God of War Dev Hates PSP Pirates

[vansau]

God of War Dev Hates PSP Pirates

Ready At Dawn is known for making great PSP games, but piracy on the console is so bad that it might not make any more titles for the system.

We're all used to stories about how bad game piracy is on PCs, but it's not often that people mention what the situation is like on consoles like Sony's PSP and Nintendo's DS. Ready At Dawn, the development studio behind handheld hits like Daxter, God of War: Chains of Olympus, and the upcoming <a href=http://www.amazon.com/God-War-Ghost-Sparta-Sony-PSP/dp/B003L51GW2/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1288383935&sr=8-1>God of War: Ghost of Sparta has revealed that piracy on the PSP is actually pretty horrendous.

Speaking to VG247, Ru Weerasuriya (RAD's creative director) explained that piracy for the system is so bad that it's "getting to the point where it doesn't make sense to make games for the PSP, if the piracy keeps on increasing. It's a tough call right now to say what's going to happen to it and where it's going to go, but it definitely hurts a lot of developers out there who are trying to make great games."

According to Weerasuriya, PC developers have an easier time of defending against piracy thanks to "connectivity and multiplayer." He cites Battle.net as an example, pointing out how, in order to play Blizzard's games, you have to be connected to its servers.

As for what's next on Ready At Dawn's agenda, that remains to be seen. Weerasuriya isn't even sure what platform his company will work on: "We have to figure out where all are heads are, and where our hearts are, and where we want to go.

Source: VG247 via <a href=http://gamepolitics.com/2010/10/29/piracy-makes-ready-dawn-sad>GamePolitics

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[hottsaucekid]

People are gonna find a way to pirate games no matter what. doesnt blizzard still have people on free servers anyway?

 

[Olikunmissile]

People are gonna find a way to pirate games no matter what. doesnt blizzard still have people on free servers anyway?

As long as those servers don't make money from it, (other than donations) those are perfectly legal, with a few of them going as far to make their terms of agreement, what you have to click to get on the game, use their website, state something like "no employees of Blizzard or it's other companies are allowed on this site/in this server."

Meaning, they'd have to break rules to find out, and with so many free servers, it's just not worth all the legal hassle.

 

[-Samurai-]

So, we might not see another God of War game on the PSP? The series that continues to one-up itself with its innovation and constant improvement of gameplay. [small]I really hope the sarcasm comes through.[/small]

OH NO!!

 

[Woodsey]

To be honest I hope they do stop so that people see how ridiculous this whole situation is.

People don't want any sort of regulations imposed on the internet (not that it's exactly easy to do so if tried) but then they keep giving reasons to do so.

 

[RvLeshrac]

People are gonna find a way to pirate games no matter what. doesnt blizzard still have people on free servers anyway?

As long as those servers don't make money from it, (other than donations) those are perfectly legal, with a few of them going as far to make their terms of agreement, what you have to click to get on the game, use their website, state something like "no employees of Blizzard or it's other companies are allowed on this site/in this server."

Meaning, they'd have to break rules to find out, and with so many free servers, it's just not worth all the legal hassle.

Legal, indeed.

 

[Throwitawaynow]

To be honest, I hope they do so that people see how ridiculous this whole situation is.

People want to only play video games with heavy DRM, or quality games like farmville.

Damn good marketing though. Buy a PSP get free games for life, or better yet get a pirated PSP for really cheap and get free games for life.

Edit: The future of gaming are genres dedicated solely to people who don't know how to pirate, or don't want to go through the hassle of pirating for crappy games. Scrabble 10: Revenge of Grandma! Wii: Heart Monitor. Xbox Kinect: Kinectimals. PS3 Move: Your Children Call You!

 

[Woodsey]

To be honest, I hope they do so that people see how ridiculous this whole situation is.

People want to only play video games with heavy DRM, or quality games like farmville.

Damn good marketing though. Buy a PSP get free games for life, or better yet get a pirated PSP for really cheap and get free games for life.

Were you quoting with the first line ? xD

 

[Anti-Robot Man]

Piracy on PSP is rediculously easy (though it's easy to brick your system, which means that while the pirates save money on the games they might have to buy more than one handset), with the DS I believe you need to buy a special cart to do it but again very easy. Apart from the relative ease I think the relatively high cost of hand-held titles leads to piracy (they are pretty much the same price as superior console titles) and the price doesn't drop anywhere near as quickly.
I own a DS lite (and don't pirate games) but I've bought next to nothing for it because it's too expensive. I'm basically only holding onto it for when I see cheap copies of the Castlevania and Final Fantasy games.

 

[Olikunmissile]

People are gonna find a way to pirate games no matter what. doesnt blizzard still have people on free servers anyway?

