Sorry to get into this again, but as much as I want to ignore it, this one’s significant. Ubisoft have stated that they’re artificially delaying the launch of EndWar on PC because of, you guessed it, piracy.
Talking to VideoGaming247, Ubisoft Shanghai director and former Total War “Evangelist”, Michael de Plater said,
“To be honest, if PC wasn’t pirated to hell and back, there’d probably be a PC version coming out the same day as the other two.”
He continues,
“But at the moment, if you release the PC version, essentially what you’re doing is letting people have a free version that they rip off instead of a purchased version. Piracy’s basically killing PC.”
This hardly seems worth saying, but of course we in no way endorse piracy. Illegally downloading games is, well, illegal. But what we want – what we want so much that our sides ache and our foreheads pulse – is for the truth to be at the centre of this discussion. We want people who make these decisions, who give comments like this, to present the facts and figures that back up their statements.
We want to see the demonstrable evidence for the harm piracy has on sales. Because if it’s true, then yes, action needs to be taken. But if it isn’t (and history suggests it very well might not be – the most successful formats in the last 30 years have always been the most pirated, with the DS currently proving this on a dramatic scale), then untold damage is being done to the PC platform by claims like this.
What’s fascinating here is to consider whether this is an isolated case, or whether this attitude is endemic amongst publishers. Is this why we’re not seeing Mirror’s Edge on PC until next year? Does this explain why GTA takes nine months to find its way onto our preferred platform? Are we missing out on Fable 2 because of a fear of the pirates? Halo 3? Has the reputation of the PC, so far entirely without corroborating evidence, hobbled it?
At the moment it feels like an out-of-control rumour is driving a steamroller over the PC. Increasing numbers of publishers, who frankly wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the PC, are jumping on board. And this is despite the continued huge sales on PC via the dramatic success of digital distribution. The perceived, received opinion is that, “If someone downloads a copy of a game, that’s a lost sale.” As much as this might immediately appear to make sense, a moment’s scrutiny reveals it to be, so far, entirely unfounded. (Stardock’s Brad Wardell wrote eloquently on this subject earlier this year). Surely the people publishing games should be desperately researching to find out why their PC games might not be selling in the volumes they might hope, rather than just assuming it’s piracy, and then declaring it as a fact. It might be piracy! It really might be. But without evidence, without facts and figures to back this claim up, it can only be considered hearsay, and deeply unproductive.
So come on publishers, put your mouth where your money is, and organise some research into this. Demonstrate that PC piracy damages console sales, and you’ll win our attention. From that point, we can start creating imaginative new methods of controlling the problem. Until then, actively hobbling the PC yourselves is quite the self-fulfilling tragedy. (Thanks to the GriddleOctopus for the tip).
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@Dolphan: Steam protection was cracked ages ago. Releasing on Steam means getting a pirated version out there immediately.
@GLOWi
John didn’t say PC exclusives, etc were declining or not, he just mentioned a couple of possible factors to take into account that would effect the increase or decline of them.
There is absolutely nothing preventing research into the question if piracy hurts console sales. Its just that if you want to do something slightly more substantial than a survey then you probably need to invest a bit to make it happen.
And you would obviously not do an internet based survey either. It is possible to gather reasonable statistics from properly conducted surveys, you just need to add a little bit of professionalism.
I believe that in order to investigate priacy on the Pc you have to look at the demographic of those pirating. I think one would find that the typical pirate is a teenager or in the early twenties, and that they are pirating because they want to play every game out there but can’t afford to buy all of them. The addictive nature of games require that they try every game that is mildly interesting and it is just easier to pirate than getting a job and purchasing them. And they got the time to play them all. The older gamers probably have children and a job and don’t have the time to play that much anymore, and can afford to buy a few games here and there. (And they might have developed a moral that suggests that if they want better quality games the companies making them have to make money).
I would be willing to bet this research has been done, by a number of publishers. It is in their interests to make informed decisions. And when was the last time you saw a press release -from anybody- full of scatter plots and regression anaylses?
The point is that the research may (I’m saying probably) doesn’t support the ‘piracy is to blame’ argument, and it is being used as an excuse for prudent development choices that would otherwise alienate and cause resentment among the PC fanbase.
