Towards the end of July, at the Develop conference, we took a much-needed break from listening to design paradigm analysis to have a coffee with Frontier Developments‘ David Braben. He’s one of the living legends of the industry – one word:Elite – and it was a welcome chance to casually pick over the issues of the day. So, yes, the P-word features strongly.
RPS: Develop seems like a good opportunity to talk about where you see things at the moment? What have you been paying attention to?
Braben: What I’ve been looking at is PC sales compared to those on other formats. Online games, such as World Of Warcraft, are selling well and making money, and then you have almost all other PC games: they’re not selling very well at all. It’s difficult to know quite what conclusions to draw from that, other than people aren’t buying retail copies of PC games unless there’s some kind of online component. The real question for me is whether the PC is going the way of the Amiga, with piracy killing off sales. Our last game, ThrillVille: Off The Rails, sold almost nothing on PC, but did sell on other platforms.
RPS: If I were ever to make a game – which I hope not to do, since everyone involved would be doomed – I’d be looking at making an online component intrinsic to the game, even if it were just glorified copy protection.
Braben: EA were suggesting something really draconian for Spore [this interview conducted well before Spore's release, obviously - Ed] and that would drive me round the bend, because I often game on a laptop, away from my internet connection.
RPS: Yes, I just moved house and found myself dragging a PC downstairs to get online to activate Mass Effect code
Braben: We need to find a suitable solution for the PC.
RPS: The solution we need is for the traditional PC middle ground, specifically. Casual games are doing okay, and the ultra-budget MMOs are doing okay, but the middle-ground is really having trouble. What people seem to be doing is embracing digital downloads – Tilted Mill for example with their games – Hinterland is being done on a budget, so it’ll make money from the people who want that kind of game. What do you make of those kind of very specific approaches on PC?
Braben: Well yes it’s interesting that the market is so fragmented, and so you’ve got small areas of it that are doing okay, particularly online games. Certain types of games, however, are going to die out, and the rate of piracy is a big factor. I mean the Amiga lived on for a very long time in certain areas, but the main stream of development died off. What that meant was that people didn’t renew their Amigas, they just kept them as they were. At the moment people renew PCs every two or three years, and that used to mean it led gaming. Now developers want to lead on console to get away from piracy, and that’s a real shame for the format.
RPS: Stardock’s approach is interesting that way – they’ve noticed that the piracy for certain sorts of games is much lower than for other sorts of games. I did that research too: Even a really terribly marked FPS – say Turning Point – gets downloaded enormously on torrents, but something more cerebral like Sins Of A Solar Empire didn’t get pirated much, and sold a fair bit.
Braben: I thought the idea for Turning Point was really interesting! Surely the bad mark doesn’t justify piracy.
RPS: Sorry: what I meant was that first-person shooters are more prone to be pirated, because the pirate audience is more interested in that kind of game.
Braben: Well yes, that is interesting. It’s always been the case that certain kinds of people have quite distinct tastes for certain kinds of games. But FPS gamers are likely to be young, poor, and very savvy about how to get these games online. There’s nothing more sinister to it than that – but it is an interesting point. I find that looking at who buys games is fascinating – almost everyone at the company is a gamer, and they’re all rather different people.
RPS: Going back to your point about the PC no longer leading game design – where it’s pushing now is in alternate business models, isn’t it? In the free to play stuff, the micropayments and ad-funded things…
Braben: That’s because there’s no choice?
RPS: Yes, but the thing we don’t think about with relation to the industry is that the biggest games are all free-to-play MMOs that are filled with teenagers. There’s that thing about the US teenager playing browser games until he’s eighteen and can afford a 360 and the games…
Braben: Runequest! My nephews played Runequest until they upgraded to a paid account. They thought they’d get a lot more from that, and when they didn’t they lost interest. What’s more interesting about that, perhaps, is it’s their education. And it’s becoming an education for that generation, giving them the expectation that online stuff is free. That’s something we need to look at. People’s expectations of what games look like demand huge art assets, and to make something people will want to pay for you need a huge team. When it’s something that can be so easily pirated on PC that leaves you with only one realistic choice: something online where the account can be verified by a server. Like the Amiga, it will be slow, but it will slide that way. We’re looking at ways round that. Online advertising is a possibility, but not at the moment: the revenue isn’t enough. What we need is online functionality to make the game both appealing, but necessarily paid for.
