Rock, Paper, Shotgun

29/04/2008 at 20:23 Mike says:

I love this “they bring it on themselves, those piratey PC gamers” lark. The further along we get with consoles, the more we see piracy on them. It’s just a matter of what’s in most people’s homes.

Still, it’s fair enough that they want to do this. Hopefully, with platforms like Steam emerging, this sort of thing will be a blip on gaming history rather than being representative of a future trend.

29/04/2008 at 20:38 Mario Granger says:

But let’s be perfectly honest; what exactly has Crytek really contributed to PC gaming? Not to say Crysis is completely without merit, but its basically FarCry with new graphics right down to the stellar first half ruined by a ridiculous sci-fi element.

I have to admit, I don’t really care about this at all. This ranks up there with Epic’s ridiculous bashing of the Wii in my eyes.

29/04/2008 at 20:49 Jonathan says:

“That said, in these splendidly idea-rich times for PC, do we still need someone pushing quite so hard against the graphical ceiling?” No. No we don’t.

Crytek are engineers not artists. They can perfectly replicate a tree but they do shit bird song. Not sure what that means. I didn’t like Crysis. Roburky had it right, how many months did they waste on bendy leaves only to use five year old animation tech. They focused on making pretty stills. you don’t need animation for that.

Also wasn’t the pirating for the Playstation absolutely horrendous? Everyone I knew had a “chipped” console. Steamworks has the potential to be the biggest games console in the world. At least it will if Valve don’t censor or block new games. If they don’t then PCs will be the easiest way for designers to get a game out as they won’t need a license from the console makers.

29/04/2008 at 20:53 Dude says:

Yeah they should read about GTA IV being leaked 10 days before it official launch. I think piracy is also an issue on consoles, but simply the fact that there is so many of them make it less than an issue than on PC. I would like to see actual figure to compare piracy on console and on PC. At the time of the PS1 everyone around was pirating games, I wonder if it changed….
Is it sad? well not really, they are probably going to make money by selling to the console world and they will probably have some extra in their engine for the good old PC. Let’s face it, consoles will always lag behind the graphic race.
If it means more money, it means more time to develop games. Now of course their is the argument of dumbed down game because it’s also on console. Personally I don’t think it is true in all case. but I can allready see it coming for their next game…

29/04/2008 at 21:03 UncleLou says:

“Just as an idea to throw out into a debate, this is about them not selling 6-7.5 million (i.e. What CoD4 did) instead of the 1.5 million or so they probably have.”

That’s not really what he’s saying though, is it? He’s not saying they’ll go multiplatform because you of course sell more on 2 or 3 platforms than on one, he’s comparing Crysis to single console exclusives (or to how much a game like CoD 4 has sold on each the PS3 and 360, for that matter, rather than in total) – at least that’s how I understand him.

29/04/2008 at 21:10 Kalain says:

The comments about piracy on the PC are starting to get old now. Consoles suffer from it just as much as pc’s, look at GTAIV on the 360. people were playing it up to a week before launch. I believe the PS3 has been cracked.

I go to my local market and I see far more pirated games for the 360 than the PC.

But as KG has said, they probably want more cash so they are going for the consoles now. When the consoles get to the end of their life, in about 2-3 years, you’ll see PC exclusives again. BUt, I believe they are just doing this so they can say it sold 6+ million.

29/04/2008 at 21:15 UncleLou says:

“BUt, I believe they are just doing this so they can say it sold 6+ million.”

The thing is, I can’t really blame them. If you can sell 3 times the number with comparatively little additional development time, you’d need a bloody good reason not to do it.

29/04/2008 at 21:19 Yoshi says:

This announcement seems a bit disingenuous coming form Crytek, a company that was raided in its early days for using pirated software.

http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=205574

Couldn’t find any information on the outcome of the raid.

Perhaps they paid the licenses/fees and it went away?

29/04/2008 at 21:23 Rob says:

Just a note to those praising Steam vis-a-vis stopping piracy: it only prevents pre-release piracy, post-release encryption on Steam is routinely cracked.

29/04/2008 at 21:26 Monkfish says:

I can’t help thinking this is just a bit of scapegoatery. Sure PC piracy ain’t exactly ideal, but is it really affecting sales that badly? Are a significant portion of those cheekily downloaded copies genuinely lost sales?

I’d have been happier if they simply said that they were just gonna chase the mighty console dollar, and not give any other half-assed reason. Making out that piracy is at the very core of PC gaming is tarring everyone with the same brush, and I don’t think that’s fair on the 1.5 million punters that bought the game fair and square.

29/04/2008 at 21:31 Rook says:

You’d think that demo they released before the game came out would have answered that question.

29/04/2008 at 21:35 fluffy bunny says:

I wonder how many of the people who will inevitably cry “bullshit!” at the notion that piracy might be killing the high-end PC games market are pirates themselves.

29/04/2008 at 21:38 UncleLou says:

And even if it is bullshit, publishers and developers obviously believe it. And they are the only ones that matter in the end.

29/04/2008 at 21:44 po says:

Quote: UncleLou

And even if it is bullshit, publishers and developers obviously believe it. And they are the only ones that matter in the end.

Thankfully quality publishers like Stardock/Ironclad don’t believe it, just the big overhyping publishers like EA, who can quite frankly f-off to console land.

29/04/2008 at 21:50 UncleLou says:

“Because we all know pirates would’ve gone out and bought a copy if piracy was nonexistent.”

Noone says that. Well, the industry sometimes does to calculate their theoretical damage, but they don’t believe it themselves. But if you see the figures, often before a game’s release, you’d have to be rather naive to believe that it doesn’t have a significant impact on sales.

That aside, there’s of course also the more philosophical idea – you don’t want people to use something for free that you have created to earn your living, whether they would have payed for it or not.

29/04/2008 at 21:52 Anach says:

A huge number of pirates doesnt mean that if there werent pirates that it would sell a huge number of games.

It would most likely be a small percentage of those pirates that would actually purchase the software if they werent able to pirate it.

29/04/2008 at 21:59 po says:

How many online games have been pirated. For practically every online game I’ve played (BF2, BF2142, TF2, CoD4) you need an individual serial number to play online. Either that our you’re stuck playing hacked servers with a bunch of cheats.

29/04/2008 at 22:03 Acosta says:

I’m a bit puzzled for the reactions here. Everyone (apart of Stardock or Valve, which put their games on consoles too) are complaining of the actual state of PC gaming and the best answer we can give is: “uh, the game was crap”.

If you want to close the eyes and sing “lalala”, fine but you are crazy if you think this is not an issue. What is going to be the space of PC gaming? a second thought platform to put ports from technically inferior consoles? There is less and less money for PC project and less studios interested on it, I don´t know you but I find it a less than ideal situation.

29/04/2008 at 22:05 po says:

Back when I was chipping Xboxen, the best mod chip you could buy was £45 including shipping.

29/04/2008 at 22:06 Kanakotka says:

Nothing wrong with piracy. It has been there since computer gaming. I actually have pyro 2 cracked. Anyone remember pyro 2? Yeah, it was 1992 or something like that. It’s just hip to cry and whine about piracy, and blame everything on it. The true software pirate’s creed is simple, so simple, in fact, that i have to type it in caps. Any group that has been around for more than a year and isn’t retarded has this posted in every single info file.

IF YOU LIKE THE GAME, BUY IT. SUPPORT THE SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS.

Piracy is the leading cause of shitty games not being done en masse, and great games being supported. We would be flooded with barbie adventure games if piracy didn’t exist.
Yet, nobody mentions this in the press, curious, isn’t it?

I have bought around 40 games that i have pirated first.(one of them being crysis. Another one being farcry… i see a pattern) The number of those i haven’t bought and played is, of course, greater. But you could get over 40 games just by looking at EA’s games with year number in the title. There are over 15 NHL titles, for instance… sigh. :P

Yet they fail to always mention that console piracy exist on similar scale. Have these people even heard of mod chips?

And just like Ozzie said; ” main problem Crytek faced with Crysis was that they limited their audience hugely through massive system requirements” Though, this bothers me… didn’t Crytek give out a press release not too long ago that Crysis sold over a million copies? FLOP MY ACHING ASS

Also, epic weeping at UT3′s flop, and pointing the finger at pirates is just ridiculous, unintentional humor. It’s an online game, and the single player is boring, let’s face it, no one wants to play Unreal Tournament as single player. The game flopped because it bluescreened estimated 20% of the computers it ran on, and which it didn’t bluescreen, it crashed to the desktop, to the point that 10-30% could play the game, and realize it’s shitty reincarnation of a boring game.

29/04/2008 at 22:12 fluffy bunny says:

Cliffski: “Piracy *is* killing off PC gaming. How many more developers have to abandon the PC as lead platform (or abandon it completely) before the kids who refuse to buy games get this through their skulls?”

Ah, but you’re a developer, so you can’t be trusted. Because obviously, like all other developers who have been saying this lately, you’re part of that great PC-hating conspiracy to slander the PC games market. Yes.*

* might not be what I believe.

Edit: Uh, my response was more fun before you posted the post above mine… serves me right for being slow. :)

Also:

Frosty:
“The real argument:
Pirate-boy has £40. He wants copies of PCShooter25 and ConsoleTrash3000.
Having money, he pirates the one that’s easiest to pirate. That would be the one on the PC.
Total loss to the industry? £0. Again, no money that didn’t exist in the first place wasn’t spent, and nobody lost it.
Total loss to the PC-games sector of the market? That would be a £40 loss from the sale that went to the console game instead of the PC game. Right there, there was money to be had and it was not had by the industry because of piracy.”

QFT.

29/04/2008 at 22:19 cHeal says:

“We are suffering currently from the huge piracy that is encompassing Crysis. We seem to lead the charts in piracy by a large margin. I believe that’s the core problem of PC gaming: PC gamers that pirate games inherently destroy the platform. Similar games on consoles sell factors of 4-5 more. It was a big lesson for us and I believe we won’t have PC exclusives as we did with Crysis in future. We are going to support PC, but not exclusive any more.”

I think this man should read the article on Piracy authored by the Sins of our Solar Empire developer. He made two very important points. Create a game which will run on a wide range of systems (also something I feel Valve pioneered) and STOP MAKING GAMES FOR A DEMOGRAPHIC OF PEOPLE WHO PIRATE!!!

It really is that simple, it’s all very well and good to complain about piracy but why do developers continue to make games which I would nearly say encourage piracy. It’s an FPS, it is hardware braking technology, it’s been hugely hyped and there are questions over whether it will run on peoples systems. That is smack bang in the middle of pirate country I’m afraid.

Games which are being looked forward to a lot will in-evitably suffer from piracy, whether it be on PC or console. On PC a few steps can be taken to avoid piracy. Provide a healthy sized demo at the right time, not two months before and certainly not two months after. I’d also imagine a good number of people, who wank over computer graphics are the same kind of people who know how to pirate. Sure it’s not hard, but most gamers who are not highly involved in the PC software internet social networks don’t know what torrents are and they certainly wouldn’t know how to mount a drive, hell I didn’t know until 6 months ago. Stop making games which so specifically appeal to this hardcore group of gamers. I hate to tar them all with the same brush (which I actually am not, I’m just think the percentage wise I’d imagine piracy is higher among this group) but the needs of these people (new tech) is an element of the industry which is genuinely of little real worth.

Crysis limited its possible market by creating an engine which such a small number of people would ever have the chance to play on release, I don’t believe that monetary concerns should take complete presendence over the art of the industry but some research into the market you are relying on to survive is still required and when those elements of your game which are limiting your market are so superfluous one really has to wonder what Crytek were thinking.

That’s my take. It’s sad to see so few developers making pc exclusive titles but to blame on piracy the failings of the game Crysis really seems to purposely miss the point.

I’m not sure about CoD4, I heard that it had high piracy rates but it seems to have still done pretty damn well, so it’s hard to guage how much of an effect piracy actually had on the game, as it always is.

EDIT: I take exception to Cliffski’s belief that piracy is killing PC gaming as it implys that PC gaming is dying or will at some point be dead. This is simply not true, infact PC gaming will almost definitely outlast all other formats just because PC development is open and free and nearly everyone has a PC, less and less people I know are getting the new consoles. What are they getting instead? A laptop.

29/04/2008 at 22:21 RichPowers says:

Chemix: That may be true of PC users as a whole, but the people who are most likely to be PC gamers — computer literate users with broadband — would have no problem finding them. (PC gamer in this sense meaning those who play Battlefield, Crysis, etc.)

29/04/2008 at 22:26 Larington says:

In the case of Steam games being cracked? – well, I’ve noticed that quite a few publishing types like to talk about ‘Day one sales’, its the big bug bear and the thing they love to brag about – My game sold x million *on the day of release!*… The Steam online auth system allows you to prevent the day one piracy because any disc copy of the game doesn’t include the base exe which is downloaded when you’ve passed auth and the magic release game button has been pressed.

Thats mostly why Steam is mentioned as a good solution to the whole piracy issue, it encourages people to actually fork money out for the game in order to play it straight away.