If you say, “Consoles represent 85% of our revenues, so we’ve got everyone working on the console versions right now. When we’re done with that, we’ll shift gears and give you guys a hack-job port”, you piss off a lot of people. When you say “we’re desperately trying to stay afloat because of Piracy”, you hope maybe not to. In short, piracy is a convenient excuse, and the more publishers who through it around the more it’s got the social proof going for it.
The fact of the matter is, if i make a console game, I built it on a computer to begin with so the transistion process would be (comparatively) minimal, i’ve got all the conceptualization done, the design completed, assets made, all of the polishing and tuning done, most of the testing finished,etc..
So the marginal cost of putting this game on PC, unless i’m missing something, is very low, low enough that it could weather decreased sales and still be profitable. How many units would you have to sell to pay the guys who did the porting job and come out on top?
And if it wasn’t going to be profitable, i can’t see how waiting a couple of months and then releasing it anyways is going to change anything.
@Lukasz same here in the UK, well at least outside of the cities, you can buy console games in many high street stores, supermarkets even newsagents but to find a pc game you have to go to the biggest high street chains or specialist stores. Even then the gaming stores are mostly geared to console titles and barely have any pc games that aren’t in the top ten or budget re-releases. The last four years has seen a real decline in pc game availability on the high street, I wonder how much piracy and online sales have increased in that period?
Not everyone shops online and I don’t know about anyone else but at least half of my game collection were impulse buys of games I’d never followed pre-release.
“That would only make sense if the torrent sites were doing anything illegal. Something which has yet to be tested in the courts”
Yes, it very probably isn’t technically illegal. Games piracy technically isn’t theft. But torrent sites are most definately immoral and exploiting what they _know_ to be weaknesses in current law, and piracy is most definately the moral equivalent of theft*
How to find out how many sales are lost to piracy: Create an unbreakabe DRM system that does not in any way inconvenience the user at all and creates no controvery. Release the game. Then rewind the universe and release the game with no DRM. Compare the results.
That’s two impossibilities.
I don’t think any company seriously thinks each download is a lost sale. But I do think just about everyone thinks each download is a theft, and that if only a fraction of the illegal downloads was converted into sales it would be a big boost to the company’s balance sheet.
Is Ubisoft’s decision the correct one? Almost definately not; why not use steam pre-release-day-encryption or something similar then? (I maintain that a larger proportion of pre-release downloaders would be converted into pre-order customers, though obviously I have no proof)
Do I understand it? Hell yeah. From their point of view, “The PC gamers” are pissing on them from a great height, and if nothing else they need to be punished. That there is no such group as “The PC gamers”, and they are pissing on what would otherwise be valued customers as well, is escaping them, but pigeonholing people into groups against their will and then colouring them with that groups’ stereotypes is not exactly an uncommon thing to happen.
* “I’ve not taken anything away from them so it’s not theft” is, in my book, about the same as “they’re a big company and make lots of money so it doesn’t matter” in the feeble-self-serving-justifications category. As is “if you invest twice as much money and pour even more of your heart and soul into the game, I cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die promise that I won’t pirate your game, unlike every other time, honest.” (Otherwise known as “I only pirated it because it was crap” – but how did they know it was crap in advance, I wonder?)
The answer is simple. Cut their hands off.
1) Release a high-quality demo which capitalises on the full game’s appeal, has a substantial amount of content (preferably unique), is easily obtainable, and does not come with a prohibitively high download size.
2) Release full game in a way that is as or more easily obtainable than a torrent.
In that order.
On 2), this means:
a) Fast download servers with minimal queuing.
b) Support for as many payment methods as possible, including international payment standards.
c) Keep download managers to an absolute minimum. If it’s not greater than or equal to Steam, it’s an added hassle.
On 1), if you can’t manage this, you’re not marketing your game properly. If you can’t market your game properly, you have no goddamn right to blame anything else for your game failing.
@Maximum Fish: You are missing the main point: the intersection of PC gamers and console gamers is not an empty set.
Delaying the PC version increases the chance the console version to be fully exploited.
@Malagate
As I wrote, the problem are not multiplatform titles, but that multiplatform titles are almost always designed to take advantage of consoles, not PC.