RPS: It’s just a technical limitation though isn’t it? I mean I’m playing Devil’s Advocate here, but games have always, and will always, face technical challenges, and piracy is just that…
Braben: Yes – it’s just so easy to remove software protection from PC games. People will crack something you put on within an hour of release. You simply can’t assume software protection will work. And as I said, people expect to get stuff for free. They don’t have that expectation when they’re buying stuff for their console.
RPS: Gamer entitlement is interesting. Why are gamers like that?
Braben: Even within a development house we’re never quite satisfied with a game. You always get the “what about this idea!” One of the ways that people justify piracy to themselves: “Oh well it isn’t exactly like I wanted, so I wouldn’t pay for it.” They can always imagine how it would be improved, because they’re intelligent people! And it’s only when they can’t access something, or need something from the retail version that they’ll consider buying the game.
RPS: To be honest, when I was a kid we spent all the money we had on games and pirated the rest. I think that’s still the case to an extent, but I think now piracy is easier, that money just goes somewhere else. If you wiped it out, just how much of it would come back to the PC is hard to say, of course.
Braben: I remember Virus was hugely pirated because it was on one disc. Just that simple logistical fact made it much more popular. There was no correlation to quality or anything else, it was just about practicality of piracy.
RPS: The PC crowd really hate DRM too, and that’s a big issue for them.
Braben: I hate DRM! That “you wouldn’t steal a car” thing at the start of DVDs, that drives me mad. I’d rather put games out without DRM, and just find a way to encourage people to buy it.
RPS: Going back to Stardock, they have a way: they make the patcher heavily protected and get people to log on for that. They’ve had some success with that.
Braben: Again it demands some online support… the people who play it again might well be the people who pirate it. Something I learned in the US is that are still some areas with painfully slow internet access, and people in those areas still buy boxed games! It’s those kinds of sales which best support the things that best on the PC: high-quality single player games with great story-telling. Games that you might love, but only play through once, because that’s it. I think we’ll see less and less of those games, or find them awkwardly shoehorned online, with strange justifications for their online component.
RPS: They’re games I really care about, yes. The kind of games you’re talking about are what interest me most about the PC, and they are in decline.
Braben: We’re a creative industry, we need to find creative ways to encourage people to buy these games – without pissing them off with restrictive copy protection!
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But, y’know, “skippalbe” has a certain zing. Now we just need to find a context for it.
@ Slang
You seem assume that all console owners do not own PC’s, which in my experience is just not true. Nearly all the people I know that own a 360 or a PS3 also own a PC for gaming.
I think what puts off most people from pirating games for their consoles is the fear that they might fuck up the machine in the process of cracking it, invalidating the warranty etc. Which on a £250-£300 piece of kit, is a very reasonable fear to have.
On the PC however there are no such hardware barriers to piracy to worry about. It’s all software driven, and the worst that will happen if things go wrong, is that the cracked game you just downloaded won’t work.
So maybe the soloution to PC piracy is, to lock the hardware down some how like on the consoles. Whilst that won’t completely erradicate piracy, I reckon it’ll certainly cut down on the amount of casual pirate downloads.
@Pod: That may be a joke, but it’s still heresy of the highest order. BURN THE UNBELIEVER
Piracy is a scapegoat.
Simple economics. When the cost of your product expands beyond what the customer is willing to pay, a black market opens. Look to ITunes as an example – millions of people downloading music when it’s possible to get it illegally for free. The $0.99 cost point there works.
$60 works for a 50+ hours GTA4 style game, as the market has shown. If your average 5-10 hour game was $20-30, people would be able to justify the cost easier, more willing to take chances on impulse buys, and less likely to pirate.
Either make AAA blockbusters, or if you’re a smaller studio, focus on making good games in the $20 price point. Give up on the latest Unreal-tech, bloom-enhanced, normal-mapped 90-minute cutscene eye candy and just make something fun. Developers like Popcap (Peggle) are cleaning up.
Force copy protection onto the hardware that I spent my thousand hard earned dollars on and I will pirate out of principle. You can take my video card
WHEN YOU PRY IT FROM MY COLD DEAD HANDS.
@Chaz:
Locking down the PC hardware would also destroy the whole point of a PC, really. It would also potentially allow the enforcement of monopolies of software provision, especially at the OS level. Therefore it would be an immensely stupid thing to do to a general purpose computing platform.
I have never been able to understand piracy of games. And the massive number off people who do it and think it’s perfectly okay is staggering. Can’t they see games just come into being but require actual work? You know, the process usually garnering money?