Its also why I hate consoles, where PC gets a game release weeks, months or even a year after the console version(s) were released so a lot of the ‘must have now’ types have already bought or pirated the game (For a modded console), so the battle is already won by the consoles.

29/04/2008 at 22:27 UncleLou says:

and STOP MAKING GAMES FOR A DEMOGRAPHIC OF PEOPLE WHO PIRATE!!!

I for one happen to like (and buy) many games others obviously pirate. What the SoaSE dev said (and I thought it was mostly a lot of smug nonsense, btw.) is a suggestion to narrow the scope of gaming, effectively.

Read what cliffski wrote – many causal games already target 30 women because they don’t download games. Now I have nothing at all against 30 women, but I don’t necessarily share my girl-friend’s taste in games.

edit:

too slow for fluffy bunny :)

29/04/2008 at 22:32 CrashT says:

If I wanted a pirated copy of Crysis (Or any other PC title) I could go to a particular website and start downloading it in the space of thrity seconds.

If I wanted to pirate a copy of GTA IV (Or any other console title), I could again begin downloading it within thirty seconds but after that I’d have to find somebody to chip my console, then have to worry about going online with it, or what affect updates would have, and several other issues like what I’ll have to do if my 360 ever RRODs on me again.

The idea that people who pirate wouldn’t buy the game anyway is utter nonsense. If I have a choice between paying £50 for a game I really want, or pirating it, considering the ease of piracy and the nonexistent likelihood of ever getting caught I’d be dumb not to pirate the game thus taking £50 I would otherwise spend on that game away from the industry. If I wasn’t able to pirate it but I still wanted it I’d buy it.

It’s not just poor people who pirate games.

It’s precisely because I understand how easy it is to pirate games, that I don’t do it. If somebody seriously thinks it’s not having an adverse affect on the industry then they are lying to themselves. The PC as a platform won’t die, but it will slowly lose all but MMOs, Casual games, and Indie games. I wouldn’t loathe that future but I wouldn’t particularly welcome it with open arms either, I like Triple A PC titles.

29/04/2008 at 22:36 Larington says:

I wonder how many of the people who use cost of games as the excuse for their piracy honestly can’t afford many games, and as such, how many sales or rental revenues wouldn’t have been gained anyway. Thing is, this gets tied into the whole “if it turns out to be a good game then I’ll buy it” rubbish – Afterall theres no shortage of reviews, metacritic scores and demos for many games (PC ones especially) that are great for telling you which games are worth forking out money for.

Its actually comical that the 360 version of GTAIV suffered from day one piracy by about 10 days prior to the games release, but a Steam held exe unavailable until release wouldn’t have suffered from that problem.

29/04/2008 at 22:41 born2expire says:

Mario Granger says:
“For the person that commented that Steam only stops pre-release piracy: Thats the most damaging form of piracy. The most sales are lost in the copies made available BEFORE release of a game than after.”

again, Bioshock had the online activation which completely stopped zero day warez, hell, it took a good 10-14 days for it to be cracked. Fine people whined and bitched about it, but you know what, I bought the game and haven’t had any trouble with it the 3 times I’ve installed it.
Perhaps that is the answer, also online FPS are hardly pirated due to the fact that you need a unique key to play, or your stuck on cracked servers that are full of cheaters.

29/04/2008 at 22:45 UncleLou says:

“There are piracy charts? Are we sure that they’re not just looking at poor sales and assuming piracy,”

Yes, you can be pretty damn sure that they don’t just look at poor sales. Very, very sure.

29/04/2008 at 22:49 Mooey Poo says:

I’m literally in tears. Well, not literally, metaphorically maybe. Well, not even metaphorically. Ok, I’m a bit upset.

In light of this, we’re never likely to see another Deus Ex, or another Thief. I know consoles are more powerful, but devs are still facing an uphill battle against memory constraints. Look at Thief 3 and Deus Ex 2, and how simultaneous Xbox development hampered them. They weren’t necessarily bad games, it’s just that you knew they could have been a shedload better had they been developed purely for the PC.

Bioshock’s the same. Yes, it looks impressive, but the levels are so enclosed and claustrophobic and linear you can just tell it was developed for the 360 first and the PC second. Console owners seem to love nice shiny levels, but love loading screens even more.

Of course the exception to the rule is GTA, which allows huge levels. But given the amount of money Rockstar put into its engine, and the way they won’t license it to anyone else means that it’s their tight-fisted money-spinning exclusive. Which sucks really.

And Crysis – yes it wasn’t quite as good as it should have been, but at least it showed people that the PC is still a valid platform for gaming, and Crytek deserve more recognition for that. I started playing it, and feeling like something was missing. Then I realised what it was when I saw the first load point after about three or four hours of solid gaming. That’s pretty impressive if you ask me. And the game itself isn’t that bad if you just go with it, the magic ride that is Crysis.

29/04/2008 at 22:54 cHeal says:

““STOP MAKING GAMES FOR A DEMOGRAPHIC OF PEOPLE WHO PIRATE!!!”

Good point, but you realize what you’re effectively saying? You’re saying that PC-devs should only make games for girls and niche-based titles like hardcore strategy games.

And, well, that seems to be exactly the direction the PC games market is going in right now, if you exclude the multi-platform titles. And I think it’s sad, because… I happen to like first-person shooters.

:-/”

Yeah, an unfortunate result of an irresponsible group of people, though I don’t think it would mean the end of FPS’s completely, just smaller, more cheaply developed game. And like I said PC’s will still have a collosal user based well into the future and there will be plenty of money to be made. Developers just need to be a bit more sensible with costs and also marketing, and It’d probably serve Publishers well to support the education of parents on what their children do on the internet.

29/04/2008 at 22:58 po says:

Personally I’m hopeful for the future of PC gaming, considering the competition that is being stirred up in the integrated graphics arena, with Nvidia, and to a lesser extent (considering their current financial problems) AMD joining Intel in the ring.

Vista may have been universally panned, but one thing’s for sure, Aero is ensuring that PCs will have better graphics cards.

PCs still have a lot of graphics horsepower, and the console generation is only getting older. It may look pretty poor, but I can run Crysis on a £20 graphics card. It still may not look amazing on an 8600GT, but that’s what’s likely to be in a lot of vanilla PCs with gaming as an afterthought, and it’s better than console graphics when the code is done well.

29/04/2008 at 23:06 po says:

“STOP MAKING GAMES FOR A DEMOGRAPHIC OF PEOPLE WHO PIRATE!!!”

Good point, but you realize what you’re effectively saying? You’re saying that PC-devs should only make games for girls and niche-based titles like hardcore strategy games.

Personally I prefer strategy, even in my FPS games. If it wasn’t for the other serious players on my regular BF2 server, I wouldn’t have played the game at all online. I think pirates are likely to be the same people who cheat, hack and grief their way through games. Strategy puts them off playing so the serious grown up players can have a good game without having to spend time as admin on the server.

In it’s last days that BF2 server ended up being locked to keep out tards, and now almost everyone has moved onto ArmA.

Consoles are toys for children, and they should stick to playing on them, as anyone who has had to put up with their crap in FPSs would tell you.

29/04/2008 at 23:14 Monkfish says:

I was thinking the same thing, Alec. Also, it may mean their next game will have slightly more modest system requirements, thanks to cross-platform development. That, alone, will generate more sales.

29/04/2008 at 23:20 Rook says:

I’m saying that demos aren’t a very good example of performance either way, and with some developers you may find the rest of the game isn’t up to the standard of the demo in other areas.

That arguement is basically saying the only way to tell how a game runs is to play the entire game (after all, level 6 might be a buggy mess). And I think anyone using that line to justify their piracy should just learn to be a little more honest and say they didn’t want to pay for it.

29/04/2008 at 23:28 Rob says:

Interesting comment made in a recent Eurogamer article but it bears repeating with regard to all this pre-release piracy talk: “There will always be a core of people who can’t or won’t pay for things, and who will go to incredible lengths and inconvenience themselves awfully just in order to get stuff for free.” To this core it doesn’t matter if the game comes out 10 days before or 10 days after the street date, I guess the discussion then just deteriorates into different assumptions on the size of said ‘core’.

29/04/2008 at 23:47 restricted3 says:

And here come again the crybabies.

Didn’t they sell 1 million copies of a game few computers can move?. Then shut up and be thankful, man.

It’s a pity, but the truth is that you can put a turd in a box, put a xbox or ps3 label on the front, and it will sell 5 million copies. It’s hard to fight with that.

29/04/2008 at 23:53 Monkfish says:

Crysis simply isn’t very good. People want to play the game to see the candy, but really aren’t interested in gameplay. *That’s* why it’s being pirated. It’s just a tech demo.

Nonsense. I bought it on day of release and enjoyed it thoroughly, as did plenty of other people. There was more to the game than just the graphics. The only part of the gameplay I’d criticise is the way it suddenly changed pace (floaty bit, shooting aliens bit, and the silly VTOC piloting bit). I still replay all the fun, stealthy combat bits on a regular basis.

29/04/2008 at 23:57 Cargo Cult says:

“There will always be a core of people who can’t or won’t pay for things, and who will go to incredible lengths and inconvenience themselves awfully just in order to get stuff for free.”

I’ve seen people jumping through far too many hoops in an attempt to get my own MINERVA to work on what can only be pirated copies of Valve’s games (they’ve extracted everything from GCFs why, exactly) – and being utterly vague about the reasons for their peculiar setups. Made trying to do technical support a bit difficult, until I saw a den of pirates discussing the issues in the open on a site I found during a more generic MINERVA-flavoured, ego-stroking Google-trip.

They’ve wasted many hours in trying to get a free mod to work on a ten quid game. And maybe even did get it to work, albeit missing vital content. BUT THEY SAVED TEN QUID! HAH! THEY’RE THE WINNERS! … Or not.

The excuses and cognitive dissonance around piracy are great too. Demos aren’t representative of the games, reviews (all of them) aren’t to be trusted, even basic copy-protection is, like, sooo unfair, it’s not theft, it’s copyright infringement, the games companies are stuck in the past, blah blah blah.

Some people really will pirate anything, simply on principle. Sadly, their distribution networks are being adopted by people who probably would pay for games…

I didn’t pay for Crysis. I didn’t pirate it either – or even download the demo – ’cause I read reviews, which made it sound like a new Far Cry with overly spangly graphics. I might get round to buying a budget copy in a year or so when I have a computer that can really do it justice – and when I can actually treat it as a game, rather than as a GPU-humping graphics benchmark. By which time all the piratical torrents will be long dead anyway – hooray for the long tail!

30/04/2008 at 00:03 Robin says:

Epic, Id and Valve push the technical envelope in ways that are relevant (and widely adopted, and scalable). Crytek do not, and their games rapidly end up being bundled with graphics cards.

Console games have always sold an order of magnitude more than their PC equivalents, it’s odd that this is dawning on them now. Not that I’m denying that boxed PC games are in crisis. They’ve been completely nuked by the ease of piracy afforded by BitTorrent.

Guess it sucks for Crytek that EA games aren’t on Steam.

Of course the World of Stuart brigade have already been along to stick their fingers in their ears and shout that everything is rosy and piracy is a cure for cancer. Try getting a PC-native high-profile game financed then, geniuses.

30/04/2008 at 00:16 Rook says:

I dunno why people are so down on Crysis. It’s very good until the aliens turn up.

Also, Minerva was the best single player mod ever. You should sell a remixed version with Ellen McLain doing the voiceover, it’d be brilliant.

30/04/2008 at 00:30 Monkfish says:

why did you buy it, what game is Crysis as good as [comparatively]? is it as good as COD4 or Portal? and what are your pc specs?

While I freely admit that I did, indeed, want to see the eye candy, I was also interested in it based on the strength of the gun-play in Far Cry, which I really enjoyed.

My PC is a modestly capable set-up, bought around Christmas 2006:
Nvidia 8800 GTS (the older, 640MB one)
E6600 Core 2 Duo (it was best price/perf at the time)
2 GB cheap RAM

I was happy to sacrifice some of the eye candy in favour of performance (tweaked the configs to get a decent balance of looks versus performance).

With regard to which games it’s as good as, that’s a difficult one to answer without copping out. I tend take each game at face value, so don’t really see much merit in comparisons of that nature. I can say that I absolutely loved both Portal and COD4, and would say that overall they were “tighter” experiences than Crysis. They are also very different games to Crysis; Crysis placed emphasis on the sandbox nature of it’s gameplay (well, at least the first two thirds did). Portal and COD are masterpieces of linearity.

