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).
Related Stories:
@ Cliffski:
I’m happy to buy Gal Civ 2 (and its expansions) direct from Stardock because:
1. I’m not tied to them (no DRM)
2. Their delivery system is also a platform for other developers as well – in the same vein as steam (though less restrictive).
If every developer had their own platform for delivering content it would be a nightmare! Unless i wasn’t beholden to them, their system and their vagaries.
Basically, with all the DRM and crap the system is too complicated and too easily destroyed by financial uncertainty – especially in the current and coming depression.
I think one reason that console games sell much more than PC games is the greater amount of console gamers, but also the fact that they have less choice – at least, at the beginning of the console’s life cycle. It’s been a quiet few months for PC gaming releases, but I was fine with that as it meant I had time to play classics I hadn’t played before, such as Morrowind and Planeacape: Torment. One more benefit that the PC has over console is that you can often update old games with mods to make them look, while not as good as new, certainly improved, so PC games age more gracefully than console games. While this is a benefit to games wanting to play classics, it’s not of benefit to publishers who would rather gamers buy the latest full-priced game than waste their time replaying old cheap games.
On the other hand, with my Wii, I ended up buying some mediocre FPS simply out of frustration – the kind of game I wouldn’t touch on the PC with a bargepole.
P.
Ohnoes. Games designed for Consoles sell better on consoles! Games designed for PC sell better on PC!
Call the village elders we must get to the bottom of this mystery!
Sam: Let’s be honest. We can’t do historical comparisons, because the idea of copyright infringement is a far newer one. The word “theft” pushes buttons that go back to the bloody Bible and before. This is wired into us – hell, there’s some people who say that it’s wired into us in a genetic level. We all understand a repulsion to the word “theft”. Copyright infringer doesn’t sound nearly as bad, but I think that’s mainly mental nonsense.
If there was a way back in the ancient history for people to do a magic spell which copied someone’s efforts with no effort of your own*, I suspect the word “Copyright infringer” would carry a similar nastiness around it.
But we’re into magical hypotheticals now. I dislike these particular sorts of debate, because the subtext is making excuses. I don’t mind piracy so much *as long as people don’t make excuses*. While it hasn’t happened to me, I’ve had comic writer friends had pirates confess they bittorrented all their stuff to them, as they couldn’t afford them. Wearing fancy trainers and carrying a superhero statue or whatever they bought at the con.
Point being: No, you could afford to. You chose to spend your money on other stuff. *Don’t lie*.
KG
*”I don’t need you to build my house, builder – I’ve magicked up an identical house to the one you just built. Now starve.”
I have a hard time believing that the number of torrented copies for any given game ever pass 100,000 mark. Which, of course means that if piracy is a threat to a game’s success then that game’s developers have a lot bigger things to worry about than piracy.
I am not a pirate but i sometimes go to torrents sites just to see what the F is going around there and i found one that had really huge numbers of pc games being pirated, one in particular Brothers in Arms hells highway, 5277 people are downloading right as i write it down.
DON”T they care what F**K they are doing to the PC GAMING?
“Which, of course means that if piracy is a threat to a game’s success then that game’s developers have a lot bigger things to worry about than piracy.”
That sentence doesn’t make any sense.
P.
“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.”
Yeah, but apart from money? There’s only so much I can spend on games.
It’s strange that PC game companies don’t band together to, for example, launch ping/DOS attacks on well-known torrent sites.
P.
@Migit
I do not pirate games and definately do not support piracy but as people have pointed out, pirates tend to log in and set anything they find to download. Then once downloaded they will try the game and more often than not, not like the game and will never play it again or like the game but because they are constantly downloading games, they will move onto something else, play for a day, then move onto something else.
This therefore in most cases means this person would not of went out specifically to buy this game – if they could not pirate it, meaning it is not a lost sale.
They only downloaded the game as it was available to them for free.
From that point of view PC game piracy is not effecting PC gaming much, if at all.