And there is a bunch of PC exlusive or primary AAA RPGs, FPSes or racings, please name them, I can’t really think of any.
“or we could… you know… actually DO something about the torrent sites?”
Is there any reason they don’t?
Weirdly, you have to admit that at least the Evil Music Industry attempt to do something about the problem, even if they resort to suing dead grandmothers (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/05/riaa_sues_the_dead/). The PC industry just indulges either in whining or in DRM that only affects its customers, not its pirates.
True story: Went away to see some friends over the weekend, and brought my laptop so we could play some LAN games. We had about 4 games in common purchased on Steam, such as HL2, Day of Defeat, Counter-strike, and so on. However, we had no access to internet and, between us, had not actually started any game in common – onlu downloaded them. And you need to _start_ a Steam game at least once while online in order for it to later work offline.
So, in the end, we resorted to playing a pirated copy of Half-Life 1 deathmatch which one guy had had on his laptop for the last 8 years.
P.
“or we could… you know… actually DO something about the torrent sites?”
Is there any reason they don’t?
Weirdly, you have to admit that at least the Evil Music Industry attempt to do something about the problem, even if they resort to suing dead grandmothers (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/05/riaa_sues_the_dead/). The PC industry just indulges either in whining or in DRM that only affects its customers, not its pirates.
True story: Went away to see some friends over the weekend, and brought my laptop so we could play some LAN games. We had about 4 games in common purchased on Steam, such as HL2, Day of Defeat, Counter-strike, and so on. However, we had no access to internet and, between us, had not actually started any game in common – onlu downloaded them. And you need to _start_ a Steam game at least once while online in order for it to later work offline.
So, in the end, we resorted to playing a pirated copy of Half-Life 1 deathmatch which one guy had had on his laptop for the last 8 years.
P.
@Bobsy
Your first point is critical. A unique feature of PC gaming is that players want/need to know how the game will work (or if it will at all) with their system.
You can’t take PC games back, and if it’s buggy as hell, has DRM that doesn’t recognize your DVD-ROM, is horribly optimized or just requires a beefier machine than you’ve got, doesn’t like your operating system, doesn’t like your sound card, or any of a multitude of other issues, you are shit-out-of-luck, as well as shit out of $50.
PC Gamers are unwilling to take this risk, and if they can’t demo the game to check these issues, they’re are far less likely to buy it, and more likely to just download it, risking nothing.
Take note of the games and companies that do the best on PC: Stardock, Valve, Blizzard, Maxis. What common thread runs through these? They each have reputation, demos or no, for consistently releasing quality games that a) don’t require an ice-9 cooled supercomputer to operate, b) are stable, widely compatible, and bug free, and c) offer exceptional value for what you pay for them.
If you don’t have this sterling reputation, you either release demos or you don’t sell.
@frymaster:
I think you’ve failed to understand that [i]theft[/i] is immoral (and illegal) [i]because[/i] it violates the right of the individual to personal property.
Copyright infringement, instead, violates the right of the creator of a (copyable) work to control the creation and distribution of copies of that work (and to profit by the control of such).
That doesn’t mean that copyright infringement isn’t immoral (of course, it is illegal), but it just makes you look stupid to argue that copyright infringement is theft – they’re defined differently, and are different legal and moral acts.
thank you for calling me stupid :)
I did not and am not arguing that piracy is theft; just that the difference is semantic and not actually relevant. If a developer points to the amount of invalid multiplayer keys in use and says “these people are stealing our work” I do not consider an argument along the lines of “ah, but if you look up the legal definition of stealing…” especially useful.
Oh why didn’t Ubi just lie and say they’re delaying it as they’re making it better for the PC, and make some token UI changes that would take 5 minutes? Its what they and other cross-platfrom publishers have been doing for years, and it would contain just as much truth as the assumption of known piracy effects at this stage.
I don’t believe the PC is dying as a format. I do however believe that the games industry has changed and is no longer making PC games.
They may be making PC ports of Console games but these aren’t PC games. And guess what? Console games that aren’t on a console won’t sell that well in the same way that PC Games on a Console don’t sell well.
@Strelok
I guess you could make the argument that the consumers with both a gaming PC and a console who want to play your game will either buy it for one, or buy/pirate it for the other, and shoehorning them into buying the console version prevents the loss to piracy.