A little rambly, but hope it answers your questions… :D

30/04/2008 at 00:51 A-scale says:

I’m stunned at the repugnant ignorance of game developers. The “piracy ruins everyone’s fun” attitude is simply a misreading of the issue. People buy games that they really enjoy, that are made by companies they know, love and trust. If you want to cut down on piracy, try being a more humble company that reaches out to its customers and always gives the customer an ear to speak to. If your company is faceless, untouchable, deaf organ that is just part of an even larger, yet more out of touch monolith of a company, don’t expect people to feel bad when they pirate your games. I love supporting Telltale games. Do you know why? It’s not just because they make funny games that are in a league all their own, but because their employees frequent their message boards, and listen and respond to consumers. I also enjoy supporting Valve, not just because they make some of the best and most innovative games around, but because I almost always get a response when I send them an email, becuase they regularly patch, update and otherwise fix their games, and do nice things for their consumers. Crysis is, lets admit it, a technical marvel wrapped around a mediocre title. The story, and basic gameplay mechanics have nothing new to offer. Would Crysis have gotten a tenth the hype it did if I had graphics equal to Half Life 2? I sincerely doubt it. Thus, Crysis is a game to show off what a computer is capable of and nothing more.

If you can’t get that down, take the innovative aggressive approach and make your game run on a proprietary validation system like Steam. Leaving PC to avoid pirates is just evidence of laziness and lack of innovation.

30/04/2008 at 01:30 Albides says:

“There are piracy charts? Are we sure that they’re not just looking at poor sales and assuming piracy,”

Yes, you can be pretty damn sure that they don’t just look at poor sales. Very, very sure.

I can’t tell if that’s sarcasm. From where I’m sitting, it looks they just thought since “[s]imilar games on consoles sell factors of 4-5 more”, then the PC’s rampant piracy is obviously the result of poor sales. I’d really like to know how they came to that conclusion.

And you know, I really can’t help but equate this to Sins of a Solar Empire’s success, and these near prophetic words written in a developer blog

The dirty secret of the PC game industry is that games with high hardware requirements don’t sell nearly as well as games with more modest requirements. And as an indie, we need every gamer we can get. Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking that there’s necessarily some correlation between what gets covered in game magazines and how well that game actually has sold. Some of the biggest name PC games have with high hardware requirements have sold very low quantities on the PC. You just don’t hear about it. And for us, our goal isn’t to be the coolest developer. We want as many people as possible to buy our game.

30/04/2008 at 01:37 RichPowers says:

A-scale: Piracy is definitely an issue, but I feel that many devs/publishers use it as a smoke screen. “What, our game didn’t sell!? It can only be because of those damn pirates!”

In other words, solely blaming piracy obfuscates other, arguably more important issues facing PC gaming. It’s just that these issues (Intel’s pitiful on-board graphics chips, for example) are complex and less well-defined.

Dean: Agreed, but look at how corporations obsessively focuses on short-term quarterly results. If you’re making a game for EA, especially one that’s not part of a long-established franchise, shareholders and suits want to see instant results.

30/04/2008 at 02:02 Alex says:

Well, this is just hilarious.

30/04/2008 at 03:51 James T says:

I wonder how many of the people who use cost of games as the excuse for their piracy honestly can’t afford many games, and as such, how many sales or rental revenues wouldn’t have been gained anyway. Thing is, this gets tied into the whole “if it turns out to be a good game then I’ll buy it” rubbish – Afterall theres no shortage of reviews, metacritic scores and demos for many games (PC ones especially) that are great for telling you which games are worth forking out money for.

Oh yeah, that good ole critical reception barometer…. Real reliable for, say, Bioshock. The game’s essentially Doom 3 with a better art department — a pretty noble failure, but still a failure as far as I’m concerned, and I don’t know about you, but I’m the final authority on what comes in and out of my wallet — and it still has a metacritic score of 96.
“Ah, but there was a demo, James!” Yes, which I think illustrates the unfortunate inadequacy of demos — Bioshock could have developed any which way from where the demo stops, but… it doesn’t. I don’t want to go offtrack with the BS stuff (teehee), but the point is that I regret paying full price for it, and absolutely should have examined it with the aid of piracy (since I didn’t know anyone else who had it, or even has it now (it is not my duty as a gamer to have gamer friends)) before shelling out.
I’m not even criticising 2kB for ‘making an inadequate demo’; that just happens to be the nature of the beast with some games. ‘Death to Spies’ had a nice representative demo — an easy enough task for them, ‘cos the way the game is structured is conducive to that. I played it, enjoyed it, extrapolated from that, bought the game and was not unpleasantly surprised. It’s just not that easy sometimes, sadly.

I don’t know how local currency maps to the pound (although I know it’s very close to the US dollar), but I do know that anyone putting down $80-100AU for an entertainment product of which they have no credible experience is a sap. 7-10 bucks on a movie ticket/multi-DVD rental (16 for the ticket if you’re a real sucker)? That’s a fair gamble. 30-40 for a book? Well, that’s a bit of a fuck-you, but at least there are libraries. 25-30 for a new album? That’s not so bad, you can get a credible preview of such a body of work by perfectly legitimate means these days. The only common entertainment product I can think that matches games for price are TV-season/film-series box-sets, and anyone dropping the cash for one of those while knowing nothing about its contents is displaying far more money than sense — a common ailment in our currently-credit-happy society, but not something that anyone should have to embody.

There needs to be an aggressively-pursued study into the whys and wherefores (tsk, redundancy) of PC game piracy — for what purposes, and in what numbers, are gamers indulging in piracy? How many are noxious little crooks pirating games to avoid laying down cash that the studios and creators deserve for their hard work? And crucially, how many of them pirate a game as a means of heeding that most cherishable warning, CAVEAT EMPTOR? Any creator who’d rail against that is essentially complaining that they’re not able to swindle a customer — I don’t think that’s anyone’s actual sentiment, it just illustrates how important the distinction is. When — indeed, if — the numbers of thieves-vs-torrent-employing-customers can even be stabbed at, then creators and gamers and bloggers can speak with a little more authority on how much money is being lost. Maybe there has been decent inquiry done, but I haven’t seen anyone cite it here.

I sure as hell can’t think of a solution to this problem — unlike console games, PC games can’t realistically be rented, and the ease of piracy comes with the platform — but without the numbers, everyone’s talking out their arses. And then the lost-sales figures get exaggerated, artificially pushing developers away from the PC — and what a waste it is for game producers to move away from the best gaming medium (why do you think Rockstar haven’t announced GTA4 PC? Because dual PC-console owners know the PC version will be better!. Rockstar want the ‘thief element’ of their PC base to be so twitchy about the viability of biding their time that they snap and buy the 360/PS3 version to add to initial sales figures! I ain’t fooled, and I’m certainly not convinced that Hot Coffee is a reason for them not to touch the PC again — if they want an HC-free PC experience, they can have a little double-check of their assets before they release the damn game, can’t they!)

30/04/2008 at 04:04 much2much says:

James T Bioshock has always been AU$50 on Steam. Maybe thats why I wasn’t so vocal when I was let down about the game not being as interactive and immersive as I thought from repeatedly watching all those clips with voiceovers from Ken Levine.

30/04/2008 at 05:10 JP says:

Albides, that quote is dead on. Hopefully PC devs are starting to realize that “high hardware requirements” is just another niche, alongside adventure games and super-complex 4X games. You can’t spend tens of millions making one and then expect the sheer technical awesomeness to make this niche profitable. You have to accept the bad with the good of being on the bleeding edge (no thanks, personally).

I for one am just happy to see PC gaming growing beyond tech showcases (which we’ve always done well) into everything from Peggle to Sins of a Solar Empire.

30/04/2008 at 05:25 SwiftRanger says:

“Modern games generally take at least 10 hours to get through. Often 30+. ”

Some big non-FPS titles perhaps, the rest is only getting shorter and shorter.

30/04/2008 at 06:34 AbyssUK says:

Yup commercial gaming on the PC is dying, luckily the indie stuff is blooming! I’d play Deathworm over Crysis any day.

30/04/2008 at 08:09 Zoso says:

Similar games on consoles sell factors of 4-5 more.

That does seem to be a huge exaggeration. I can’t be bothered going further than Wikipedia (“Citation Needed” and all that), but as lots of other people point out, if Crysis sold a million it’s only aberrations like Halo 3 that get 4-5 (or 8 ) times that many sales. Of recent(ish) PC shooters, Half-Life 2 sold 4 million. Ah ha, Steam, shows you get more sales if you stop pirates… but the contemporous Doom 3 sold 3.5 million.

Can’t say I’m terribly fussed about PC exclusives any more anyway, as consoles get more powerful. I admit I’m still a bit bitter about Deus Ex 2 and blame the XBox entirely for it being rubbish, but decently ported stuff like the GTA III series, Bioshock, (hopefully) Mass Effect, I don’t mind waiting a few months after a console release. They’d better port GTA IV, though…

30/04/2008 at 08:38 Muzman says:

Little late here, but the whole PC game is dying thing; surely what’s happening is (as others have said) not that these guys can’t make any money, but aren’t making as much as they think they can. And what’s driving it is not that copying games is now suddenly a big issue or suddenly so much easier (I don’t know what fantasy world has all this fantastically brilliant warez that just works perfectly in it, with no squillion shakey and destructive copies of the same thing to sift through, or has the bandwidth where 4+ gigs is nothing. Certainly not mine). It’s that now it’s more visible. They can do like Kieron did and whip on over to some site and scrape together some rough numbers at the drop of a hat. What bean counter could resist such figures?
That all might be largely academic, as if people are leaving PC development (or relegating it) it doesn’t really matter why, I suppose. Although it does seem like now would be a good time to repeat that fairly compelling theory that the console world has over stretched itself, is flooded and will collapse in a heap, leaving probably Nintendo standing alone (again) in a year or two.
Then they’ll come crawling back.
(incidentally Crysis’ graphics posturing actually put me off getting it as well and may well have hurt it, but the truth is it actually scales quite well and doesn’t make an upper-mid level PC seem as obsolete as the hype may have suggested.)

30/04/2008 at 08:57 SwiftRanger says:

“This announcement seems a bit disingenuous coming form Crytek, a company that was raided in its early days for using pirated software.”

They didn’t found any pirated software at their offices I think.

““Most anticipated release of the year”, and they have the BALLS to let us Europeans stew for 3 days, while the torrent starts popping up on all the usual suspect sites. No wonder it got pirated.”

I thought Crysis was even released a bit earlier because it got cracked a week ahead of release.

“If anything, console co-development has meant stuff like COD4 and Bioshock (which, folks’ minor griping about vita chambers etc aside, both feel entirely at home on PC) benefit from far, far higher production values and quality control than if they’d been PC-only. I can even imagine Crysis’ final act possibly wouldn’t have been quite such a nosedive if it was due for an initial release on 360 as well as PC.”

Euh, I wouldn’t say that, consoles don’t have better QA, there are enough bugs to prove that. As Cervat also says, Crysis as we know it now wouldn’t be possible on consoles (read: it would have to be scaled back on more than just the graphical aspects).

30/04/2008 at 09:37 cliffski says:

“I will say it again. Even though developers might whine as much as they want, piracy isn’t really the huge problem it is made out to be.”

based on what?
I AM a PC game developer. i can see where twice as many people download patches and mods for a game that bought it. Am I a liar?
It doesn’t matter how much pirates try to justify what they do. Devs can see the bottom line, and they are leaving the PC en masse.
case closed.

30/04/2008 at 09:50 Kanakotka says:

Your arguments are irrelevant and just absurd. While they try to make a point, the analogies are ridiculous. You are a PC game developer? Well, good for you. Here’s your medal. I’m a PC gamer, where do i get my medals from? By the way, your ‘bottom line’ is merely theorethical figures with next to no relevance to truth.
PC games are not cars, they’re PC games, they’re as much consumable products as anything.
I have done my fair share on developing gamethings myself.
Reality hits hard if you live in an ivory tower. Yes, there will be people who play it without paying you a dime. But there will always be that kind of people, get over it. No matter how you release it, where you release it, what kind of genre it is, on what platform you release it et.c. et.c. will not matter worth one dime.

I am not trying to justify theft, i’m trying to unjustify shitty games.

Have a good day.

PS. If people buy 10 pieces of your game, and 5 people pirate it, it doesn’t mean you would’ve ever sold 15 copies. Hah.

30/04/2008 at 09:58 cliffski says:

“Your arguments are irrelevant and just absurd. ”

and you are a pc developer? who? don’t hide behind anonymity, tell us who you are. I’m sure your employer would like to know a pirate is on the payroll.

you [think] the whole world owes him free games.

30/04/2008 at 10:07 Cigol says:

Piracy is a problem on the PC for sure. Nobody can deny that.

Still it’s not why Crysis didn’t sell as well as they had (foolishly) hoped, nor is it killing PC gaming. All’s it is doing is helping to make the console market more attractive for the quick buck. Which you might think spells doom for the PC but you’d be wrong… Cliffski can’t take his games and put them on the console because it would cost more to develop and nobody would buy them – therefore our PC developer Cliffski is stuck on the PC, Hence; PC gaming will never die as Cliffski is immortal, right?

Huge generalisation which holds up even with more discerning gamers; You can literally shovel (graphically appealing or online connective) shit into the mouths of console users and they will swallow it with a grin. It’s the nature of the market on a console and that’s a fact (I just made up). It’s consumerism to the full, whereas on the PC it’s obviously a lot more difficult to pull off (though not impossible).