I personally think PC game piracy is an excuse the developers like to use but have no evidence to back up their claim at all. There is many factors that effect how well PC games are selling and can not be merely summed up as “PC gaming is becoming less popular due to piracy”.
I also believe pirates use many silly excuses for why they pirate games – like “I can’t afford to buy them”. So you revert to doing something illegal because you cannot afford something? Is that not like me saying “I cannot afford a Lamborghini Gallardo” and then stealing one? (I am not saying stealing=copyright infringement by the way).
Spotted something interesting about the piracy debate on gamasutra today:
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=20513
Number six.
It’s nice to know that there a few more sensible developers out there. I’d be interested to know who else operates the disc swap policy, I know Sports Interactive do, and Football Manager dominates the UK charts every year.
Kieron: if we’re playing magical hypotheticals (which we’re not), then one might note that a magic spell that duplicated anyone else’s (physical) work would lead inherently to a post-scarcity society. Afterall, you’d not starve if you could duplicate food with the spell…
But this is, as you note, beside the point. However (however!), the idea of copying books, for example, being bad certainly doesn’t predate the concept of books – and the idea that you “own” your ideas is also not precisely new. We dislike the idea of plagiarism, but we allow people to copy (with citations) in particular contexts, for example.
What seems to be the case, more so, is that people find “doing harm to individuals” abhorrent, but “doing harm to anonymous concepts, like companies” much easier to cope with. And, the problem with copyright infringement is that there’s a lot more companies which own important copyrights than individuals (even in the case of books, the publisher is the one who has the lawyers to call on, I suspect).
I’m not saying “copyright infringement is okay” – I am saying “it does not logically follow that theft and copyright infringement are morally equivalent”, and I suspect most British people would agree with me.
And then, it all goes to where morals come from and what the importance of laws vs morality is, etc.
I have traditionally only pirated games that I wasn’t sure I’d like/were any good.
If I know I’m going to enjoy a game I will buy it without even playing the demo. recent examples: Spore, Civ 4, Crysis.
However if the game has gotten mixed reviews or I’m not convinced I’ll play it for more than a few hours then I’ll torrent it and see. Jedi Academy as an example. I only tend to play games I torrent for a few hours because; and this bits important, I didn’t enjoy them.
I’ve bought bad games and good games. I’ve bought some games on the basis of supporting that kind of game even though I ended up not playing it very much. But the only games I torrent are games I wouldn’t normally buy anyway on the slim off-chance that I might possibly like it.
If games cost less I’d buy more of them. I’d buy shit games more often to try them out. However if the PC had a rental or decent second hand market it would replace piracy for me. It still wouldn’t make the developers anymore money however.
Trying to look from UbiSoft’s perspective, I’m not sure that I see why any company that has made these pronouncements and that did this research would actually release it.
Either the numbers back what they’ve said and they’ve put on the public record “Yes, we’ve lost money” or the numbers don’t back what they’ve said and the public record now has “We don’t understand our target market.”
Broadcasting either doesn’t really seem too smart for these publicly traded mega-studios that we’ve discussed.
I’m not trying to be negative on the point – I guess I just don’t understand what would be in it for the developers / publishers. With the exception of a few holdouts like RPS trying to conduct even-handed conversations on the subject, much of gaming media seems already anti-pirate, so I can’t imagine that it would do that much to popular opinion.
So if not for public sentiment and if not for the fiscal bottom line, then what would be their interest? I know I’m missing something most likely due to my limited imagination – I just can’t see what.
-Parker
Why is there no Edit anymore?
To clarify on the price thing at the end of my previous comment:
I can afford to buy alot of games. I don’t spend money on much else really and buying 6 games in a month isn’t unheard of. However the price point becomes a problem as the shit games are not in impulse buy territory. I can happily shrug off a wasted fiver a week on a throwaway game but it’s alot harder to casually throw £35 in the bin on the off-chance I might like something.
I think PC Gaming is suffering from what I consider a lack of Shareware. I want to get a large chunk of game for nothing, try it out to see if I like it and then spend some money to unlock the rest. If I’m only going to play it for an hour and never return then I’ve not lost anything except an hour of my life. If it’s a game I like and want to play further then congratulations developer you’ve succeeded at your job and made a sale by making a fun product.
