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Regrettably, some kind of accident has resulted in Mr Everiss deleting and/or silently altering his own comments too. For example, post 26 (“Deleted”) once featured his brilliant rebuttal,

Stuart you really have no idea what you are talking about. As I have said repeatedly, I was there. You only have, at best, third hand accounts. If Ian Hetherington, David Lawson and Mark Butler all said that my article was rubbish then I might have a think about it. Meanwhile it is the most accurate account of the demise of Imagine yet written

while the new version of post 106 (“Deleted”) deprives us of a long, factually unimpeachable analysis of piracy including the damning evidence,

It also killed off PSX development. Has stunted PSP development. Helped kill off the Dreamcast. Has destroyed the PC boxed game market

so crushing that Mr Everiss immediately announces his resignation from the discussion because he has better things to do; post 135′s absence (“Deleted”) unfortunately eliminates Mr Everiss’s proud list of industry achievements; and post 143 (“Deleted”) self-effacingly removes Mr Everiss’s brilliantly well-constructed, logically coherent, point by point demolishing of an ungrateful malcontent (“I thought that I would point out some glaring inaccuracies…”).

Not to worry though, readers, as these and other deletions and silent alterations are in the process of diligent recovery from iterative copies of the page so newcomers, other interested parties and posterity itself can be certain of seeing the complete story Mr Everiss has so modestly edited.

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On the other hand I’m a competitive player in both StarCraft and WarCraft 3 and have played thousands of games of each. There’s a place for both CoH and StarCraft 2 since they’re so different.

Also:

I really couldn’t disagree more, and suspect Starcraft 2’s biggest problem is going to be trying to balance the desires of their enormous Korean audience who have a national sport based around precision control and the mainstream western audience who now quite like games trying to minimise the Obsessive-compulsive part of play.

WarCraft 3 is huuuuuge in China and you can bet that SC2 will sell like hotcakes there. Piracy will be less of an issue since everyone will want to play on Battle.net. And those sales are in addition to the massive guaranteed sales in Korea and Europe. The United States is a trickier region where RTSes aren’t as popular but I’d bet it’ll still outsell CoH by a wide margin even there.

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KG

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I know that retail is finished and have written so many times on my blog. With yet another article, this time on games of the future, due this week.

Also I have now written a longer article on piracy and gaming that will also be published on my blog this week.

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The parallel pretty much falls apart when he asserts that the schoolyard “discovered” twin tape recorders in 1984.
I remember PC (er. Pet) user groups of 1980, and I don’t need a revisionist account of what methods we had and didn’t have to copy software. Humans are social animals.

Rev. Stu was trying to suggest complete and utter mismanagement rather than piracy. He goes overboard trying to point out the falsity of every one of Bruce’s assertions.

But three things bubble up:

A. If Bruce wants to argue his point, the strongest he can get is that “Megagames were develop in response to piracy; Megagames failed, and Imagine closed shop; therefore piracy killed Megagames.”
Not only is it a bad case of the single-cause fallacy, but it’s a bit like blaming the Challenger crash on the prohibition of asbestos: “The original O-Ring design had asbestos in it. Asbestos was banned, so they changed the design and materials. The new material failed, causing the massive explosion; therefore, banning asbestos killed seven astronauts.”
Or, simpler still: “Heavy rain killed all those people, not our defective roof design.”
Piracy is an environmental force. We can debate until the end how much damage it does and where, but the fact is that it exists, so go figure out how to make money in a world with piracy. And there are plenty of companies that are doing just that — some by building stronger roofs, others by moving to where it doesn’t rain so much, and some by just staying in budget and on time.

B. Bruce mentions how they survived the PS1 Piratocalpyse:

We survived (and had to make 20% of the workforce redundant) in the two year gap mainly on PC games, most notably Operation Flashpoint which went to number one in every country with a chart. We put a massive amount of effort into anti piracy on this game. Our PC games without anti piracy, like Severance, sold very little.

Yes, but the implication, FADE = success, doesn’t work. Severance sucked, as the Rev. Stu pointed out. There are still quite a few people playing OFP today (not ArmA, but OFP itself). In BIS’ post-mortem, Marek himself points out:

One very concerning thing was that our final CD was still manipulated by the publisher. The publisher applied SafeDisc protection to the final code, which caused some unexpected compatibility problems that we weren’t able to control. The mixing of various SafeDisc versions and a serious compatibility problem with Windows 2000 that was present in the first European batch of CDs could have been avoided.

At some point, OFP patches did away altogether with copy-protection. Whether copy-protection for OFP was needed is one argument, but saying that the copy-protection employed in OFP contributed to its success at the very least challenges the data available: FADE was a liability.

C. Underlying Bruce’s argument is a false assumption. That is, “software sales must be retail.” I know, he nuances this himself, but that’s the underlying notion. The problem is that, like music, it’s now far easier to distribute software on the internet. P2P is taking off because people have the bandwidth such that pirating games across the internet is trivial. So is downloading them at pay sites. Meanwhile, many developers are still dealing exclusively with retailers, most of which do not specialize in software, and the particularities of software distribution (the W. H. Smith example of “free returns” being one), which cost the developer far more than online distribution, and which is much less flexible than digital release. (How much lead for a print ad campaign vs. an online one? How far in advance do you need to secure bandwidth for massive downloads?)

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KG

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