SO yeah.

30/04/2008 at 10:10 shiznit says:

Until I can get a refund or most of what I paid as store credit for returning a piece of shit like Bioshock (which you couldn’t return despite the malware on the DVD), long live piracy.

Piracy is pissing off big publishers off because they can’t sell complete shit on PC like they can on console since we can so easily download the full game and find out for ourselves.

And please don’t give me the argument about how I can read reviews to find out if a game is good or not, Halo 3 and Bioshock are some of the highest rated games in Metacritic but they wouldn’t even get 5/10 from me, in fact Bioshock gets a 0/10 for being completely unplayable due to the forced mouse acceleration which not a SINGLE reviewer noticed.

I’m not saying piracy isn’t hurting PC developers, and my heart goes out to studios like Iron Lore who make good games and have to shut down while clowns like Bungie make shit but get wipe their ass with $100 bills.

With that said, 90% of all games made are complete shit. I don’t believe a damn thing reviewers say and many demos are in no way representative of the full game (Crysis demo rocked but game started sucking when you met the aliens). I need to try it for myself before I drop $50 on something I can’t return, or even sell for a loss like Bioshock due to the limited installs (which were specifically designed to kill resales not piracy). Console gamers can trade their games in for $40-50 but If I buy a turd like Bioshock based on the demo so-called ‘reviews’, I’m stuck with it.

30/04/2008 at 10:15 Lou says:

Where’s that hubris coming from that gamers have a right to know exactly beforhand if they’ll like it? Do you also completely read books before you buy them and sneak into music gigs and decide to pay afterwards only if you liked what you heard? Very weird.

Pirates really seem to be notoriously bad at knowing their own tastes. Of course they need to finish the game first to be really sure, then apply their impossibly high standards as a self-excuse.

30/04/2008 at 10:31 shiznit says:

You can call it hubris or what ever you want, I call it being smart with my money. Buying a PC game is much bigger financial risk than buying a console game, and smart consumers use piracy as 100% effective quality control to make purchasing decisions.

I have bought over 50 games in the last couple years and nearly all of them I downloaded first to check if they were good. If I liked them, I bought them. If I didn’t, I deleted them because why would I want to keep a bad game?

In fact, if it wasn’t so easy to get full copies of games, I wouldn’t have even bought half the games I ended up buying. Without being able to try it for myself I would probably wait until the price is down to $20 for 99% of all releases. Not all torrent traffic is malicious.

30/04/2008 at 10:33 cliffski says:

” Buying a PC game is much bigger financial risk than buying a console game, and smart consumers use piracy as 100% effective quality control to make purchasing decisions.”

Do smart consumer steal cars and squat in houses before buying those too? What about a widescreen TV? they cost thousands, how do you cope with the fact that you don’t get a 6 months free demo of a TV OMGZ!!!! Oh Noes!!! etc.

30/04/2008 at 10:43 Butler` says:

Alls I can say on this is: some smart SOAB is going to work out how to effectively prevent PC gaming piracy (and not in the same way Steam has) one day and make a mint.

And as an aside, Crysis sucked.

EDIT: Spot on there about Crysis Radiant, my thoughts exactly. They should be glad it sold that many on the back of graphics-related hype IMO.

30/04/2008 at 10:53 shiznit says:

Cliffski: because every $50 I spend on a game is 50 less for my future real-estate empire :) (man I love recessions)

30/04/2008 at 11:02 Feet says:

Coming in late here so I haven’t read all the comments, apologies if I tread ground already… trud. ¬_¬

I reckon that PCs are about done as a cutting edge games platform in the way that game’s and games development have been defined up to now, certainly in the lucrative FPS\action genre anyway. I do think that we’ll see more exclusive PC games stepping away from what gaming has been since it became big business in the last 15 years or so, and moving into a new definition of what a game can be.

Only the console has the pulling power to continue with the current definition of what a game should be and all that entails. IE dev teams in the 100s, costs in the 10s of millions, cutting edge visuals.

I see this as a good thing over all. Piracy is bad, mmkay, but this response from the traditional FPS\action developers will mean it’ll hopefully usher in a change to what a game is on our “platform”. Go go small indie devs. :)

30/04/2008 at 12:07 Kanakotka says:

A demo of a game is not equivalent to a test drive of a car.
A test drive of a car is called a trial version.

A demo version of a car would be kid’s car with bicycle paddles to make it go faster.

Unlike you, i have to earn the money to buy my games, and other stuff.

30/04/2008 at 12:21 Lou says:

Difference is that many media, like films, and books, and games, are usually made to be used one time. If you’ve used it once, you don’t need to buy it anymore. Yes, there’s a certain risk involved, but hardly any other media offer more options to inform yourself, or are covered more extensively. There are gazillion of review sites, forums, demos, options to rent and whatnot.

It’s the nature of such things that there is a certain risk involved if you buy it. If you’re not willing to take that risk, look for a new hobby, or at least stop with the tiresome excuses. I honestly prefer someone freely admitting that he wants to save money to all these half-truths.

30/04/2008 at 12:32 cliffski says:

“A demo of a game is not equivalent to a test drive of a car.
A test drive of a car is called a trial version.
A demo version of a car would be kid’s car with bicycle paddles to make it go faster.
Unlike you, i have to earn the money to buy my games, and other stuff.”

oh joy. I’m 38 years old and run a games company, in case you didn’t realise that.
The creator of something has the right to decide on what terms he sells it, what price he sets and who can try it beforehand. Not you. if you don’t like those terms, make your own games.
By the way, the demo’s of games use the same engine as the full game, just like the trial versions of games do. Lots of games have full features and just one hour trials. I bet you pirate those too don’t you?

30/04/2008 at 12:57 J says:

In the future RPS will just post articles that just say “Piracy.” and there will be millions of comments.

30/04/2008 at 13:04 cliffski says:

“PC games, or games to begin with, aren’t the only thing beriddled with people stealing the product and getting away with it. You’re (supposedly) 38, please, get real.”

Yes, people with no sense of right and wrong like you try to put all kinds of different companies out of business. I know that. You don’t have the guts to actually physically go and steal from people that might catch you (and give you a good thumping) so you hide behind your keyboard and do it. We have established that.

The thing is, this attitude poisons your entire life. You think games are all shit, because they didn’t cost you anything. you invested nothing in them, so they are all disposable crap to you. You don’t even believe a game dev linking his name to his website when he tells you his age! Why would you? everyone cheats and lies and steals right? At least that’s what you have to tell yourself to justify what you do.
Not a great way to live IMHO.

30/04/2008 at 13:18 Kanakotka says:

cliffski, please stop the flamebaiting and try to discuss like a grown up, failing that, at least someone with the mental age above 20′s.

I have been around too long to fall into a simple flamebait.

30/04/2008 at 13:24 Kanakotka says:

The way to crack an online activation is rather trivial. It is already present in most Windows Live! games which require you to log in to play them. And they all have been cracked. (For instance: Halo 2 and Juiced 2 : Hot Import Nights )
Truth to be told, i had bioshock 2 days after the release, working just fine. And i didn’t buy it at that time either. I bought it a week after that.

And you’re 38, failing to see the difference of software and a car/food/house? Jesus H Christ. When was the last time you ate a DVD? Or lived in it? Seriously, this is getting borderline ridiculous. To avoid a flamewar with a person who has a logic that would befuddle Sigmund Freud himself, i’m going to do the easy thing and just ignore your posts from now on. Saves the people who moderate this discussion from doing alot of extra work.

And no, it doesn’t. I have a very critical mindset of everything. I’m a perfectionist at heart. I had the same ideals when i did the lottery of buying games before downloading them first. Oftenmost i just went on selling it on Finnish equivalent of eBay day later if i didn’t like it. This happened with Anarchy Online, Theme Park World, Theme Hospital, UO Third Dawn and quite many others. But of course, selling games as “used”, even if they were used only for a day or a few hours gives me a fraction of the price back, so, i lost money to gain nothing. Good going.

30/04/2008 at 13:29 cliffski says:

“Truth to be told, i had bioshock 2 days after the release”

I doubt that. I watched all tha major warez sites around that time. everyone was full of thousands of people complaining they couldn’t pirate bioshock. but its common for pirates to claim months later they had ‘special knowledge’ and cracked it on the first day.
Pirates aren’t known for keeping quiet about the fact that they cracked a new game are they…

30/04/2008 at 14:01 cliffski says:

Sorry but that makes no sense, you cant eat a house, but it is a major purchase that takes most people 25 years to pay off, yet they make the purchasing decision based upon (at best) a 2 hour demo and some reviews.
What is so magical about the purchasing decision that you make regarding games that doesnt apply to stuff where you haven’t worked out to steal it yet?
Pls explain.

30/04/2008 at 14:13 James T says:

Do smart consumer steal cars and squat in houses before buying those too? What about a widescreen TV? they cost thousands, how do you cope with the fact that you don’t get a 6 months free demo of a TV OMGZ!!!! Oh Noes!!! etc.

Cars and houses and TVs are reviewed by regulatory bodies, so that they meet the objective legal requirements of doing what they need to do. You don’t need six months to work out whether a TV or car or even a house is sufficient, you examine it in the store/test-drive it/inspect it good and proper, you get all the info you can, decide based on that, and you get your property. The properties of a car that get you from place to place and stop the thing from killing you with excessive ease are not optional things, needing to be discovered with a test-drive — they are required by law. If the car or the house does not function precisely as documented and as required by law, you are empowered to, in a nutshell, raise some serious shit.
Art and entertainment have no such objective requirements, outside of simply functioning (‘The DVD must play’, ‘the game must work’, ‘the painting must… be visible’). That’s why any art or entertainment media that leaves its customers in the dark has to have a very cheap outlay (see: cinema, no ‘in-the-dark’ pun intended). Books have libraries. DVDs have the aforementioned cinema, or rental. Console games can rented as well. Paintings and sculpture can be, y’know, looked at. Box-sets have television (or again, cinema). Mainstream PC gaming is the only medium I can think of offhand where literally the best the model can offer is to metaphorically show me BSG episode 3 and then say “alright, me ol’ suc– er, mucker, now are you gonna buy a Season 1 box, or am I gonna have to ask you to leave?”
“Well, that was pretty neat, but hey, what if the rest of the show sucks? The ‘Heroes Season 2′-monger screened his wares on TV over a few months — man, I dodged a bullet there! Y’know, I could be paying for my groceries with this money, I can’t just piss it awa–”
“YES OR NO?!”

I sympathise, that a demo is the best of any known means of caveat-ing the emptor, so to speak. But, simply due to the nature of many games, a demo has no guarantee of being representative. It will introduce you to the basic mechanics of a game, yes. If that core mechanic is sufficiently complex that the entire appeal of the game flows thenceforth, as you could say was the case in, say, Puzzle Quest or Streetfighter or EVE or Hitman, or, hey, Democracy, then the demo will illustrate this neatly, and it’ll have done its job; hurray. If a gamer, like myself, finds Bioshock’s game mechanic unengaging but acceptable, and thinks, “Well, now I know the game will function, but this one’s obviously all about the narrative, so I’m gonna have to gamble the better part of a hundred bucks”*, then the only useful thing the demo has told me is that the game actually functions; a piece of information right up there with “this meal has been cooked before being served to you!“. That doesn’t even mean the demo was poorly done (per se), it’s just the fundamental limitation of a demo to narrative games (hence the BSG analogy).

*(incidentally — Bioshock? 50AU if you want to/can get it on Steam (didn’t have the option, meself), a comparatively mild gouge for the jilted consumer. CoD4? 88.50AU Ohoho! No thanks, I won’t blow that sight-unseen (indeed, I did not; I thought CoD4 was another beneficiary of inflated hype, and one I abandoned without regret).

I have no time for thieves; our opinions on people who deny creators their deserved reward are identical. But the doggone hurts-to-swallow truth of it is that not all ‘pirates’ are thieves; pretending otherwise proves nothing, and pretending that conscientious customers assessing the most expensive entertainment format this side of a gold-plated yoyo before purchase equates to thieves stealing a manufactured object (and the only reason the informed customers and the thieves are ever confused is because the statistics unfortunately can’t be disentangled — there’s no moral confusion or obfuscation there whatsoever) falls at the first hurdle. As applied specifically to your setup, your position is pretty inoffensive — your prices being a perfectly reasonable gamble for the informed customer, and your games being very aptly represented by their demos, there’s bugger-all excuse for anyone to pirate your games — but it doesn’t ‘scale up’; a 70-90 dollar PC game with a nonexistent or unrepresentative demo (inevitably the case with games that retail at that price, apart from, say, sport games) demands not a gamble, but a cautious assessment to ensure that you’re not having a phone-bill-sized chunk being bitten out of you to no avail.

And now, off to play STALKER! Which I downloaded. And then bought, because it was excellent. Oh the weight on my shoulders!