I do this ALL THE TIME on Xbox Live Arcade. I didn’t know if I’d like Castle Crashers and if I hadn’t been able to download it and try out a big chunk of the game before spending a few quid to unlock it I never would have bought the full thing.
I do the same thing with books, films and music. I won’t buy an album if I’ve never heard the band before. I will borrow a cd from a friend or listen to their myspace page or something to figure out if I want to spend money on them. I’ll borrow books before I commit to buying a copy for myself and I’ll wait for a movie to be shown on the TV for free if I’m not sure I want to see it at the cinema or buy the DVD.
My money is limited and I want to KNOW that I will not regret spending it on your product. This applies to everything and not just games. The problem is the simplest way to try out a PC game you aren’t sure about is to download it for free.
Worth noting is that Sins of a Solar Empire patching – the game largely in question in Brad Wardell’s linked post – has since begun -as of 1.12 i think it was- requiring use of the stardock downloader or whatever it’s called (not at home to check) for which you need to have a legit game. So while piracy may have seemed insignificant enough at launch, they’ve since [apparently] decided too many people were giving the standalone patch installers to friends who’d pirated the game.
Now, mind you, this is only for patch distribution, so they’re still sticking rather true to their statements.
Just to throw something out there, what happens if piracy does kill the PC as a gaming platform.
The hackers and pirates all just give up and retire? Or do they all focus their efforts on consoles and increasingly simple ways to allow pirated games to run on them? Surely it’s the latter.
As for the torrent sites, you pretty much can’t do anything about them. Actually you probably could, much like with the old P2P stuff like Napster and Kazaa, just sue a few of them and try and force the rest into uselessness.
But you know that somewhere out there some genius is already working on an even more efficient, more decentralised P2P network. And exactly how do you track anything when we no longer need a torrent site? We just need an IP for ANYONE on the network, and can then access a distributed list of files…
Comics are an interesting one KG – I only ever read things once, and am not one that coos over the art, but sometimes if it’s a story by a writer I really like I’ll be interested in the comic. But £3 for something I’ll be done with in 5 minutes is far too steep. Unless they’re packed full of back-matter…
In an ideal world I’d borrow them from a library…
As for ‘piracy is theft’. Of course it isn’t. It has the same end result for the perpetrator and they’re both crimes but they’re different for a reason. It’s like saying “Raping a prostitute is theft” – sort of makes sense in a twisted fashion but not exactly what you’d be charged with. Worth noting in the UK ripping a CD to an iPod is also copyright infringement (Computer Misuse Act 1990). Now you know that I expect everyone that’s said “it’s a crime so it’s wrong, end of” to delete all their MP3s. And never do 71mph on the motorway.
As for the name ‘theft’ and the psychological effects, I can’t help but think ‘piracy’ was meant to be equally evocative when it was first dreamt up, but we’ve done a marvellous job of glamorising high-seas piracy these past decades. I’m not entirely convinced that’s co-incidence.
Wow – spend some time at work and then see several hours of comments fill up a page. So going back to something that was said quite a while ago:
@Shadowmancer:
Unless you’re paying and downloading from iTunes or another official site then this is no better. In fact, it’s probably worse. The people who make those shows you’re downloading do rely on residuals which they get from first time showings and re-runs on TV and, as a result of the US writer’s strike earlier this year, will be getting them for any shows that are viewed or downloaded online.
You’re downloading torrents for free means that these people are not going to get the money they would have done had you used iTunes or whatever. While JW makes a good point that the 200 people who work on a game get paid and don’t get residuals (although at the back of my mind I have a nagging thought that members of the UK writers guild who write on games may well do), the same is not true for actors/writers/directors etc on TV shows.
Downloading films and TV shows is still piracy.
@Paul Moloney:
Yeah, if you take it out of context it sounds pretty dumb.