But that doesn’t consider the percentage of the market that just doesn’t like playing certain games on consoles (FPS’s with thumbsticks or C&C 3 on 360 for instance), the percent who would simply rent the console version, and the percentage of the would be pirates who aren’t interested at all unless they can pirate it.
If you sell this demograph only the PC version, sure a large percentage will just pirate it. But if you sell this demograph only the console version, another large percentage will simply not buy it, rent it, or not buy it (respectively).
No. No, no, no. U R RONG! All rong!
The Rong is strong in this one.
PC gaming is not dying, consoles are not generally more profitable(to who anyway?), but publishers really, really, REALLY, want us to think that.
The most profitable and successful consoles at the moment are the Nintendo Wii and DS(nowhere near as powerful as a mid-spec PC) with 360 kind of limping a bit behind and PS3 unable to crawl off the starting line. Most publishers are really wanting the 360 and PS3 to be popular so they can shift their shiny crap on them. Wii doesn’t have the same shiny pushing power but they can’t scream “Wii gaming is dead” because it is enjoying too much of a good reputation in the mainsteam media.
PCs on the other hand are misunderstood and therefore they can talk utter shite about them, expressing either breath-taking ignorance or outrageous dishonesty, such as the Force Unleashed dev spouting ignorant college-dropout level wisdom in claiming that it wasn’t released on PC because you would need something like a $4000(or £) rig to make it run like it does on the consoles(including the ‘almighty’ bastion of pixel-proccessing, Nintendo Wii).
They want PC players to start buying more consoles and console games because some clammy-handed analyst says they could make more money if they persuaded the most cynical, oldest and fiscally-conservative demograph of gamers to adopt the platforms of the most impressionable, younger and uninformed gamers. They basically don’t understand why PC gamers are PC gamers, so everyone is confused because whilst authorative heads are claiming one thing, experienced consumers are seeing evidence of the complete opposite.
They have also lost a vast amount of money due to typical console gamers discovering the addictive delights of World of Warcraft; it isn’t just the first MMO for a lot of people, it’s their first ever PC game, period(there’s the period—>).
So they’re in a panic and trying to get console gamers to come back, but they aren’t going to. They are never going to be buying console games again in the volumes they used to. Just about everyone I know with a console says World of Warcraft is nerd bollocks, except the ones who have played it. My best friend seriously can not understand why his sister, cousin, mum and their friends talk for hours about WoW stuff he doesn’t understand. But then, I tried explaining to him why Army of Two is a terrible game, why he should get Bioshock for his 360 and that PCs have had the high-definition picture quality he is so proud of having for some years before even the first Xbox came out. He completely believes the opposite and nothing will convince him unless he sees for himself like his family and friends did.
Publishers are trying to make more people my friend. They’re trying to get his family and friends to see their error, undo what was done when they actually got hold of half-decent PCs and played a high-quality PC game. But this can not be undone: they did not merely change their opinion and perspective. They learned. They grew. Their horizens expanded and their expectations got higher. This is irreversible.
Publishers should simply accept this and adapt to their consumers, rather than try and change their consumers.
Hey, I just had to reply, because I get quite upset if I see statements that piracy is killing the PC market or that piracy is stealing.
The majority of people I know that pirate games would never buy those games; they usually don’t have the money. I of course can’t prove that.
But lets compare it with another type of media. Have you ever been in a library? Do you know what this mother******* are doing? They lent you the books for FREE!!1! I helped publish two books and it’s a lot of work and expenses and those communists are giving my books away for free!
If you would totally suppress pirating, I think there would be such an outcry of the public, that we would soon get institutions that would be similar to public libraries – the poor want to participate in culture too, and games are becoming the most powerful expression of culture.
The publisher will have to give the paying customers a better deal then the freeloaders. Where are those great cloth maps and thick books of the old Ultimas. Where the heck are the manuals (oh yeah, in PDFs). Make the online experience more compelling (not just DM and CTF B.S.) – pirates can’t play there. Publish demos. Release old games or code to the public (like I.D. and Red Alert). Dont’t make those extra items “Collectors editions” and sell them for 80$+ – this “extras” should (and have been) be standard.