30/04/2008 at 14:21 cliffski says:

its the job of game reviewers (along with the demo) and informal reviews on ranking sites etc to tell you what the game is like, combined with videos and screenshots and walkthroughs etc etc. there is a TON of information out there about what every single game is like. The customer cannot seriously pretend to have no idea what they are buying.
And lets not forget that a house is at least a thousand if not ten thousand times more expensive :D

30/04/2008 at 14:59 spd from Russia says:

PC market is semi-dead in USA. even if you kill the piracy sales will still be low in America (and non-existant in Japan)

Now all I can hope for is mouse becoming a standard option for console shooters cause gamepad is not suited for aiming

30/04/2008 at 15:27 James T says:

Cliff, the film and music forms can (at least in the recent past) boast a depth of critical analysis that makes pretty much all mainstream videogame criticism (or, more aptly, review) look like a noncommittal grunt, and even they don’t routinely try to sell an 80-dollar product on the basis of critical murmurings without letting the customer know what they’re getting. I’d like to suggest that this is because the film and music industries market so broadly that a higher percentage of their patronage know what their damn money’s worth, but in fairness to the mainstream PC market, there simply isn’t any conduit to treat customers with respect without letting the thieves in (as earlier posts were saying here, the rent-to-buy method would be perfect… if it didn’t have the same security holes as all software); so PC developers making certain kinds of games are damned whatever they do, but let’s not therefore pretend that review is a substitue for player experience, especially considering the state of gaming review.

(and again, houses are utilitarian objects with laws and guidelines to which you have recourse should a place be lacking — the only way a game ‘maps’ to this scenario is if, say, the disc is scratched, in which case you have rights regarding its repair/replacement/refund… just like with a house). If you pay way too much for the broken-on-software-level Splinter Cell DA on the basis of some nitwit reviewer in Ubi’s pocket plus a bunch of others who tossed off a review without thorough dissection, “well, at least I didn’t buy a house!” is… probably not one’s first thought. “Maybe I should trust my own eyes next time”, conversely, is likely to be right up there…

30/04/2008 at 15:47 arqueturus says:

I agree with Nallen.

And yes, I’ve done the piracy thing many times in the past but I admit it was thievery, pure and simple. I’ve had reasons like not being able to afford to buy games but it doesn’t change the net result.

I stole stuff.

30/04/2008 at 15:55 Kanakotka says:

While i cannot publically represent the pirates as a single person, or moderate their doing, or be their spokeperson, for me, and for my part alone, to the publishers of games that i enjoy most, it is ideal thing to do.

As i mentioned before, i would’ve not personally bought so many games, ever, if i hadn’t pirated so many of them before buying. But let’s stick to the topic here, blaming piracy about loss of sales, even though it’s tremendously hip, is stupid, and the finger is pointed in entirely wrong direction.
First, the finger should be pointed at self. The question being asked is what -i- did wrong when making the game. Or ”we” if you are in a larger team.
Then, ask for others of criticism about the game. Everyone who is not a game reviewer by profession aswell. Because there are no experts to -taste-.
Another player likes the extremely boring grindfest maplestory, another likes WoW, and third one thinks MMOs are idiotic and plays fifa, where the fourth just doesn’t care the slightest bit and plays abandonware in the dark of his room.
I have to pressure this point again and again, since people keep relating to it.

People.

Have.

Different.

Tastes.

And mine isn’t probably compatible with most.

And cliff? If memory serves, i pirated 1 or 2 of your games in the past. You know why i didn’t buy them? They were bland and boring, and kept my attention for about 20 minutes after the demo part. So they’ll be excellent example. Some of them, if i recall right, didn’t do bad in reviews, but it is just that -i- didn’t like them. End of story. I, however, understand your infuriation at piracy, but face it. It will happen, no matter what someone does. This is a risk known by everyone who makes anything. Even if it were a cellphone you made, it would likely be pirated to hell. (See: China )
Disrespectful? Sure.
Illegal? Yeps.
Does it save me money and ensure that -MY- money goes to where -I- think it belongs, instead to taking chances at buying crappy games and supporting crappy developers? Sure as hell does.

30/04/2008 at 16:35 veek says:

It’s not PC gaming that’s in trouble, it’s high-end gaming. The Xbox 360 has cost MS a lot of money, and is getting stomped by the Wii. The PS3 regularly gets outsold by the PS2. Crysis is less popular (and probably less profitable) than Runescape. It’s all the same phenomenon.

The sooner PC devs start putting the PC in the same tech class as the Wii rather than the 360 the sooner they’ll start pulling in Nintendo-level money. Every laptop with a recent intel GPU can run Wii/PS2-level graphics, but hardly anything on the store shelves caters to this huge market.

And before people complain that this would mean the death of “hardcore” games, the PS2 has them in abundance, so what’s the problem?

30/04/2008 at 17:01 Rev. Stuart Campbell says:

“Of course the World of Stuart brigade have already been along to stick their fingers in their ears and shout that everything is rosy and piracy is a cure for cancer. Try getting a PC-native high-profile game financed then, geniuses.”

I have a brigade now? Awesome!

I’ll decline your kind offer, thanks, but suck on this until it chokes up your idiot word-hole and saves us listening to any more drivel:

http://gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17350

This is the ONLY even vaguely scientific actual research that’s been done into how many sales are lost to piracy. It was conducted by a small PC developer, exactly the sort of people who are always said to be the ones who suffer most, so you’d expect them to big up the damage. Their actual conclusion:

That for every THOUSAND pirate copies you stop, you will sell ONE more copy of the game.

By making games effectively unpirateable, you can make a very big difference to whether people play them or not. But what you can’t do is get those people to buy them. 999 out of every thousand will simply shrug their shoulders and go play one of the 50,000 other games competing for their attention.

Piracy is a giant red herring. Every day we hear losers who make failures claiming that it’d all be different if not for piracy, and that soon nobody will make games at all because of it. And yet every year the games industry gets bigger and bigger and richer and richer. It’s not a matter of opinion. There is more piracy now than there has ever been, and yet there is more money flowing into the games industry than there has ever been. Shut up and make games that people actually want to pay for, crybabies.

(And you might want to start by not punishing the people who DO play fair by infecting their computers with shit like Starforce.)

30/04/2008 at 17:17 InVinoVeritas says:

“As i mentioned before, i would’ve not personally bought so many games, ever, if i hadn’t pirated so many of them before buying.”

This argument is interesting, but I don’t think it holds water. If piracy was impossible starting today, would you quit gaming all together? Or, more likely, would you start relying on things like demos, and more importantly the reviews and advice of such fine fellows as those here at RPS? With your argument, it almost sounds that piracy is an essential component of your interest in gaming, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

30/04/2008 at 17:23 Acosta says:

So, after flooding RPS with opinions away, the result is that some people steal because a) they want b) they have no money c) they want to know for sure if the game is good enough for their high standards.

Frankly, we have had this discussion many, many times, if not here in QT3 or in any public forum, and this is a common topic since Amiga times. Maybe it’s time for a full rethinking of the computer gaming model, something like Metaboli, totalgaming, Steam or a mix of different services that have an active security system (crackers will still have their fun, but it will be annoying enough for normal leechers). And from that point, start offering based on what users of PC (and only PC) want and at the price they want it.

The actual model doesn’t work and hasn´t worked in a long time, maybe is time for something new.

30/04/2008 at 17:37 Acosta says:

Hey, I read it, was a great interview, but I guess the topic doesn’t burn the same errr passion? than this one. How much time have computer gaming enthusiasts discussed about piratery since Internet was created?

30/04/2008 at 17:42 Jochen Scheisse says:

As soon as something else becomes the main medium, it will probably be pirated just as much as the PC. It’s just economies of scale, isn’t it?

EDIT: Anarchies of scale, rather.

30/04/2008 at 17:49 Rev. Stuart Campbell says:

“It’s funny, because if there’s one poker player I know who bitches for DAYS about a bad player getting all their chips…”

And I ask you this question: does anybody like me?

QED.

30/04/2008 at 18:00 Rev. Stuart Campbell says:

“I know a lot of piracy advocates hate my guts. I couldn’t care less, because those people don’t buy games. face facts, if the demo was 3 hours long, you would find it suddenly got crap at 3 hours and 1 minute. It sounds like the music pirates who whined about DRM until it was removed, then started whining about bit rates instead. You will never be happy.”

And it was all going so reasonably, too. You see where the “arrogance” thing comes from, right?

The unfortunate fact here is that your most cherished core belief is simply utterly wrong. I’ve never in my life met a pirate who didn’t also own some originals, and I’ve been writing about the subject for 20 years and I’m entirely confident in saying that I know a lot more about it than your simplistic kneejerk view. Fundamentalist dogma is rarely the intelligent response to anything, and it certainly won’t sell you a single extra game. Do you want to be pious or successful? Because the former is a lot easier, but it probably won’t make you happy like the second one would.

30/04/2008 at 18:07 Rev. Stuart Campbell says:

You don’t sound happy. But if you’re making a decent living out of doing something you enjoy then WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU WHINING ABOUT?

Man, I hate the greedy.

30/04/2008 at 18:09 cliffski says:

Ahhhh I seee. You have decided the cap on my earnings that you will permit yes?
If you are just angry that some people make more money than you, I suggest flaming the guy who made 2 billion quid from tetra pack milk cartons.
Apparently its fine to make money from that, because you can’t download milk cartons as a torrent. :D

30/04/2008 at 18:16 obdicut says:

Cliffski:

I know a lot of piracy advocates hate my guts. I couldn’t care less, because those people don’t buy games. I care about what my customers think.

I know you believe this, but I think you’re wrong. I have pirated many games; all games that I owned, and all for convenience. I’m glad that the pirates exist, and that their DRM-cracking technology exists, because otherwise many, many of the games I have bought would have been bricks due to me losing the CD, the DRM being incompatible with something on my system, or simply because I moved, and needed to reinstall the game and couldn’t find the original install. (This is why I love Steam, by the way.)

There are many people like me, who like the pirates for the convenience they provide; the exact same reason I love Steam. The money is not in the least bit an issue for me, and for many people.

30/04/2008 at 18:26 cliffski says:

I just don’t get it. I am apparently greedy.. therefore you pirate my games? is this the new excuse?
I can ASSURE you that will wright is way better off than me. Should his games get pirated more? Do you go to companies house to check the corporate profits before you click a torrent link?
If you had really LOVED my games, would you still have bought them? even if I was well off? what if I was a millionaire? I had no idea this was a political stance that was being taken, I thought it was all about you getting a decent game no?
BTW if you have a PC that will run any of my games, you too are better off than 90% of the population, and yet you still you want MORE??

30/04/2008 at 18:36 Jochen Scheisse says:

Except when possessions are like race cars and jets and rockets. They make you go woooosh!

30/04/2008 at 18:38 John P (Katsumoto) says:

More comments than the EG article on the same piece of news! Impressive!

Far fewer “twonks” in this one, too.

30/04/2008 at 18:41 obdicut says:

Cliffksi.

I didn’t call you angry, or stupid, or swear at you. But instead of responding to me, you’re responding to others who are being more combative.

This may be what makes you appear angry. I think you’re probably just angry on this particular subject, and prepared to think that you’re perfectly happy in your job and your life in general.

It may be that the way you choose to engage with the issue is combative, and therefore makes you seem angry.

30/04/2008 at 18:48 Larington says:

I’m beginning to think this needs locking, the argument is going around in circles which I don’t see coming to an end anytime soon.

This discussion keeps plowing forward, yet getting no where. And I see this circle being replicated every time the piracy reaper is brought up.

30/04/2008 at 18:52 Jochen Scheisse says:

But who could have known that this thread, too, will fail to put a full stop behind the piracy debate?

I see it as proven that Stuart is holier than cliffski, with both contestants giving it all.

30/04/2008 at 18:59 Rev. Stuart Campbell says:

No, Cliff. You’re evil because you’re a stupid and blinkered fundamentalist loony, which is a lot worse than just being greedy. Nearly everyone’s greedy, it’s a basic human survival trait. But being stupid and wilfully blind is an evolutionary dead end.

30/04/2008 at 19:07 po says:

Difference between a game (software/music/film) and a car/house/food?

Very simple, and rather importantly, production cost.

Your production costs for any digitally distributable media are fixed. The distribution (and publication costs) will increase as you produce more, but those are more than covered by the sale price.

Once you have that master disk, and you have covered your costs, then you are making a lot more money than with any product that requires a physical object to be produced for each item sold.

Media is in a completely different ballpark from physical goods.

The thing is though, how much of the money ends up going to the developers (giving them the resources to make better games in future), and how much is pocketed by the publishers. Who likes the way the big publishers do business/support products once they’ve been released? I think the general rule is developers are great and deserve our support, publishers suck the scene dry.

I’d be happier pirating games and sending a cheque direct to the devs than buying from some puplishers, considering their history.

30/04/2008 at 19:14 sinister agent says:

About two minutes ago I thought to myself “Hang on a minute…” and hovered over your name, Cliff. I had kind of assumed your games would be ones I’d never heard of (to be brutally honest I assumed they were crap and that’s why you had such a bee in your bonnet over piracy, as often happens), so imagine my surprise when I realised you’re the Democracy guy.