No money, no games. Obviously it won’t be as rigorous as that, but it still strikes me as unbelievable. I mean, games are just games, but livelihoods, incomes and personal moral/ethical standards are a whole ‘nother thing.
“Piracy is a scapegoat.
Simple economics. When the cost of your product expands beyond what the customer is willing to pay, a black market opens.”
if the customer (and many pc gamers now act this way) decide they are not prepared to pay anything for a PC game, none will get made. Enjoy solitaire dude.
“Simple Economics”
Recognize that people work hard to make money to play those games. Would you be singing the same tune if games were priced at $500 each instead of $50? I doubt it. Recognize that everyone has a breaking point, and it is the responsibility of the game producers to find the balance between getting the most dough out of the consumer, while still keeping it low enough to keep customers happy and garner more purchases.
If almost every game producer decides that their game; regardless of quality, length or replayability should cost 50 bucks, precious few will get sold. Enjoy defaulting on your home loan dudes.
Well, games cost a certain amount to make and developers have to recoup their costs. So even a bad, short game costs money to make. Indeed, I quite like strong stories so don’t mind limited replayability in some games. Games that do have replayability represent staggering value for money compared to some other forms of entertainment.
@cliffski:
Bollocks. We already have this thing called “free software”.
Sam: I don’t really want to play *only* small indie games in the future, laudable though the indie developers’ efforts are.
Gap Gen: Two points:
Firstly, it’s not only small indie games that are produced as free software, although they are the majority.
Secondly, the comment was a response to cliffski’s apparent insistence that *no-one* would do something if there was no profit in it. This is trivially false, and it needed pointing out.
I don’t understand the argument that hardware manufacturers aren’t allowed to put copy protection in their products.
How are you guys coming to that conclusion? It’s their product. Your buying it, certainly. But they have the right to add said protection if they so choose.
To be honest I’m surprised game publishers haven’t already done that.
Further, that game console you own does hardware copy protection, so why not your gaming video card?
Of course they’re allowed to do whatever they want with their hardware. It would not necessarily be in their interests to do so, see this. The game publishers are not hardware manufacturers.
In fact, considering the increasing interest in using “gaming video cards” for distinctly non-standard things like commodity GPU processing, it would be incredibly stupid for them to tie their product to some game-console-like limiting DRM system.
Again – a PC is for general purpose computing, not just for playing games.
@Dan Milburn
That’s a good point, and I should have better elaborated on mine: I think what would need to occur here is this. A group of the larger game publishers come together and talk to the video card makers, and tell them that they will co-fund R&D development of a copy protection scheme for their video cards. In addition to that funding, they’ll also pay the card makers a fee for every game that uses said protection.
@Sam
Taking your point as fact, why would a hardware copy protection scheme hinder the application of gaming video cards for other uses? I’m not being flippant by the way, I would genuinely like to know the technical reason why this wouldn’t be possible.
I’m aware, which is why I want to see game makers get more money. 9/10 copies of Crysis were stolen, if you believe Crytek’s statement. That is evidence that 9/10 customers didn’t think their game justified the 50 dollar price tag. COD4 was a 50 dollar game. Crysis was not the same quality as COD4, and as such doesn’t deserve a COD4 price tag. Developers need to be honest with themselves and judge how much their game is really worth. Car manufacturers are used to pricing their cars according to what they think the new car is worth, but most game companies are only familiar with the 50 dollar price per game model. If they don’t break out of this, they will go down.
Didn’t Crysis sell over a million copies?
Yes, it did.
The problem with having the encryption tied to the hardware, is once the encryption is cracked (it will be, moreso when you’ve given the key and the lock to the same person), you’ve got to make a new key which obsoletes older cards.
Another problem is that if the card only works with encrypted content, it won’t work for general purpose use. If it works with unencrypted content, it doesn’t stop anything.
Also, how would having the encryption on the video card, which is only rendering what you see, not really doing anything to the game, stop anything apart from legitimate uses?
@Evangel
Gotcha. I didn’t realize that by having it do hardware encryption, it would invalidate ANY other use of the kit with unencrypted, non-gaming content.
I stand corrected!