I can’t believe I’m adding to yet another comments thread about piracy thats 100 bloody pages long (or destined to be)
There are certain truths we simply must accept:
1. Publishers are greedy money grabbers who, like the record industry and movie industry, will NEVER back down from the theory that one pirate copy = one lost sale. The rich are paranoid about losing money, even if its unproven. These accusations will always fly around.
2. Piracy will always exist in some form. More than likely, all of us on this thread have pirated at some stage. Maybe not a game, but certainly a music CD or a DVD. It will never be eliminated. And it certainly won’t be stopped by DRM.
3. PC Gaming will never, ever die. Ever. It doesnt matter what kind of consoles come out next year, or the year after, PCs are required to develop the games for these consoles. PCs will always be around and involved in the games industry, the same way that Macs are involved in the publishing industry. And PC games, played with a mouse and keyboard, fill a certain niche that Consoles cannot. There will always be a market for the smarter games. (Also, lets not forget that the PC back catalogue dwarfes the combined back-catalogues of all consoles ever created)
The best solution I’ve seen to the PC games ‘problem’ has been steam. Steam is an excellent solution because rather than screwing you over like DRM does, steam does the opposite. It provides a significant advantage in buying the game over copying it. Namely, a backed up online copy of every game you’ve bought, recoverable and installable as many times as you need. Once or Twice lately I’ve had to re-install windows on my machine and I actually ENJOYED installing steam and seeing a list of all the titles I own on it, with the option to install them, along with games I didn’t know I had. Add to this the fact that its also often significantly cheaper to buy games through it. Crysis Warhead is $29 dollars, which works out at €21, significantly better than the €39.99 Gamestop tried to bleed out of me.
In a nutshell, steam ENCOURAGES buying the game, instead of tryng discourage or stop piracy at the cost of non-pirates.
I took a quick look over a torrent site, after reading this article, and noticed that more than half the game torrents listed are for consoles.
For me personaly I stopped buying most PC games a few years back for a number of reasons, here’s a few:
1. Got tired of buying buggy games with little or no post-launch support. Certain companies just got a bad rep for rush releasing games, they have nobody but themselves to blame that I dont buy games created by them anymore.
2. A lot of developers just started cloning titles and releasing the same old thing with minor changes. I just started getting the ‘been there, done that’ feeling about a LOT of games. RTS #34 or FPS #47 …bleh, I’ll pass thanks.
3. I havent purchased a game from a traditional walk-in retail store for about 3 years. If you dont have an easy download purchase option you missed out on my sales, oh well.
4. I recently moved back to Scotland from the US, suddenly Im not good enough to buy your games anymore? lol, your loss.
These companies can blame piracy all they want, for this customer it had NOTHING to do with it. But as was mentioned above I kinda suspect that it may be nothing more than a way of saying “we want to make console money but dont want to offend the PC crowd who supported our company when it started so lets blame piracy and try to milk some money from them later when we release a crappy port”.
Thankfully there are still dev houses making worthwhile games for the PC, they will get my support and my money. For the rest, blame what you want … I guess it’s easier than taking responability.
Myros: Numbers of torrents. Now look at the numbers downloading those torrents. Arguments of “there’s console piracy too!” are pretty spurious. When I actually counted number, it was about 10%. Of course, that may have changed.
KG
Thank you for that. This same thing drives me nuts. I certainly don’t believe that every pirated copy of a game is a “lost sale”, or anything like that, and on the whole, it doesn’t bother me much if someone tells me they pirated a game, even if it’s a really good game that I want to support in every way possible. The one thing I think is plain unacceptable is when people attempt to justify it. Saying “Yeah, but I couldn’t afford it anyway, so it’s not a lost sale”, or “Yeah, but it’s not that good a game, so I wouldn’t have bought it”.
You could have afforded it if you chose to spend your money on the game. You made a conscious choice not to pay for this game, and instead spend your money elsewhere. It was a choice, not some fundamental law of nature. Don’t try to dodge the responsibility for the choices you make. And if you claim “It wasn’t good enough to buy”, why the hell did you waste your time downloading and playing it then? Again, you *chose* this game over all the other ways in which you could spend your time, so it must be worth *something* to you.