I’ve downloaded probably about half a dozen, ten games, tops, without paying for them. Of these games I’ve since bought three and deleted the rest, except for one which I’ve kept and not paid for because the developers are scumbags and I’ve been burned by them twice in the past, so screw them.

I also bought Mount & Blade, and (and your blinkered “pirates don’t buy games” rhetoric suggests you won’t believe this, so if you like, I can prove it – I’m sure I’ve got a paypal record of the transaction somewhere) Democracy. Why? Because I, like the majority of pirates, am not in fact a cartoon villain who is a conveniently evil, amoral, selfish thief, but just someone who:

a) doesn’t have the money to buy many games (£30? Fuck right off – I can feed myself for a week with that), and
b) is sick of being fleeced with crap, overpriced games by greedy hacks who actively despise gamers.

And so I pirate the odd game here and there. If the game’s worth my money, I’ll buy it. If it’s not, I’ll delete it. If the game’s good but the company involved are useless bastards, I will probably keep the game and my money, because shitty developers are the reason games are so expensive, why they’re so lousy and why there’s so much piracy.

I paid for your game because I thought it was pretty good, and because supporting an indie developer trying something kind of interesting is a Good Thing. Being brutally honest again, I probably haven’t got my money’s worth out of it as I played it for a couple of days and then never touched it again, but I’m not bitter about that because you’re not taking over the planet, and it didn’t cost much. I even paid extra for that wee planet-defending shooter thing, and I only played that for about forty minutes. I won’t be buying (or downloading, relax) Kudos or Rock Star because they don’t look like enough of a departure from what I’ve already got. They basically don’t look good enough to justify spending my money, and that’s the only reason.

If I couldn’t pirate the games I pirated, I sure as hell wouldn’t pay for them when I could buy half a dozen books instead, or even just play one of the scores of old games I have.

I know a lot of piracy advocates hate my guts. I couldn’t care less, because those people don’t buy games. I care about what my customers think.

I can imagine how frustrating it must be to have your work pirated, but saying that pirates don’t buy games is farcically unrealistic, imagining that many of them would buy if they couldn’t pirate is as well, and comparing piracy to theft is utter nonsense. I’m one of your customers, and I think you’ve got this all backwards. I support piracy. I also support innovative, typically independent, developers who aren’t churning out any old turgid shit to chase a profit. The two are far from mutually exclusive.

You’ve really done yourself no favours at all with some of your comments today. Some of what you’ve said is not only fatuous and ill-considered (stop calling it theft or shoplifting, for chirst’s sake – you’re embarassing yourself. And can you really not see the difference between a game and a house? Here’s one important hint – you can and will see the entirety of the house before you buy it. With games, you can see – at most – the bits that the person trying to sell it lets you see. Would you let the estate agent only show you one room before buying a house?), but very arrogantly phrased.

30/04/2008 at 19:14 Larington says:

Yeah, there was once I time when I toyed with the idea “pirate because the publishers are evil” the big problem with this, as I concluded, is that by hurting the publisher you hurt the developer. Few publishers are willing to fund a sequel to a failed game and (in rare cases) a failed developer if its first game(s) don’t sell.

A certain company was voted best new developer at GDC 07… One year later, the developer was closing its doors. Interesting that, no?

30/04/2008 at 19:30 Kanakotka says:

Let me step in for a moment. Again.
Since people do not read earlier comments, here’s the sum up again:

PC gaming has been actively dying for the last 20 years, but still hasn’t! Amazing!
And why has it been dying? Piracy, of course. Are j00 st00pid? It’s dem darr damn pirates dar be steeling our profits.

Pirates – Killing PC gaming AND your profits since 198x ? Or not…?
As i mentioned before, the amount of peers on any game has been declining. And i’ve been doing this thang for far over 10 years.
Let’s compare.
suprnova, year is 1999, homeworld 2, over 23,000 peers. ON ONE SINGLE TORRENT.
mininova, year is 2008, superhit GTA IV prereleased to everyone before it even hits stores. 14,000 combined peers on ALL torrents.

oops?

By the way, GTA : SA is still the most pirated game ever! (Thanks Jack Thompson) Did you -ever- see Rockstar games whining about it like this? Surely, they mentioned “aww damnit pirates” somewhere in the press releases, but they had(back then, being around 2-3 million) large sales figures, so…

Also, since the industry is getting fair bigger every day, even if the amount of pirates would stay the same as they were in suprnova’s times, the ratio would -still- be far smaller when compared to back then.

As i have said now 4 times, it’s just hip to blame things on everyone who isn’t directly responsible for it. (See : 9/11 conspiwancy thewwies.)

Piracy is doing great big amount of good in comparison to it’s bad sides, too. To those who are aware of things. I would be willing to bet my left arm that there is at least 1 person who downloaded cliffski’s game before he bought it. AT LEAST. That makes him a customer to cliffski. And chances are, without piracy, he would’ve never even heard of the game.

Now, again, to sum it up. Piracy is stealing, big deal, et.c. et.c. it happens. But not just in PC gaming, not just in software, it happens even in CARS. (Gaze at: http://www.riemurasia.net/jylppy/media.php?id=30140&c=1 for instance. Yes, it is called plagiarization, but what you are stealing here is IDEAS. It isn’t the name that makes the product.
Then again, piracy (physical) isn’t really relevant to piracy (software) in much of ways. So blah. I’m just talking for the sake of talking.

(Biggest thread ever, i’m superseeding milk now. Moo.)

30/04/2008 at 19:36 SwiftRanger says:

That Gamesindustry.biz-interview deserves its own RPS post I’d say, I was especially surprised about Lombardi’s stance on retail versions. At least he acknowledges that PC gaming should always have retail presence next to digital distribution. Some folks might think a DD-only future is the way to go but I am not one of them.

edit: nice new perspective idd, Dinger. :)

30/04/2008 at 19:39 po says:

Single torrents? There’s usually more than one torrent for a game (and you forget about other networks like edonkey/kad/overnet/dc++/etc)

30/04/2008 at 19:53 Kanakotka says:

Oops again. The above post by me is actually written before i read sinister agent’s comment. Proof of concept?

Also, can i lick you, John? I like licking people.

30/04/2008 at 20:12 Rocktart says:

I haven’t downloaded any games/comics but I gave Jamie $10 as I’ve used one of his pictures as wallpaper for ages. I’m not sure how that would translate into gaming.

30/04/2008 at 20:18 cliffski says:

Piracy doesnt deprive a physical object, clearly. But it still hurts the developer. ‘copyright infringement’ sounds like some minor legal debating point, not something that means people lose their jobs. We dont have a word that sums it up correctly unfortunately.

As for the pirates can be customers thing, yes thats true, but those people (who pirate occasionally, but buy games they like) dont tend to be the raving,insulting,foaming, aggressive types like ths guy in this thread. THOSE are the ones that I don’t listen to regarding my games.

BTW On the angry thing, please… re-read those posts, and yours. You have thrown insults directly at me, called me an idiot, stupid, all kinds of stuff that I haven’t said to you. How can you not see the difference between the way I’ve addressed you, and the flaming hatred and foaming insults you have hurled at me?

BTW it’s not a ‘hobby horse’, its a very very serious issue. Go ask a small independent retailer what he thinks of shoplifters. I can assure you he will be MUCH more annoyed about it than me.

30/04/2008 at 20:22 Rev. Stuart Campbell says:

Yes, Cliff, I have called you a few (factually accurate) names, boo hoo. That doesn’t mean I’m angry, it means that after 20 years I’m weary of debating with really stupid people who don’t listen to the evidence and I very quickly get bored of trying to reason with them like adults. It’s not so much anger as resigned, pitying contempt. You, on the other hand, are clearly poisonously bitter that some people are playing your games without paying for them, even though you claim to be doing very nicely out of them anyway. Heck, you even threaten physical violence. Nice.

And heavens, can that really be you going on about the completely unrelated topic of shoplifting AGAIN in your last paragraph? Sigh.

30/04/2008 at 20:28 sinister agent says:

Go ask a small independent retailer what he thinks of shoplifters. I can assure you he will be MUCH more annoyed about it than me.

Ah, but what does that shopkeeper do about it? He just accepts that it’s inevitable and tries to appeal to the majority of his honest customers by treating them better. He doesn’t double the price of everything and hire a thug to scream “YOU WOULDN’T STEAL A CAR” at everyone who comes in, while rifling through their pockets. If he did that, people would tell him to shove it and go ahead and steal more than they would have anyway just to spite him.

Run the business right, get in the right stock and treat people well, and the shoplifting/piracy won’t make a dent. It worked for Sins of Solar Whateverface just as well as for the slightly creepy corner shop owner near my old flat.

30/04/2008 at 20:30 cliffski says:

stuart, if it doesn’t show your angry, it shows your incredibly rude, and incapable of defending your point of view.
Even after you pretend I’ve been ruder than you, and get called out on it, and shown what nonsense it is, you cant even accept you were wrong, yet throw a load more insults and abuse at me.
What do you think you achieve by the abuse exactly? because you aren’t making games pirates look like the nice guys here…

30/04/2008 at 20:33 cliffski says:

“Ah, but what does that shopkeeper do about it?”

He employs security guards, sticks tags on everything he stocks, and scanners by every exit, he installs video cameras that watch the customers, he has steel shutters that cover the windows at night.
Thats WAY more invasive than 99% of game DRM. You have just got used to it, and see it as reasonable.

30/04/2008 at 20:36 cliffski says:

Ok, I thought earlier RPS had posted that people should stop flaming. I did. (to the extent I even had) Stuart didn’t, and his posts are still here, in which case, I’m off.
If I wanted this level of discussion, I’d go play counterstrike…

30/04/2008 at 20:38 Citizen Parker says:

If ever I’m elected Global Ruler For All Eternity, first decree: Any internet posts about piracy have to be published without commenting enabled. All sides seem to come in with minds made up, so little ever seems to be accomplished. Maybe that’s just me being defeatist however.

(for the curious, second decree: Segways for everyone!)

30/04/2008 at 20:43 cliffski says:

Show me John.. show me the bit where I go bezerk.
You disagree with me (Clearly) over piracy, and you have discussed it sensibly. He has not. The only person going bezerk here is Stuart.
He was warned not to flame people, and now that warning is apparently void.

How on earth is pointing out that he is being abusive rather than addressing the issue ‘calling him a fuckface’?

this is silly.

30/04/2008 at 20:45 cliffski says:

Ok here is a rational question. lets see if it gets answered..

“Do you think that the customer that already has in his possession a full copy of a game which he has played all the way through, knowing he can get away with keeping his money if he decides to, is in a neutral position when deciding if that game is worth purchasing, in comparison with someone who has only played a demo.”

30/04/2008 at 20:48 cliffski says:

I don’t have statistics. I know from experience that devs I know and worked with have shifted entirely (or mainly) to the console market, and quote piracy as a major factor. witness crysis, id, epic etc, as well as smaller devs I know personally.
But are you suggesting that piracy is fine as long as the market does NOT decline?
Surely the market should be the size it deserves to be based upon the entertainment value it provides? In other words, even if the market is growing, it should be growing MORE if some people are using piracy to avoid paying for the entertainment, where they would otherwise have done so.

30/04/2008 at 20:56 SuperNashwan says:

“Once those were removed, CD sales were rocketing. Oops.

I’m not sure what comparisons can be drawn with PC gaming from that.”
I’d like to think a sensible person might at least come to the conclusion that for PC games piracy, we just don’t know right now. Some people here seem to be taking devs abandoning PC exclusives to be proof piracy is hurting sales, rather than merely being blamed for doing so. If you look at the flak some companies took for going multi-format (Thief 3 anyone?) it’s certainly a convenient excuse for the transition.

30/04/2008 at 21:01 Rev. Stuart Campbell says:

“I don’t have statistics.”

Ooh, down at the first fence. Bad luck. So not only have you not proved that piracy is to blame for the PC’s decline, you can’t even show us that there IS actually a decline in the first place! Meanwhile, empirical published sales figures (they’re in MCV every month) show that the PC’s share of the market is much the same as ever, and probably actually getting bigger once the likes of Steam and casual games (which are rarely properly counted, and are growing especially fast) are taken into account. So the PC has a growing share of a growing market, yet you somehow manage to interpret this as a catastrophic decline signifying an imminent apocalypse. I find that weird.

“But are you suggesting that piracy is fine as long as the market does NOT decline?”

Yes, I am. Because, among other things, I believe that piracy in fact grows the market. The evidence available plainly supports this assertion, because levels of piracy have grown every year since games were invented, yet the market keeps consistently getting bigger rather than smaller. Piracy is a hundred times easier and a thousand times more widespread now in the broadband age than it ever was in the Speccy era, yet the industry is unimaginably more vast and profitable. The most-pirated formats in history – Spectrum, Playstation 1, DS – are also the most successful and longest-lived, even though piracy was rife on all of them from day 1.