As long as those servers don't make money from it, (other than donations) those are perfectly legal, with a few of them going as far to make their terms of agreement, what you have to click to get on the game, use their website, state something like "no employees of Blizzard or it's other companies are allowed on this site/in this server."

Meaning, they'd have to break rules to find out, and with so many free servers, it's just not worth all the legal hassle.

Legal, indeed.

Why is it against the EULA?

You mean, aside from being a way to make profit with someone else?s IP and hard work?

They were making money off it. If you actually read my post you'd see the ones that are legal are the ones THAT DON'T make money.

Donations are a different matter. There is nothing illegal about donations. But when the server starts saying "gives us £X and we'll give you X" then that becomes illegal.

If you put the effort into reading that you do trying to be a smart ass and prove people wrong you might be the one who creates the cure for cancer. That is of course, if you read this properly, but I'm not giving good odds on that.

 

[Throwitawaynow]

Piracy on PSP is rediculously easy (though it's easy to brick your system, which means that while the pirates save money on the games they might have to buy more than one handset), with the DS I believe you need to buy a special cart to do it but again very easy. Apart from the relative ease I think the relatively high cost of hand-held titles leads to piracy (they are pretty much the same price as superior console titles) and the price doesn't drop anywhere near as quickly.
I own a DS lite (and don't pirate games) but I've bought next to nothing for it because it's too expensive. I'm basically only holding onto it for when I see cheap copies of the Castlevania and Final Fantasy games.

Do you honestly think that people who pirate a majority of their games will stop if the price goes down? Or if any of the other "reasons" stop happening?

Were you quoting with the first line ? xD

Maybe = P

 

[Therumancer]

I think this guy is on another planet, and seems to be oblivious to the fact that consumers hate DRM and being forced to connect to the internet to play their games and such.

I'd also seriously question his logic since video games are a multi-billion dollar industry and last that I was hearing the PSP was actually doing fairly well. It's a failure compared to say the "Nintendo DS" simply because it sold more units, but in absolute terms there are still a ton of PSPs out there and it's a success by any reasonable standard.

I very much doubt piracy is any worse for the PSP than any other platform. It seems like the people running EVERY platform whine about this nowadays to be honest.

I think the issue here is that this guy is convinced by some of the statistics that he's losing money that he could otherwise have made. The questionable logic of the game industry that without piracy all those pirates would be buying new copies of the game is a big part of the problem.

I have trouble taking the industry seriously when you have guys walking off with billions of dollars industry wide, but then crying because they convince themselves they could have billions more.

Now, I can see that due to less units out there that the PSP is less profitable than say the DS because the DS represents a bigger market and more units that can be moved. However that has nothing to do with piracy.


What's more I think game developers need to get off their high horse with them thinking that we are stupid. There have been articles over the years about the game industry and how it works, and the differances between producers and developers.

Understand something, when a video game comes out the developer has already been paid. The guys risking the money are the producers. A failed game costs the developer nothing except possibly reducing the odds that another producer will hire them or lend them money. Cases where developers produce products totally out of their own pockets are pretty bloody rare overall and not something you can base a stance off of.

What actually happens in most cases is either that a producers approaches a developer to make a game that he thinks will make money, or just to produce any game at all that is liable to get him a major return. In other cases the developer has an idea for a game and borrows money from a producer to develop a game that they want to make, in hopes that the game will make more money than they borrowed allowing them to profit.

The development budgets for games are largely based around the cost in human resources. Out of that pool of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars the cost of office space, computers, utilities, and other things are fairly minimal. That money goes towards paying the people involved... and if the game developers are borrowing the money, that means towards paying themselves while they develop the game.

Even if a game flops horribly (for whatever reason) the developers already got paid for their time and effort. If they borrowed the money, generally what is at stake is the chances of someone else lending them money since they won't be able to pay it back. Look at things like "Duke Nukem Forever" as an example of how it basically works in that case, the guys lived off the millions paid for the game apparently, and since it's spent the guys doing th elending really have no recourse towards getting their money back even if someone goes to jail (which is actually unlikely, investments are risky for a reason, and this is why trust enters into it), I mean if the money is spent it's gone.

In reality the gamble of game production pays off far more than it fails, which is why it's a billion dollar industry, and there is no shortage of people willing to bankroll games at the moment. This billion dollar industry has grown, and continued to exist, despite the existance of pirates in all their multitudes.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying Piracy is right or anything of the sort, all I'm saying is that the game industry is throwing a tantrum about it, and trying to count money they never had. An industry that continues to see major growth in the current enviroment can't at the same time sit there and claim they are being strangled out of existance in any way, shape or form. *I* care because as a consumer the industry's greed is pretty much causing me problems as they look towards things like internet verification, DRM, and other garbage that doesn't even slow the pirates down much.