We need to accept that piracy is wrong. Sometimes we all do things that are wrong, yes, but that doesn’t make them right. You can pirate a game if you like, just like you can steal from the local supermarket if you like, or jaywalk or any other illegal action, but be honest about it. Say “I could have paid for it, if I’d chosen to. I didn’t, and that’s unfair to the developers of the game, but I did it anyway.”
“When I actually counted number, it was about 10%. Of course, that may have changed.”
Don’t forget for the DS the files are around 5% of the size of the average PC game, hence get downloaded far quicker.
You’re right about the other consoles of course.
I’m with Schizoslayer where shareware/demos are concerned. Back in the 90s — and even earlier this decade — it was unusual for there not to be a substantial demo of a game ahead of its release. The ability to “try before you buy” is vitally important to the video game industry — at least from a player’s point of view. But it seems as if, in recent years, that ability is being denied to gamers.
Would you slam down 15 bucks on an album full of tracks you’ve never heard before, simply because the record label told you they were all really good and groundbreaking, honest guv? Of course not, yet this is precisely what game publishers would like you to do.
Now, I’m not saying that all piracy is due to an inability to preview the source material, but it is a contributing factor that publishers have some control over.
What’s the publisher’s stance on demos or shareware episodes? I can’t say I’ve heard many saying anything significant on the subject for a while. Usually it’s something dismissive like, “Oh, it would be completely impossible for us to release a demo, because of the open-ended nature of our gameplay.”
Yeah, Ubisoft said that about Assassin’s Creed. Anyone who’s played the game knows it’s not THAT open-ended and a self-contained demo made from existing content would have been pretty easy to knock up. There are many gamers out there who like stealth-based games but aren’t willing to shell out 40 bucks for what could be either a poor man’s Thief: Deadly Shadows or something genuinely interesting.
But there’s no demo, so what’s a game with piqued curiosity to do? Risk spending that money and hope they fall in the with crowd who enjoyed the game, torrent the full game or just not bother whatsoever? Not really an enticing set of options, are they?
Why can’t publishers simply realize that multiformat titles often/mostly sell less on the pc simply because they are multiformat titles, and as such are primarily aimed at console players?
I think Stardock summed it up pretty well: Target the potential buyers who are least inclined to pirate, and make a game that is uniquely suited to the system.
Seriously, EA or Ubi could make an xcom or Dungeon keeper spinoff on the pc using a fraction of the budget of say, Gears Of War, or Rainbow Six 2.
It wouldn’t sell 5 milllion copies, but chances are rather good it would actually be profitable. After all, Stardock pulled it off with Sins.
I couldn’t read all of the comments, but I thought I’d chime in with something not mentioned in the first half or so of comments.
Games made for one console, paid for by the console companies themselves. I work for a company that makes games exclusively for Sony. There’s no PC equivalent.
I think piracy on the PC is a problem, but I think people are using that problem to cover larger ones — decreased quality of games, further reliance on sequels, and games budgets outweighing the improvements; I.E. game A has more bloom/bump-mapping/textures than game B. Game B has better story/more polished gameplay, costs 60% what game A did. They both sell the same amount of copies.
I think we need to move the fuck away from insanely ridiculous graphics, and start improving A.I. Stalker is the only game I can think of that actually went ahead and said “graphics are great, sure, but what we really need is a smarter environment.”
In response to schizoslayer’s comment, I agree. I think the problem with ‘demos’ on the PC is that they are often ridiculously huge, and the majority of the US is still on dial-up (why, America, why?) So while it’ll take me 30 minutes to download that demo, and maybe beat it in 30-45 minutes, it’ll take American Joe there an entire day. And they consider that wasted.
I haven’t even gone into the fact that games are rushed now, and that there’s this false belief you need to spend 30 million to make a good game.
PC developers have already realised it, but cross-platform devs are lagging behind: It’s better to spend 5 million to make 20, than 30 to make 50.
You could be right Kieron, to be honest I just had a quick look over it.
