Yuo really believe that publishers believe an article on tweak games over actual sales figures? I can tell you that the chaps who make these decisions spend their nights at home in bed with pie charts of sales figures. Also, always worth remembering that around $2bn of that $10bn you quote comes directly from one game (WoW).”

The current industry delays PC versions of games weeks to months, if they come out at all, claim the system is dying at worst and “lacking direction” at best, and in general badmouth it all the time. So, yes.

And WoW’s profits are NOT from retail sales of the game, they’re from subscription fees. NPD data is only for retail purchased copies of games. The only part WoW has in that $10b are copies of WoW bought at Gamestop and Wal-mart for $20, the subscription fees that are Blizzard’s bread and butter go completely uncounted by the NPD. They probably count in the PCGA’s $33b total figure, though.

Certainly the number of torrent downloads the dude cited for Spore seems to suggest that the more annoying the DRM, the more the game will be downloaded. At least some of these folks will be people who decided Spore’s DRM wasn’t worth the hassle and they’d rather have a cracked version.

So if we want PC gaming to stay healthy, we should stop pirating? If we refuse, we are admitting we are pirates, if we agree, we are admitting we are pirates. We are prejudiced by Yerli who can not imagine that he holds any blame for why Crysis did not sell like a block-buster and why it was pirated quite heavily.

No, Crytek is not a charity or advocacy group, *but neither are the customers Yerli despises* even as they keep him warm and fed. His entire reaction to the reception Crysis got was of a sulking brat that thinks the world owes him something. If he wants any goodwill, he should give it liberally first.

Not at all, I was simply using a clumsy rhetorical example to suggest that his inference that all PC gamers are pirates is unhelpful.

I’m guessing that the people who object to the DRM on Spore are probably the more “advanced” users — the ones who know about the issues involved, who know that the new breeds of DRM are going further than ever before, etc.

Unfortunately, I would expect that’s also the demographic of users most likely to pirate the game.

I’m reminded very much of that Brad Wardell posting about piracy:

Our customers make the rules, not the pirates. Pirates don’t count.

It seems likely to me that the large majority of Spore purchasers were from the more casual crowd, the ones who buy all those Sims expansion packs, and the ones who don’t really know or care what DRM the product uses.

Conversely, a lot of the “advanced” users were probably going to avoid Spore anyway, after reviews made it clear it was a decent concept with very shaky execution.

When your userbase is laid out in that fashion, it’s hard to recommend caring about how restrictive your DRM is. Most people aren’t going to notice or care, and the ones crying foul are the ones least likely to have bought it anyway.

Really, the whole issue resolves around the notion of companies adapting — of ceasing to promote to high-piracy markets, and focus on the more profitable ones instead.

One of the common excuses for piracy has been that companies are just being whiners and need to learn how to better adapt to the “real world” of today. Well, great, they’re doing exactly that … but you probably won’t like the result.

Whut? Is your point that Crytek should talk up the PC platform more, or that the CEO actually beat his wife? On the former point, there’s no reason why Crytek should stick to PC if there’s a business reason not to. Crytek is a business, not a charity or advocacy group.