and interaction. Naturally a conceptual layer like this would need to have a windows type ‘retro’ layer for games already out designed to be installed under windows. It would be similar to say the ps3 console menu with polite lists and perhaps nice animations.

The PCGA is a collection of hardware firms, interested and recognising the effect of programs and ideas like Steam. Is not a software solution the most resource efficient as future hardware would only need to be tested with a single ’skin’ for ensure gaming compatibility. Does not protecting games from a single OS (windows) free up designers to think and work in the environments they want rather than appealing to what they feel is the market. When Grand Theft Auto III was released sales of the ps2 accelerated because people could only get that game on the ps2. The current environment on consoles is very different, games often appear on both the 360 and ps3, as well as the wii. The PC market remains the same, Windows, and with a new Microsoft improved ‘Games for Windows’ which seems to mean you will need a very powerful pc and then Vista as well. The hardware companies recognise this as a problem but probably will not take the capital risk to develop something truly innovative. This attitude is the most problematic for people when looking at buying computers, as they will be told a thousand and one different things, especially is they have not computer experience. I think to find out a top end gaming machine would probably cost £2000 would shock them. Additionally people wanting to sell computer games must be able to make a profit from the games themselves. This alliance does not represent people that make games. Microsoft occupies a unique position within the alliance because it controls the ’software’ of the pc. I think this will turn out problematic for the PCGA as it becomes apparent that Microsoft wants different things from the PCGA than the other companies. This is the complete proprietorial dominance of the software required to play games. This is the case already and it will want to maintain it.

In Summary, Windows is not the cause of the problem in gaming but it is a problem and will not help things along. Gigantic Sumo Software Corporation flab fests like ‘games for windows’ are not want people want to see. They want a simple ’skin’, a gui and compatibility layer for functionality of all their games old and new. A layer where steam can also fit in as well. This layer is geared for high level functionality and fast networking, the best that the machine running it is capable of. This would go nicely with the idea of coming up with ‘bands’ of pc capability with a simple ‘low, medium, high’ concept.

This idea is not to prevent innovation in hardware, end up handing all our gaming hardware keys to either intel or amd, but initiating ideas and development about the market. Software compatibility and hardware clarity is what is needed, not the other way around.