His understanding of PC gaming is somewhat limited. The big subscription games like WoW, ok sure they make up most of the PC market and the profits easily beat any main stream console profits SO FAR (that excludes DS and such handhelds but those sell like monsters jumping at people, got my own :D) The rest of the games, most of the new games are either top of the line or they’re too low quality. The last big titles I remember were Crysis which tended to be out of reach for casual gamers, Orange box, which did quite well, and CoD4 which did quite well, IIRC early release it was second to 360, not sure right now, I need to find a new revenue chart. The rest were small time, mainly fanbased, or simply crappy (and ports). Also small time downloadable casual gaming titles do well too. The problem is that the PC gaming industry needs some fresh or GOOD material. Most of the games coming out now are things you’ll find at bestbuy without even realizing such a game existed. Plus PC gaming industry? Still strong.
And honestly they should try this: award people who actually buy the game and use a legit serial code and go online, MOST PEOPLE have access to the net, regardless of what he says. They should be able to get extra goodies online if they’re really worthy of it. Piraters can try but they’ll be limited to mostly emu-servers and SP.
Cactus, I second that “Bonus content for having a valid CD key” motion.
I’d also like places to stop comparing PC game sales to console game sales because it’s comparing 1 platform to 3 (5 if you count handhelds, 2 if you exclude handhelds and the Wii).
LOL @ Braben. The guy was the smaller part of the Elite duo and sued his former friend several times for the design rights.
He hasn’t made a playable game since then either but look how many ideas he has to make safe profits with his mediocre productions.
This is one of the bad apples who actually put people off PC gaming with their bugged games and restrictive DRM ideas!
He even repeats the age-old lie that “the Amiga died because of piracy”
No, Mr.Braben! The Amiga died because Commodore was a hollowed-out console builder after the Tramiel clan had left for Atari. The Amiga design team was dissolved and the machine never updated, how long should it live on after the PC technology had finally overtaken it??
However I do remember that people went for consoles following the atricously bugged games of the Frontier series, thats more like the truth.
And “Elite 4″ – it is actually the one product thats more vaporous than even Nukem!
Isn’t Starcraft one of the most pirated games ever? If so, isn’t it also one of the highest selling games ever?
I ‘pirated’ games constantly as a child. Why? I didn’t have the money to buy them. When I did, I bought them. I don’t pirate games pretty much at all, unless I’m unsure of a game and want to see if, you know, it’ll run. How often have you bought a game, only to discover that despite meeting the minimum (or hell, recommended) requirements, you still can’t run it? How many games that promise the world, don’t deliver?
I think hype is actually a huge part of pirating, as people are told games will be whatever, but end up being awful. Basically, gamers got burned, learned from that, and are now wary.
If you give me a good single player game with a fair amount of gameplay (say, Deus Ex style) I will buy it. I won’t buy another Bioshock, which took me maybe 5 hours to beat, and I’ll never touch again.
The way they jump on piracy and tiptoe around DRM and beta releases and very little customer service (because they think they are talking to a pirate) i8s amazing! Today Alpha Protocol is called an RPG that the developer says has around 25 hours gameplay. 25 hours gameplay? How can it be an RPG? The reason games don’t sell very well on PC is a larger and larger majority are CONSOLE games being sold on the PC format with barely a change to to interface at all!
Let me tell you what I think is killing PC gaming: The way modern games are produce, DOSBox and retro gaming. The math is simple: Modern games have less and less gameplay. More interest is therefore garnered in retro PC gaming, to respond to this a group of programmers release DOSBox, in less than 6 six years we now have 10 million DOSBox downloads. That’s millions of gamers saying yes to 90’s game and no to 00’s games. We have the success of STEAM based mostly on retro game sales, not HL2 as you would think, you have GOG.com being very successful too, utilizing as a big selling point of: ‘guaranteed to work in XP and Vista and no DRM’. These are the two bugbears gamers have with modern games, and CD Projeckt knew that.
So we have millions of people playing millions of DOS games to an extent that modern games seem dull and simple in comparison after a while. These modern games are not good and PC games are not being released because the industry thinks all console gamers are snotty 15 year olds with little IQ and attention span,and they produce games like that and then convert them to PC. They put little effort into PC because they think we’re all pirates and they produce crappy console games that PC gamers are then expected to buy because they cannot get their head around the fact console gamers are more likely to be 25 than 15 and middle class and educated than dumb. This dumbing down then is killing PC game today and will kill hardcore (360/PS3) console gaming tomorrow. We know this is happening on the PC with £40 price points for games, Starcraft II selling the three campaigns separately, making Starcraft a £35 game and Starcraft II a £105 game,both with three campaigns, but Starcraft has network play, Starcraft II won”t. We also have all those £35 10-12 hour games, which work out very expensive too. Plenty of signs then, but it’s a lot more complicated than ‘piracy’!