I do suspect though that may be just a symptom of information saturation ie the amount of people who know how to use a cracked console game being low. I dont know how to do it, though I know my nephew does. That may change as more people learn how, though as I say it’s not something I know anything about so could be wrong.
The only reason I know how to ‘crack’ a PC game is because at one point I had about 30+ games on my PC and got tired of having to find CDs :) Another reason I download only now I guess, no need for cracks at all that way.
Myros: Absolutely. But then again, it’s just harder on the console. You don’t need to do *anything* to make most pirated games work on your PC. You just download them.
(What I’m trying to say is that while most of what you’re saying not on, arguing that Console piracy is comparable in a real way doesn’t hold water. At least, piracy on the next-gen consoles anyway. The DS situation, as walker puts it, is an interesting one)
KG
“Shouting “PIRACY IS THEFT!” doesn’t make it true. It is illegal. It is against the law to do it. But it isn’t theft, and so let’s not use that word to describe it.”
Downloading something and stealing a data carrier, with a material value that goes against zero, and which is near-infinitey reproducable, is comparable to the point where insisting on the “loss” of the stolen good as the distinguishing factor becomes absurd.
Stealing a game from a multimedia chain and downloading it is more closely related than stealing a handwritten manuscript and stealing a game, even if the latter two are called “theft”, and the first two aren’t.
It’s no coincidence that “theft of intellectually property” is such a widely used and accepted term between jurists, the kings of the pedants.
Shouting “PIRACY ISN’T THEFT” is just as helpful and irritating as shouting “PIRACY IS THEFT”.
Apparently us PC users sail the mighty seven sea’s and raid cargo ships containing games?!
I havent read the whole discussion above, but i think they should try and scratch there own head first, 65/70 euro’s is not justified for any game in my opinion.
PCG and RPS shouldn’t let up on the bastards. Demand to know why they ignore the very powerful arguements against DRM and point out the very large gaping holes in the batshit-crazy ‘anti-piracy’ nonsense they keep spewing.
And if it comes to it, we as consumers should be prepared to punish.
On a completely different note, I had no idea there would even be a PC version for this. I blame a lack of marketing for bad sales. :)
And this: “At the moment it feels like an out-of-control rumour is driving a steamroller over the PC.” hits the nail on the head.
It would be nice if publishers stopped their self-defeating whining and were a bit more proactive in getting gamers to buy their products instead of pirating them.
It seems to work for Valve. Granted, Steam is far from perfect as a content delivery system, and it won’t stop the most determined freeloader from acquiring Half-Life 2, but I suspect that Half-Life 2’s sales to piracy ratio is a lot healthier than that of most other PC games.
Plus Valve do other cool things, like give Half-Life 2 away for free with a sequel package.
Seems like a more workable business model than sitting in a corner, sulking, mumbling that all PC gamers are thieving bastards.
Yeah so, edit is gone as mentioned. A couple other comments I forgot to add:
-There’s a theory that games are easier to create on consoles. That is far, far from the truth. In fact, the PS3 is so insane to make games on, PC seems like a walk in the park. When I was at EA, we had five of our areas seven 360’s brick in the first two weeks. Of those five replaced, another three broke down a month later.
-Aren’t indie games doing extremely well on the PC? When was the last time you saw something like… argh name escapes me, those card-game/strategy games, on XBox live or something. Seriously, the console market is ‘more profitable,’ but only if you’re a major company. You have no choice, as a small company, to do anything other than PC games.
A bit off-topic but am I the only one who sees the connection that since publishers have moved more and more over to the consoles, games have also slowly become dumber and dumber? Then PC gamers sometimes gets tossed a bone by a shitty port and all of the PC gamers gather around to see why console players praise this game as their new messiah, but the PC gamers can’t see what the hell they are talking about and just think it’s an average game. (Read: Halo).
If Endwar’s delayed PC release really is down to The Piracy Argument, then why aren’t Ubi doing the same with Far Cry 2, which happens to be another of their multi-platform releases?