The point of this rant is that while piracy is wrong, I still get tired of all the "woe is me" stuff no matter what platform they are talking about. I also get tired of people pointing at the various game studios that are involved in layoffs or having problems as examples of the problem, when the industry as a whole is making major bank. In every industry there are going to be failures and people on the out, even in very successful industries.

Now, I will say that with the rise of corperate game production there are some exceptions, you wind up with situations where there is a parent company with tons of money that effectively buys out developers and gives them products in-house. In that paticular case the actual developers are being paid no matter what kind of failures occur (well barring things like Bobby Kotick ejecting people with thugs to avoid paying promised monies), but the parent company loses money if a product fails. HOWEVER these major gaming corperations are making major amounts of profits despite the piracy, which is why you see so much forming up, merging, and buying out of game studios. If big bucks weren't being made, it wouldn't be going on... and in that case, the guys actually sitting down to code your game are STILL being paid bfore it ever releases.

In short the whole "stealing food from the creator's mouth" is BS above and beyond any issues about how much those guys are actually making (which is a differant issue I harp on from time to time). Coders, artists, musicians, voice actors, writers... they got paid all through the development process. Even if they borrowed money, and a product fails, these guys still basically got to live off of shares of some huge multi-million dollar pool during the development time when they were working (case in point: Duke Nukem Forever's investment contreversy).

 

[Danzaivar]

I always put low PSP sales down to noone having the bloody thing.

 

[Lord Devius]

I always put low PSP sales down to noone having the bloody thing.

The only reason I have a PSP is to play PS1 games on something that isn't an emulator. Yes, I modded it, no, I haven't pirated ANY PSP games, I'm almost exclusively using it for PS1 emulation.

...Yeah, if there were any games that interested me on PSP I'd buy them. Or try to.

 

[Anti-Robot Man]

Piracy on PSP is rediculously easy (though it's easy to brick your system, which means that while the pirates save money on the games they might have to buy more than one handset), with the DS I believe you need to buy a special cart to do it but again very easy. Apart from the relative ease I think the relatively high cost of hand-held titles leads to piracy (they are pretty much the same price as superior console titles) and the price doesn't drop anywhere near as quickly.
I own a DS lite (and don't pirate games) but I've bought next to nothing for it because it's too expensive. I'm basically only holding onto it for when I see cheap copies of the Castlevania and Final Fantasy games.

Do you honestly think that people who pirate a majority of their games will stop if the price goes down? Or if any of the other "reasons" stop happening?

Were you quoting with the first line ? xD

Maybe = P

No, I think most pirates wouldn't buy the original product to begin with (so it's not really lost sales any way). However, I think a lot of average, less tech savvy, consumers drift into piracy when they suddenly realise that they can have tons of stuff for little or nothing. A high price point (particularly if it's percieved as more than what something's worth) encourages this. It's already a niche market, let alone when the Sonic RPG from Bioware is twice as expensive as Mass Effect 2. Your harcore pirate is never going to stop, but then again he wasn't going to buy all the stuff he downloads anyway, your average consumer is willing to pay money for products, but only what they deem it is worth it.

It's also worth remembering that the hand-held market is predominantly a younger audience, with less buying power, where socially piracy can spread easily through schools.

 

[Throwitawaynow]

No, I think most pirates wouldn't buy the original product to begin with (so it's not really lost sales any way). However, I think a lot of average, less tech savvy, consumers drift into piracy when they suddenly realise that they can have tons of stuff for little or nothing. A high price point (particularly if it's percieved as more than what something's worth) encourages this. It's already a niche market, let alone when the Sonic RPG from Bioware is twice as expensive as Mass Effect 2. Your harcore pirate is never going to stop, but then again he wasn't going to buy all the stuff he downloads anyway, your average consumer is willing to pay money for products, but only what they deem it is worth it.

It's also worth remembering that the hand-held market is predominantly a younger audience, with less buying power, where socially piracy can spread easily through schools.

Exactly, so if they made the DRM stricter the average pirate would stop because they wouldn't deem it worth it and the hardcore pirate has to work harder, hopefully limiting the amount of games they can pirate. Then when they cooperate to pirate as many games as possible maybe have structure and hierarchy and we can call them a terrorist cell and put them in gitmo. 1 Cell at a time until the only people who could possibly pirate the games would be the game developers because they would be the only ones left to know how. They would get ID tags and biotechnical signals would track them when they log on to a computer and monitor what they are doing.

 

[Sixties Spidey]

They should take a look at the country that BANNED all the God of War games, Dead Rising 2, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Call of Duty 4, Grand Theft Auto IV, and Dante's Inferno among others. There's a reason pirating is a last resort.

 

[SimuLord]

When I saw the headline I thought "Is David Jaffe spouting off again?"...then I saw "oh, these are the idiots who took God of War and completely fucked it up. No wonder people are stealing it."