As a secondary reason, I’m not a mean-spirited market fundamentalist, so if someone is genuinely never going to buy something I make, I don’t give a toss if they have it for free. If it’s no real-world loss to me, in fact, I’m happier to have it experienced by more people, because I like it when culture is widely shared. But then I’m a liberal tree-hugging pinko that way. I make my entire archive of past writing and games available for free. I’m not greedy, y’see, and I have nothing but contempt for those who are.

30/04/2008 at 21:04 Dudley says:

“I make my entire archive of past writing and games available for free. ”
A slight correction that by make available for free he means “charge £2 a month if you want to see anything recent” (www.worldofstuart.co.uk)

Otherwise of course a solid post. There’s a hell of a lot at that site to read. Perhaps a few of you could go do so rather than enter a battle of wits unarmed.

30/04/2008 at 21:06 Rev. Stuart Campbell says:

“A slight correction that by make available for free he means “charge £2 a month if you want to see anything recent” (www.worldofstuart.co.uk)”

That would be why I used the word “past”, you insanely argumentative clot.

30/04/2008 at 21:10 Dudley says:

Yes Rev Pot.

30/04/2008 at 21:18 shiznit says:

And liverpool just got robbed.

30/04/2008 at 21:19 Dudley says:

“And liverpool just beaten by a better team despite that team wrongly having a goal disallowed”

Fixed that for you.

30/04/2008 at 21:22 Rev. Stuart Campbell says:

And that’s the difference between us, Cliff. I’m a rational realist, you’re a religious fundamentalist, whose religion is Capitalism. Which is what I said in the first place, and why we will never agree. I believe in happiness for as many people as possible, you believe in money. Good luck to you.

30/04/2008 at 21:33 obdicut says:

Cliffski:

You didn’t at all address the assertion, which I also believe, that piracy is actually good for the games market, in pretty much the same way it’s good for the music market.

I am much more inclined to buy a game because I know that if, for whatever reason, my retail version does not function, that there are pirated versions available for me to install and use.

There are many games that I would never, ever go to the trouble of purchasing in-store, but I will purchase using the most accessible and easy format available to me– Steam or Direct-Download. I have the comfort of knowing that if I change computers, I can redownload.

Piracy gives me the option to download a game that I bought, legally, without needing to find the actual physical case. I like pirates for that reason. I also like them for cracking intrusive DRM.

Chicken/egg is obviously applicable here.

30/04/2008 at 21:35 Rev. Stuart Campbell says:

Sigh. You’re not even listening, Cliff. What’s the point?

I’m saying that piracy DIRECTLY CAUSES THE MARKET TO GROW TO A GREATER SIZE THAN IT WOULD BE WITHOUT PIRACY. Yet you say “I don’t care if the pc games market has increased 10,000% [because of piracy]. That doesnt mean that piracy is good for the market.”

But that’s quite clearly EXACTLY what it DOES mean, IF my assertion is correct. And you can’t handle that even as a possibility, or come up with any sort of argument disproving or even disputing it, so you start dribbling on about imaginary hamburgers instead. Someone else paraphrased your reaction better than I could, though:

“I don’t care how brilliant everything is for everyone, if it means I have to change my mind.”

I gave you a fair shot, with a rational viewpoint supported by the available facts. Your response was “I don’t care about the facts if they conflict with my fundamentalist ideology.” You’d apparently rather sell FEWER copies and make LESS money, as long as it meant that nobody was getting a free ride at the same time.

That I expected such an irrational and paradoxical response makes it no less disappointing, and I’m leaving it here, so that John can go to bed without worrying about what’s happening and having nightmares.

30/04/2008 at 21:42 cliffski says:

I tried to be civil, and yet i just get insults. so fuck it, why bother.
bye

30/04/2008 at 21:46 sinister agent says:

Cliff, do us and intelligent debate a favour – ignore Stu’s insults, but address his points. Yes, someone can be rude to you but still make a perfectly valid point, and it is up to you to address that point regardless of the insults. Rise above it, but address it.

That way you get to defend your stance, understand someone else’s, and maybe we all reach an understanding we didn’t have before – and you get to shrug off someone else’s rudeness, which is always satisfying because it means they get all frustrated while you get to be all “psh, I am immune to your tiny words.”

30/04/2008 at 21:49 cliffski says:

“And honestly, statements like “I don’t care if piracy has grown the game market” really do seem very, very, very strange.”
you didnt read them then. That is NOT what I said.
I said I dont care if the market has grown. That is so clealry and obviosuly not what you just stated.

I do NOT think that piracy grows the market (obviously).
I said that growth in the market does NOT mean that piracy has no effect. Surely people can see this?
If a non-piracy market will naturally grow 50%, but with piracy it grows 30%, then piracy HAS had a 20% effect on the market, despite its overall rise.
That is my point.

30/04/2008 at 21:54 obdicut says:

Cliffski

My apologies, then, for misunderstanding you.

So if you were showed data that showed that piracy does indeed grow the market, would you reverse your opinion on piracy?

I’m trying to disentangle whether or not you’re making a philosophical or a practical stand here. It seems to be more philosophical than practical, since you’ve come to the conclusion without having data.

In an interesting side note, bookstores do track most-stolen books-from-libraries, and they do use that as part of the metric for what books to repurchase. Of course, when a book is stolen from a physical library it actually disappears.

30/04/2008 at 21:59 Dinger says:

Guys, in 2 hours, according to GMT (!= GMT 1, contrary to what you Imperials like to think), it will be May Day. Kindly show some respect to the Wretched of the Earth.

You know, if piracy is making it so that your business model doesn’t work, figure out what the cost of dealing with piracy is. If it’s too high, change your business model, even if it means not developing for the PC, or doing something else. Heck, I’d love to be paid to drink beer and watch professional sports, but it’s not a viable business model.
As said, people CANNOT make unprofitable games. So don’t.
Where it stops being a serious issue and becomes a “hobby horse” is when you cease taking effective measures against piracy and try to “socially engineer” change by insulting people who have a different opinion, and not necessarily one that condones piracy.
Here’s the bad news: you may be a software developer, providing games for people to play. But, by your own admission, the people you’re debating with are not the leaders of the “pirate community”, nor is the ideology they espouse that of most pirates. So even if you thoroughly beat them, and by your persuasive argumentation and full command of divinely illuminated reason, forced them to admit the rightness of your position, it still wouldn’t change a thing.

It’s as ludicrous as Bruce pointing to Stu’s site and screaming “pirate!” Uhhh, he just pointed out the difference between copyright infringement and theft. Copyright Infringement in most civilized places is not a crime; it’s a civil matter.

Feel free to spend your time as you wish, but don’t pretend like your arguments are helping anything.

And, for the record, many of us consider breaking the peace wrong, but we find infringement of our rights evil. Anyway, in that spirit, in a couple hours, we will commemorate the 222nd anniversary of the Haymarket riots, which brings together the spirits of communism and the fierce defense against any infringement of our rights. I strongly recommend we commemorate it with fierce spirits.

Oh and Robin, clicking on your name brings up a page accusing me of pirating your images. After bypassing such charlatanry, I find you have made a game in which the player participates in a “victimless crime.” Oh Lord, let me guess how it ends: Cliffski writes “Wait, that’s a stolen apple. I’m sure you’re full of parasites now.”

For the record, I opposed the Enclosure Movement too.

30/04/2008 at 22:04 cliffski says:

No I have no data. as I just said NOBODY has data that can be trusted on that.

But hold on.. You are saying that if a dev makes a game that EVERYONE loves, but NOBODY buys, then they make ends meet by doing the same thing again?
If game A loses money you do NOT make another one. Unless you want to go bankrupt. How is that not clear?
You are equating the amount of money the game made with how good it is. Thats fine, if people buy the games they like. If they like the game, play the game, but dont buy it, then you could make the next 10 awesome games ever and never earn a penny.
That is my point!

30/04/2008 at 22:06 obdicut says:

“But I just do not believe it does so, and furthermore, I do not believe its possible to know for sure, because you are asking pirates if they would have bought a game they know they already got for free.
Nobody can answer that question honestly, not you, not me, not anyone. Thats just not the way our brains are wired.”

Well, there are many other ways of figuring out whether or not privacy helps. You can assume every single person pirating the game never buys the retail version, and you could still prove that piracy helped the game.

If you ask your legitimate buyers the following question, with a promise of absolutely complete anonymity (as was done for the music industry) “Did you play a pirated version of the game before you bought it? Were you inspired to buy the game based on someone’s recommendation who had a pirated copy? Do you ever download the pirated copy of a game you already own?” These would be a good start.

You do believe me, right, that I use pirated copies of games in the manner that I’ve described? And that others like me exist? Or are you assuming that I’m lying?

30/04/2008 at 23:12 cliffski says:

It doesnt matter what you promise them or what you ask, thats not my point.
I think people lie to themselves.
People play a game to the end, and then when they know they could buy it retrospectively, they CANNOT even to themselves, be fair about what they think the game is worth.
People tend to devalue something they got for free. And people like to (generally) think of themselves as honest, and reasonable. If they have to admit (even to themselves) that they DID enjoy that game enough to buy it, it makes them feel bad. So not surprisingly you tell yourself that the game wasn’t good enough.
I’m not saying it’s malicious, just that its natural, and thats what people do.

30/04/2008 at 23:17 sinister agent says:

Of course, when a book is stolen from a physical library it actually disappears.

Yep – and the library operates in such a manner that means theft will not cripple it (as do shops, shipping companies and every other industry in the world).

you are asking pirates if they would have bought a game they know they already got for free.
Nobody can answer that question honestly, not you, not me, not anyone. Thats just not the way our brains are wired.

Except that we can answer it. I already told you that I’ve bought at least three out of 6 – 10 games that I originally pirated. My brain is just fine, thanks. Also, there are a fair few games I and loads of other may not have heard of if it weren’t for a few people nabbing them – those people nab the game, play it, talk about it, etc, etc.

If this really grew sales, then surely the idea of making the game free, but asking people to pay for it (like radiohead tried), would be a MORE profitable system.
Is this what people here think?
If so…

1)Why hasn’t any developer done this?

Because most developers prefer to shout and scream and blame piracy for all the industry’s failures. The videogame industry is incredibly conservative and cowardly.

2)Why don’t YOU prove us ignorant devs wrong by doing it right now. Prove us wrong. with hard sales figures.

It’s interesting that you’re so keen on sales figures when you freely admitted earlier that you have no evidence for your claims at all. Look at the posts someone made about the music industry earlier (big spikes in sales when Napster and the Napster 2 era took hold; industry trying to fiddle sales figures so it’d look like the opposite happened because reality didn’t fit in with their delusions about the convenient bogeyman). THere’s that for starters, and then empirical observation of myself and a fair few other people who have bought more games solely because of piracy to back it up.

Not watertight, but it’s more than you have.

If letting people take the product for free really grew the market, then donationware would be the top earning system of games publishing.

It isn’t.

Arguably because most donationware is crap.

It currently works the other way round – people make a game, and then automatically think “how much can I sell this for?”. It’s only natural – it’s the traditional mode of business, it’s practical and the networks are already established. It’s a safe bet. If, however, people think they won’t make any money off it (or no publishers will touch it), then they consider freeware and donationware. What they don’t do is get their game and start considering all the options for distributing it – people will naturally think of selling it the conventional way first.

And of course, I’m not talking about letting people get the game for free – I’m talking about letting some people get the game for free – they’ll then talk about it to people who will go out and buy the game (because some people, myself included, prefer to physically buy the game, and might not donate simply out of neglect, but if they had to pay or pirate (or pay AFTER pirating), they’d pay).

. I pirate games AFTER buying them

Oh yeah, I’ve done this too. I couldn’t get a Total War game to work from the CD. Downloaded a cracked version and bang – it worked.

01/05/2008 at 00:13 Alex says:

“Ah, but what does that shopkeeper do about it?”

He employs security guards, sticks tags on everything he stocks, and scanners by every exit, he installs video cameras that watch the customers, he has steel shutters that cover the windows at night.
Thats WAY more invasive than 99% of game DRM. You have just got used to it, and see it as reasonable.

No, sorry cliffski, that’s not the same, in fact it’s less invasive. I’m only inconvenienced by those countermeasures as long as I’m in the store, as soon as I’ve paid and leave the store, that’s that.

When I buy a game, everytime I want to play a game there’s still a security guard standing behind me, to see if I actually paid. Granted, he disappears when my disk check goes through, or I connect to a server, but he’ll be back next time.

01/05/2008 at 00:49 Robin says:

Stuart: “I gave you a fair shot, with a rational viewpoint supported by the available facts.”

Please show me the facts that back up the claim that piracy is causally linked to growing the market. It makes some sense in the abstract, I agree, but this comment thread was sparked off by discussing a specific set of circumstances. You want to be a realist, address those circumstances. Face it, you won’t accept the possibility that piracy *can ever* be detrimental to the amount and quality of product in a discrete section of the market. And yet you’re calling cliffski a “fundamentalist”? Utterly hilarious.