Sorry for my english.
Y’know what’s killing PC? It’s not piracy, it’s the self-fulfilling prophesy about piracy killing PC. These idiotic publishers releasing games long after the hype’s died down and with completely unrealistic specs (Assassin’s Creed, anyone?) with ZERO publicity and then blaming shitty sales on piracy. Sorry, but piracy’s not killing PC. Publishers are.
I never looked into this, but I cannot imagine it being that hard to pirate console games. If anything, I would expect it to be easier because an internet connection is, as far as I know, not a must-have for most consoles.
Compared to a computer with console-like specifications it’s possible to buy a console and a cheap computer capable of running a torrent client with money to spare. Adding in the higher cost of console games and the usual absence of free dowloadable additions to the game makes pirating console games a far more lucrative business than pirating PC games.
@Maximum Fish:
I see your reasoning, in fact I only play FPS games on PC, even though I often have to wait for the PC version. But still, this is a digression.
The idea is, if you only have a PC it doesn’t really matter (from a publisher’s point of view) if the game will be delayed. The only difference for them is that they will (hopefully) get your money a bit later, if at all. The problematic consumers are those with PCs and consoles. Now, we can talk and make cases as much as we want, but the fact remains that PC versions are much more easily pirated. So there is a _potential_ money loss here. Why create temptation if you can afford not to?
Then there is also the price difference – PC games are cheaper than console games. If you will only buy one version, it is better for the publisher if you buy the console version.
At the moment, the feeling I got for Ubisoft is rage. Making really crap excuses to delay games for the pc but still release them on the consoles on date while refusing to sell thier own games for PC users of Steam in europe.
PC gaming is not dying, the common sense of developers and publishers is.
Dear Ubisoft, shut up, release game on date for us PC owners. Piracy? It happens on every console and PC, no matter how long you delay the game, it’s going to happen.
What happened to the edit facility? :(
Forgot to mention the usual lack of a bloody demo, too. When you’ve got stupidly high system requirements (Assassin’s Creed again), and you don’t provide a demo for people to figure out if the game will actually WORK on their systems… You’re inviting torrent downloads.
Piracy for the original xbox was apparently easy. I knew a guy with a modded xbox with 120 gigs worth of rented games installed on it. I knew a bunch of people who did similar on the PS2.
Maybe some of these publishers should have a look at where these torrents that go up a week before the release date are coming from in the first place. That might help as well.
Who cares, End War looks shit anyways. “Squad one: Jump into the garbage bin and take the whole game with you, keep the lid shut and never come back. Commander out.” And seriously, wasn’t this supposed to be a RTS for consoles anyways?
This may have been covered further up, but a good start to combating the problem of factless reporting would be reporters actually asking the occasional hard question instead of just regurgitating talking points for hits and comments and/or just op-eding on their own blogs (present company excepted).
That may just create the problem of talking heads refusing to talk to anyone likely to ask tough questions. But at least games journalism would then be as mildly diverse as the rest of the media on that front.
Does anyone know why Valve refuse to release Steam sales figures – and why the gaming press hasn’t managed to work out said figures? As perhaps the leading PC developer, it’s strange that they don’t trumpet such sales in order to reassure other developers and gamers that PC Gaming is Alive.
I have a horrible suspicion that the reason they don’t release such sales figures is because they aren’t actually stellar. Sufficient, but not Halo- or GTA4-esque.
P.
@ GLOWi
The problem is that not every download of a torrent (or even concurrent downloaders) can be seen as a complete pirated copy. Those downloads will comprise of:
- Incomplete downloads
- Downloaded but not burned: therefore not used
- Downloaded and burned: therefore used
Although you could say that every 20th copy was a lost sale… which total number do you take? Do you take into account that a large portion of those downloaded games might never be used or that even some people will not bother completing the download – in both cases people move on to the next new thing after finishing the last and ignore some of the content they acquired in between. I know i do that for actual purchases (i have a large pile of unplayed or partially played games :/)… so what stops them?
I may not be a pirate but i understand hoarding mentality – and that is the mentality of pirates. The ‘gotta have em all’ approach only goes so far and usually ends up with vast collections of unused items.
