It won’t really. If people do not want to pay, it stops selling right there.

People can pirate everything, hence why there are pirate servers for World of Warcraft and cracked copies of Steam version games out there.

Of course, Steam miserably failed at this where they were off to a great start at first. Raising prices as if dollars are euros isn’t making you look nice Valve!!!

For anything other than the Sims and WoW this is actually a very good source for poll information.

That’s my feeling too.

For anything other than the Sims and WoW this is actually a very good source for poll information.

I just cannot understand the love for that game.

P.

Well of course, but in a very interesting way, and one that might mean it reflects the current state of play more accurately than it first appear to. I took the survey and would admit to being a typical hardcore PC diehard. The shelf holds copies of The Witcher EE, Fallout 3, Civ4, etc. The hard-drive is stuffed with DLC from Valve and EA. So far, so typical.

Let me tell you about somebody who didn’t take the survey, has never even looked at a gaming magazine (Online or printed), and gets a rash every time we go into a GameStop. My girlfriend.

So, a typical non-gamer? Far from it. There is a good chance she has spent more in the last year on games than I have. She has started to hide the credit card receipts, alway a bad sign. Popcap and Bigfish and all the others supply her with all the games she needs.

I looked over here shoulder the other night to see what sort of shoe-matching game she was playing, and was suprised to find her plowing through a point and click adventure that owes more to LucasArts than any Bejeweled clone. Proper game, proper gaming.

My point is this. She is as invisible to us, the Angry Internet Men, as she is to NDP or any of the other stat gathering, market researching outfits. She, and the uncounted thousands like her, are the dark matter that contorts and ridicules all of the statistics we see proclaimed as evidence of this or that death or ressurection.

All of her purchases are digital, none of her games of choice would even get a look-in on one of the mainstream gaming sites, and she doesn’t want to know about any of the other stuff anyway. But there she is, hammering away at a type of game most pundits would tell you died a commercial death a decade ago.

There are more people like her out there, and I suspect they are females between 20-35, computer literate, who think Marcus Phoenix is a shoe designer. They don’t buy from the shops because they never have and they never will. They are 100% digital, and I suspect they push that 47% figure much, much higher.

P.

http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09%2F01%2F30%2F0556251&from=rss

Gears of War on the PC no longer works after Jan 29.