“Cliff just chooses not to hear when people explicitly say “I pirated your game, liked it and bought it”, because if he acknowledged this incredibly-commonly-reported claim as being true, he’d have to admit that everything he’s stated as fact is wrong, and re-assess his entire position.”

So if an unknowable amount of people are Honest Pirates then your argument works? How terribly convenient!

It would be great if people could be trusted to just pay what they thought something was worth, on a sufficient scale to build games that are easy enough and technically robust enough for the majority of people to use. Cliff’s argument about heavily pirated games not getting sequels is perhaps an oversimplification, but one that Stuart tellingly seems to be ignoring.

sinister agent: “No, I am saying (if you read the words that I actually used) that if their first game was a flop, their first game wasn’t good enough and TOUGH. SHIT.”

Startopia? Psychonauts? It would be great to live in a world where quality of games was rewarded fairly.

Oh, and shareware != donationware. Why do you think Id, Epic and 3D Realms eventually abandoned the shareware model?

01/05/2008 at 01:09 sinister agent says:

Startopia? Psychonauts? It would be great to live in a world where quality of games was rewarded fairly.

Yeah, I know, but shit happens in other industries, too. That’s nothing to do with piracy – it’s the nature of mass markets. People have lousy taste (just look at the Box Office top 10 for proof), and sometimes good games or albums take a fall because of that. Harsh, but inevitable, piracy or no.

Oh, and shareware != donationware. Why do you think Id, Epic and 3D Realms eventually abandoned the shareware model?

Because they no longer needed the word of mouth. I know that shareware isn’t the same thing, but Doom’s ‘free’ content was plenty to just give away. Comparable to a huge, huge demo (a third of the game, wasn’t it?), but one that wasn’t made just to advertise the game as most are now, and one you could play ad infinitum, unlike the time-locked ones that don’t often give you a good idea of what the game is really like.

I wasn’t the one who proposed donationware, remember. Shareware would have been more than acceptable for most of the games I previously downloaded.

01/05/2008 at 01:17 Noc says:

Po: I say we try and stir up more invective, and try and see how long we can keep the momentum up. So you’re all . . . fags or something, I don’t know. And your mothers. ‘Cause of Pirates.

(Though my browser DID almost crap itself trying to put corners on all those boxes. 1,212 is a lot of corners.)

01/05/2008 at 01:34 Kanakotka says:

“Why hasn’t any developer released their game free and had people pay if they liked it?”
Have you even ever heard of freeware games, cliff? Run by donations, no less?
I know several. Just google ”freeware game”.

Besides, Radiohead didn’t only try, they went big with it. Raking in far more profits than with a commercial publisher, hell, i paid 14.50$ for it because it was a nice album.

Besides, no matter what you say, you love arguing, even without a point. The constant jabbering on the same damn point “kind of” proves that. If you dress a pig in a hawaii shirt it’s still a pig… imaginary hamburgers… hahhaha.

Oh, and mr. Jack Norton, because evading such system, making it read false data and other fun things are trivial to make. You know, you can even crack a windows, thinking it is activated infinitely, and you can download updates to it too. (Microsoft does a key check during each update. And checks validity of some key files.)

01/05/2008 at 02:09 Kanakotka says:

Oh, and one more thing, there’s still tv programme / movie piracy, if you live in a “backwater country”(jokingly.) like Finland or Australia, you don’t get most programs. Thusly, what’s the way to get them? Torrent em, of course. Now here’s a great little proof thing for you.

Are you familiar with the anime series Naruto, in any way?
It only came to the US because it was ILLEGALLY DOWNLOADED BY U.S. RESIDENTS SO DAMN MUCH THAT THE TEAM THAT PUBLISHED IT THOUGHT IT WAS A GRAND IDEA TO ACTUALLY SEEK OUT AND PUBLISH IT IN U.S. TOO . That sentence purposefully in caps, to give a rock solid proof that piracy has it’s benefits.
Deny that, biatches.

Also, i love how they don’t have the slighest clue how to play a game in videos like that. MASH KEYBOARD; STUFF HAPPEN, ME SO GOOD.

01/05/2008 at 07:03 Muzman says:

I realise people are probably rolling their eyes at all this and groaning at yet another piracy debate going over the same ground, getting nasty etc. But this is why piracy is such a brilliant topic. It’s got everything!: economics, morality, social values, real politik. It goes to various fundamental issues of human thought in this day and age.

As we’ve seen said, it’s pretty hard to deny that copyright infringing game and general software copying (I’ll avoid the more impassioned term) has not held back the advance of gaming and has probably actually permitted (facilitated?) the relentless advance of hardware and the spread of computing in general. But no one with any stake in software development can ever acknowledge it out loud (well some do, but I bet it really annoys most), lest permissiveness take hold and before you know it ‘God is dead’. And as much as I like the idea that humans are better off with a full and open picture of reality regardless (or perhaps because of) its moral implications for current social structures, I can’t really blame them for trying to keep it under wraps and reinforce “You get what you’ve a paid for, and only what you’ve paid for” as sacred every chance they get.

For many, I suspect including cliffski here, it’s not a cynical thing where they encourage willful ignorance or doublethink in lesser mortals to produce morally correct behaviours that benefit themselves, but that to them the sacred economic relationship is the only thing that matters. It’s the right of the individual to profit from his or her labours . I can see why people feel this way, and despite my chardonnay marxism I really can’t imagine the world I live in functioning to my satisfaction if that relationship is not generally taken to be somewhat sacred.

But at the same time, it’s difficult for many to ignore (indeed, to avoid publicising and discussing) the complexity of the situation and to address the larger picture. Is doing this eroding the morality of our economics and what does that mean? What does that say about our assumptions of human psychology and who has which assumption?
It’s ying and yang; conservative and liberal; individualist and socialist; absolutist and relativist.
It’s got it all, baby, I love it!

01/05/2008 at 09:15 Theory says:

The fact of the matter is that neither you, Stuart, nor you, Cliffski, nor anyone else, has ANY facts. Nobody can see into the minds of the people on a torrent and know why they are there, so nobody can crunch their number in anyone’s favour, so nobody gets anywhere by trying to discuss it.

The only thing we DO know is that piracy is having the effect of killing off PC-exclusive games that target the pirate demographic, because developers keep giving it as their reasoning when they decide to bottle out. No great loss as far as I’m concerned…

(I find Stuart’s consistent presumption of causality between piracy and sales amusing. Have you noticed that the number of PC game sales and the number of console-exclusive games have been growing at the same time too? Clearly, one is effecting the other! Go on Stu! Argue it!)

01/05/2008 at 09:34 Theory says:

Did you, uh, read the sentence after that quote?

I don’t PRESUME a link between those two things, but Occam’s Razor certainly suggests it.

So you accept that both your theory and (to slap a name on it) Cliffski’s are equal in all regards other than simplicity?

Above and beyond that, Occam’s razor, by its very definition a presumption actually, depends on a personal judgement of which theory “introduces the fewest assumptions“, which pretty much backs up my argument. Cliffski would reach the opposite conclusion with the same data.

01/05/2008 at 09:36 Theory says:

I keep trying to edit my comment to quote Stu at the start (several other comments appeared while I was typing), but all I get is “Saving Comment Failed”.

01/05/2008 at 10:57 Lh'owon says:

Wow… I was going to make a comment about the insane number of posts when there were around 90.

Piracy it seems is quite the contentious issue.

01/05/2008 at 13:17 Monkfish says:

Piracy debate == Irresistible force paradox.

01/05/2008 at 14:10 Rev. Stuart Campbell says:

Stats for those assertions, please.

01/05/2008 at 15:16 Rev. Stuart Campbell says:

Yes they have, and I provided the relevant links.

01/05/2008 at 15:39 Jochen Scheisse says:

Do you mean this? It is the only link I found, but I am still in bad shape because I got pretty drunk in yesterday’s Walpurgisnight celebrations, so I most probably missed the links you meant. The link I found is interesting, especially the fact that making cracks invalid after a while brought the best sales boost. But not even that is authoritative IMO, because contrary to casual games, “regular” PC games often offer a brilliant 10 hour experience, but no immediate replay value. And that’s the type of game where making cracks obsolete on a regular basis won’t be that successful, even if the person liked the game experience very much. If you played through a game like Prince of Persia for example, which is definitely a very good game, and one week later your crack becomes obsolete, you’ll maybe only notice it half a year later when you decide to replay it. And while the whole text is interesting for a small segment of the market in a small time period, it does very little to give evidence that piracy^=>marketsize^.

01/05/2008 at 16:59 Jochen Scheisse says:

As soon as abandoning PC-led development means giving the game half a year on the console market before porting it to the PC and developing it with a command scheme, game mechanics and engine requirements tailored to the console market, more people will care. Of course, that’s kind of a worst case scenario.

01/05/2008 at 18:27 Robin says:

““Epic, Id and CryTek abandoning PC-led development” means nothing, though. Who cares what format LEADS development? Nobody but fanboys.”

Please don’t insult the intelligence of everyone here. It’s blindingly obvious that if a developer has to factor porting to consoles into their design to get their game green lit, that’s going to significantly influence the kind of games that they can make. Needs cursor control to play? Uses an online business model incompatible with Xbox Live (i.e. virtually all of them)? Tough luck. Format zealotry has nothing to do with it. But you know this. It’s just another pointless, baiting diversion.

“Show me evidence that the number of PC releases is declining overall, please.”

I can’t, easily. But the fact that the developers and publishers I’ve mentioned as well as several others who typically release their games cross platform are cutting back their support for the PC suggests that the trend is continuing. It has been evident for years though. Why do you think the print PC games mags have spread their coverage of new games ever thinner, and resorted to using mods and expansion packs as cover stories?

Of course you will cite the proliferation of casual and indie games as counter-evidence, but we’ve always had those. And they don’t encompass the kind of big, risky and progressive projects like shiznit is talking about above, and that RPS is primarily engaged in discussing.

But then, you don’t play those games, so why are you even bothered?

01/05/2008 at 20:08 shiznit says:

no platform can make Assassin’s Creed actually fun to play, but Bioshock *could* have been fun for me if the mouse control wasn’t such an obvious afterthought.

02/05/2008 at 11:06 Sam says:

cliffski, Stuart didn’t say “piracy isn’t reducing sales”, he said that “increased piracy doesn’t cause game sales to fall”. Since games sales are not falling, demonstrably, and piracy is quite high, demonstrably, this is an inescapable truth.
Now, it remains to argue that piracy prevents games sales from increasing as fast as they would without it, but that’s not “falling sales” – it is “reduced sales”, if it happens; a phrase which only you have used, and which you have no produced any concrete evidence for or against.

It is also interesting that you have failed to address the fact that the music industry, which is famously grumpy about piracy, has failed to demonstrate that any loss in sales it experiences are actually proportional to piracy (indeed, as Mr John Walker noted, from his own research, it appears that, in the music industry, piracy is correlated with increased sales). I would expect that piracy in the computer games industry would not be so wildly different to piracy in the music industry as to make them incomparable.

I realise that you are angry about the possibility of people using a product that you have spent time on without renumerating you financially. I can understand this. However, as numerous people have commented to you previously, “I should have been paid for this” is not identical to “I would have been paid for this, if it was impossible not to pay for it”, since it ignores the possibility that the value assigned by a pirate to your work is anywhere near the value that you assign to it. It also ignores the possibility that piracy increases sales, as it may possibly do in the music industry (and, indeed, as the example of Baen Books’ “Baen Free Library” shows that, in this case legally distributed, free copies of a book can increase sales of the same product).

04/05/2008 at 01:51 Kanakotka says:

Also, on the original post, leading piracy on large margin is inexcusable bollocks. The most pirated game is, and always will be GTA SA, due to Jacky cracky Thompson scandal on it.

You know what also is inexcusable bollocks? Comparing piracy to any manner of theft.
Theft -> Item Lost -> Gather underpa…items -> ???? -> PROFIT

Piracy -> Item Duplicated, No loss. -> Item used, no deteroriation to item -> Item not sold for profit -> Item dumped/ Item bought.

22/03/2009 at 15:14 Puckett, Cianan Josiah Tsali says:

Speaking as one who has pirated several games (yes, lock me up and shoot my ass, go fuck yourself), there are those rare individuals we call “Try-Delete_Buys” to make sure the game is actually worth the fifty dollars. You want your game to sell strong and not get pirated? No fucking chance.

You want your game to sell strong and get minimal piracy? Release a demo that makes the worst aspects of the game seem like it could conquer Halo 3 at the worst. Get your best and brightest, model, model model, Hell, a ten year release is nothing as long as it gives the gamers what the fuck they want : Good graphics, Good Story, Good Compatibility, few fucking bugs.

Arr, mateys.

24/04/2009 at 13:48 Dan Harris says:

“…What CoD4 did…”

I love CoD4. How come you’ve never written an article on it, and how awesome it is? One of those Wot I Think ones. Bit late now.

I like the way you get to call a helicopter after killing a bunch of people.