It’s impossible to tell without doing a very large multi-continent survey what kind of effect piracy has on gamers and gaming. But as far as i know there has been none…. i certainly haven’t been asked my opinion by any publishers/developers on games that i play or want to play (sorry Cliffski) – they simply don’t care and would instead like to extrapolate from even more unreliable data such as IP addresses and torrent stats.
We all know that certain controversial games (e.g. Spore) will have higher torrent stats purely because the pirates are ’sticking it to the man’…. i’m sure there are people there downloading multiple copies etc. even though they don’t need to simply because they think they’re sending the message that ‘DRM doesn’t work and if you try to add more we’ll just pirate more’.
Finally @ John Walker. Asking for a survey is good but asking it to be undertaken or funded by developers/publishers/anyone linked to the games industry is naive for the same reasons we don’t believe research into the effects of alcohol and smoking from members of those industries.
A truly impartial survey would be an academic endeavour supported by the government that was not under the heel of the content providers… and i’m pretty sure many studies have been done on other sectors of the entertainment industry and those have found that there is minimal impact on sales of legitimate goods (there are positive and negative aspects to piracy on sales). I’m confident that such a study into games piracy would also produce a similar result but unfortunately these results are not generally free for the public to scrutinize.
If you want to do some journalism on the subject go and buy this (extortionately priced) paper on the issue.
Maybe the fact that I can buy the identical game earlier, that is also more likely to be stable and bug free and that it will already have a healthy online community when I buy the console version instead of worrying about upgrading some aspect of my PC and waiting for a patchy DRM infested version is what is really “killing” the PC market.
PC gamers need to stick up for their platform and support it more if they really want to keep PC gaming alive. People talk the talk but don’t walk the walk. People say that publishers and devs are idiots for not releasing PC games, but then openly admit they torrent them the day before they get released.
All the forum arguments in the world will not help until PC gamers accept that if they want more PC games, they have to buy games and stop pirating them. There are plenty of decent PC games out right now. Buy world of goo, for starters. Or peggle. Or GalCiv2.
And please don’t keep banging on about how beneficial steam is. Steam is just a way of placing a middleman between you and the PC developer. Buy games direct.
I agree that this is a silly game to be having the piracy conversation about.
Endwar was a game whose whole premise and main USP was entirely designed for consoles alone.
@cliffski Or, you know, stop buying consoles to play cross-overs, that might help?
” Or, you know, stop buying consoles to play cross-overs, that might help?”
I do find it odd that a PC gamer would bother buying an Xbox360, for example. Out of the top 20 (judged by Metacritic), only 5 are not available on PC – the infamous Halo 3, 3 rock-band styles games and, um, the ancient Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.
So unless you absolutely must have an overpriced music game, or absolutely had to play Halo 3, I don’t get the attraction.
I bought a Wii, but part of that was because (a) my wife was willing to go halves on it, as opposed to any other console and (b) I figured there wouldn’t be much of an overlap between its games and those of the PC.
And as it, 99% of my gaming is currently on the PC – the Wii gets the very occasional outing.
P.
As far as the PC sales vs Console sales thing goes, why is everyone balking about piracy when a much clearer indicator for sales exist.
there are far more console gamers than PC gamers.
more gamers = more moneys
Now there are much more subtle factors at play, but it seems to be getting ignored the simple fact that there are more console gamers.
Also theres the factor that, if you shell out £300+ on a games system you’re likely to buy alot more games for it than if you just have a family PC that doesn’t get upgraded much and has like 2 games on it.
@ Paul Moloney:
I have a PC and 360. Primarily because i like playing games outside of FPS and RTS :)
The complex answer is that i prefer platformers and 3rd person adventures/shooters on a console – and FPS and RTS on PC….. though i also enjoy RPGs and tactical games on PC as well as having played a share of FPSs on consoles.
At the moment, many games are coming out on PC with limited installs – which i will not abide – and thus buying them on console is the alternative i choose (or not buying them at all).
“PC gamers need to stick up for their platform and support it more if they really want to keep PC gaming alive. ”
Cliffski, serious question – what more do you think PC gamers should do? I buy a fair amount of PC games (think I spent around €150 in the last 3 months) but would always be interested on other forms of support or advocacy.