Also, if we’re being pedantic, can the people using “wrong” to mean “illegal” please stop that? Illegal is not a super- or sub-set of immoral, and probably never will be.
You can only argue that piracy is wrong if it is immoral, and you can’t use legality to argue that.
(Not, again, that I don’t believe piracy is wrong, but I do think that it’s problematic to conflate “immoral” and “illegal” – one of them is possibly universal, and the other one is mainly down to governmental preference in your current location, for a start. If people are going to have an argument, we can at least decide on the terms.)
Cliffski: “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.”
Cliffski, I’m disappointed to see you haranguing PC gamers!
Maybe I should just buy an PS3 and abandon PC as a platform because at least then I won’t get criticised and accused quite so much by the people who develop the games I buy?
Personally I think these sorts of comments represent one of the least constructive responses to piracy possible.
You and I both know that the only people who take offense at these sorts of comments are the people who actually pay for games. The pirates, by definition, just don’t care what you, or I or Ubisoft say. They are immune to haranguing, criticism, and argument. You might as well think of piracy as being something like the weather, or the tide, it doesn’t care that we’d like it to stop doing what its doing.
Which means that you are right of course that all the forum arguments in the world amount to very little, but given that there is basically no tolerable solution to the piracy problem I really think its worth bearing in mind that the other problem, the problem of the increasingly hostile relationship between PC developers and PC gamers is one that is very much under our control.
Developers can not hope to sell more by insulting their customers, even if they are very angry. And even if they wrongly suppose that the pirates will feel so chagrinned that they will miraculously start buy games instead of duplicating them for free.
I understand big software houses taking some titles away from the PC because piracy makes it difficult to turn a profit on them, but what I don’t understand is why they can’t gag the execs who then use their face time to effectively say “well, you made us do it, you bunch of crazy pirate dicks!”. It just seems unnecessary and pointless to me!
(I’m not including you in that crowd ofc cliffski! Only the first paragraphs were in response to what you said, the rest is broader rant territory.)
EDIT: (as edit is gone!) I didn’t mean that to sound quite so “you”y. By “you” I don’t mean you, Cliffski. I mean the wider “you”!
Actually some of them are you… Bugger it! I need edit!
i don’t know guys, but here in brazil the piracy for pcs is bigger than consoles just because consoles are more expensive. any pc game costs about half the price of the console version, even the hardware for pc are cheapier, a hd4850 cost half the price of a xbox360 in our stores, and i know that back in usa xbox 360 are being sold by 199 and this ati graphics by ~175.
It would definitely be interesting to get some insight on publishers’ analysis methods to reach such conclusions. At last some vague hint about the methodology.
Especially in cases where it’s not plausible they’re basing their theories on their very same sales figures, considering the release patterns adopted by Ubisoft in the last few years for what concerns multi-platform titles.
I won’t argue with the business decision behind it (not because I agree with the theory that simultaneous releases negatively impacts console sales, it’s just that this kind of speculations without hard data tend to be a bit pointless in the long run and I’m old and tired), but since the effect of such statements and the circumstances that generally generate them suspiciously move the discussion in the realm of marketing / PRing strategies, maybe it would be the case to go a bit more in depth, in order to be taken seriously.
Actually they might be right (partways) that this delay, if it means a viable PC code won’t even exist until the console version is available for awhile, would logically allow people to buy the game on console before they could rent it.
However, I for one never buy console games anymore, because I can’t be bothered to boot up my little gimp-puter, especially to play a genre that’s going to be a pain in the arse on a controller. I -RENT-, totally legal, and only about 8$ at worst. 99% of the time I don’t feel the need to make a second rental because by definition anything that doesn’t use mouse and keyboard doesn’t get its hooks in me, so that’s only 8$ at most they’re ever getting from me for a given game.
It’s not a choice I’d like to have to make. One way they have a massive distribution channel to extract 8$ from me, the other way they try to foist a 60$ (w/ sales-tax) PC purchase on me that is non-returnable and non-refundable no matter how much I might regret the purchase. Naturally, if you’ve been burned before by a given publisher or developer combo and don’t have tons of cash to throw away, you’re going to either rent or steal given the choice between the two odds.