P.
There is an interesting article over at ars technica about the interesting numbers the big content anti-piracy organisations come up with.
Read it here.
Oh no, a world without shitty Ubisoft ports on the PC!?!
The horror!
Cliffski: “I’m certain if there was no piracy I’d be playing Company Of Heroes 2 right now. ”
Uh… you wouldn’t. Relic made CoH OF instead of CoH2. And after that they are making DoW2 and surely they have a small team with Homeworld 3. They don’t have more people to make CoH2!.
So, give them more time, these games need more developing time than… Kudos :P. The first CoH was a four year project.
I thought Ubisoft would have learned from Assassin’s Creed. Games don’t sell after hype has died. That’s what happens when you delay the PC version.
Piracy, whilst it may not be killing PC gaming isn’t doing anyone any favours. Especially when you have 13,744 seeders & 48,465 leechers of Mercenaries 2 over @ mininova.org
http://www.mininova.org/sub/9/seeds
I can understand why publishers are making the comments they are and to be honest I don’t blame them. Then again, I haven’t really been bothered about any of the titles not coming to PC yet
About EndWar on PC: Lol, and what fucking pc gamer is going to buy a game promoted like “a strategy game but it is not really a strategy game, ugh that’s nerdy, this is a console game! it’s like to plan tactics on american football, moving your players!”.
The design, the controls, the interface, the marketing, all was focused on consoles, they could release it on pc but it would be too late, it is already marked as a console game, a must-avoid in sectors like computer strategy fans.
About pc gaming in general:
It sucks but it is the reality. Pc games doesn’t sell like consoles and it isn’t because piracy. It is because there are more console gamers than pc gamers. I don’t know about you, but in my friends & known people circle, there are 4-5 times more console gamers than pc gamers.
The biggest thing you can do for PC gaming is to put money directly in the hands of the people who develop PC-specific games.
Buying galciv 2 from stardock is awesome because
1) it proves people will buy games that are totally pc-centric and
2) it makes those games profitable for developers who are committed to the PC.
One problem with PC gaming is that PC gamers are the harshest and most passionate critics of everything. If you were new to gaming and read a typical comments thread on ANY high-profile PC game you would think it was a bug-ridden disaster that is on a par with war crimes committed at Auschwitz.
It’s rare to hear people openly talking about all the benefits of PC vs Console gaming, which is weird because PC gaming kicks consoles ass :D
“One problem with PC gaming is that PC gamers are the harshest and most passionate critics of everything. If you were new to gaming and read a typical comments thread on ANY high-profile PC game you would think it was a bug-ridden disaster that is on a par with war crimes committed at Auschwitz.”
You visited the WoW forums lately I take it?
Thats mostly due to the 13-18 year olds whining about something. You occasionally get a decent thread there and then Trolls and Flamers ruin it, usually on the first reply to the thread. *Sigh*.
I think Gorgeras hit it pretty much on the head in his previous large post.
I also think the fact many gaming publishers/developers have recently merged making less actual companies making games and more larger companies focusing 1 main game each. Activision+Blizzard and the like. (Though thats a bad example with Diablo 3, Starcraft 2 and “A next gen MMO not related to WoW”).
Hey John,
You’ve mentioned that no one has done any research, are you sure its not that they’ve done the research but not had a good reason to published it?
There was a much-linked rant posted by Michael Fitch of THQ a while back where he throws PC Piracy numbers around like “70-85% in the US, 90% in Europe”. He doesn’t quote a source, but presumably these figures had to come from somewhere?
But I suspect the thing that drives these decisions is the fact that consoles outsold the PC on games like CoD4 and Bioshock 10-to-1 (supposedly).
@frymaster: Yes, but you stated that theft and copyright infringement were effectively morally equivalent. That’s certainly not been a consistently held belief historically, and it’s quite hard to justify, since theft harms people more directly than copyright infringement does (and, indeed, since people seem to have different responses to theft and copyright infringement – hence the need for all those “PIRACY IS THEFT” shouty things on DVDs, as the general public certainly doesn’t seem to regard them as morally equivalent at all). Morals being defined at least partly by your society, I would argue that theft is much worse, in Great Britain, than copyright infringement.