A lot of people will wait to play a strategy game on the platform where it belongs, and given that, yeah, it’s pretty easy to figure out how to pirate if you can figure out how to run a PC game at all, this decision by Ubisoft won’t help them.
I remember when you could actually trade a PC game back in, you still can with console games and nobody seems to mind. I’m sure a lot of publishers would like to add expendable keys to half their console games but realize that might piss off customers who’ve grown to expect a 10 – 80% return on their investment when they’re tired of their new game. Perhaps if they’d applied the same thinking to PC games the retail box scene wouldn’t be on such a decline.
As a PC game enthusiast, I like to buy a lot of games (primarily boxed, but I’ve got a fair bit on Steam). The problem is, come XMas crunch time (i.e. now), we can’t spend what we want to. I end up putting games into categories of preference:
1) Must have on day of release – I.E. Left 4 Dead
2) May not buy immediately depending on reviews – I.E. Dead Space
3) Won’t buy until sale/price drop – I.E. GTA IV
Most people may disagree with my choices, but the point remains that I won’t have £100 or so to get them all at once, nor until perhaps a few months after release. If this is a typical gamer conundrum, then at XMas, game X will have lacklustre initial sales. Rather than blame it on competition, it’ll blamed on piracy.
And in reference to Ubisoft on Steam, if they allow us Euros access, and put up a Ubisoft complete pack, I’ll buy it on the spot.
@cliffski – I would love to buy all my games direct from the devs, but if that were the case, I’d have two dozen different digital distribution systems and it’d be a nightmare with all the accounts. Steam is considered the solution to this. Yes, Valve get a cut, but it allows us a central place to get our games. If lots of comparable competitors were to pop up, it’d just cause the consumers a headache, so its better to stick with Steam.
Er, I meant they could logically purchase it on console before it could be /pirated/. Yeah we really need edit.
whatever happens to the pc gaming scene, the pirates will remain, its not like they’ll all of a sudden say “drat, there’s no pc games anymore, i guess i’ll have to retire my hax0r skilz for good”… they’ll just turn 90 degrees to their right and say, “ok, lets rip the console games now”.
and then what are the pub(e)s going to say? “we will be putting out titleX on the 360/wii a month later because everyone’s grandma has hacked those and its killing our console sales”.
I don’t know about this subject. I don’t have unlimited funds so when a game for PC is delayed I go buy another for my DS and hope its fun. Then when the PC game comes out I see lame reviews so I figure I’m not missing anything and buy another DS game. This happened with spore. I wanted to buy this but read so many horrible reviews about it being boring and drm stuff I just bought clear sky instead off steam. Also I don’t have a ps3 but I did play gta4 on a friends and its fun but it does get boring fast the missions are stupid, multiplayer is fun kind of…so why would I buy this on PC a year later after I now don’t care about it? Why would I buy mirrors edge when I can goto a friends and watch him play it and take a few tries myself, the mystery is over if its great ok neat am I going to be able to afford this whenever it comes out on pc or do I need a few new shirts? I’m not rich so its going to be left4dead on nov 20 until january. I really want fallout 3 though :O
Interesting little story after surfacing on Ars Technica:
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/dodgy-digits-behind-the-war-on-piracy.ars/4
They actually tried to find evidence to support some of the “Piracy is killing the industry” comments and statistics. Can you guess what they found?
Not much. Granted this is purely an American perspective, but still, looks like a lot of the touted numbers don’t hold up to scrutiny.
Somehow making people wait and pissing them off makes them less likely to pirate your game, and more likely to go and buy a console to play it on
I buy games to support developers I like, if I don’t like them (because they don’t like me), it certainly puts some doubt in my mind as to whether I should give them my money or not
@Shadowmancer
I’m not convinced about the pricing argument being the reason Ubisoft forgoes European releases on Steam. Generally AAA titles in the US retail at $60, not $40 so the pricing is quite comparable to European equivalents.