Piracy...can it kill PC gaming?

[5t3v0]

It does annoy me that developers blame low PC version sales on Piracy. Sure, numbers are higher, but they dont take into account steam sales, and the fact that the PC market share is only 7% now thanks to the advent of the modern console.

I had one console gamer call PC gaming stupid because "All I had to do was go to pirate bay and download any game I want" despite being an honest person who rarely pirates games, only those that are IMPOSSIBLE to find, such as old games. I hate how there has been so much anti-PC gaming propaganda flung around because of developers conherant hate for the platform, despite many of them starting out as lowly-PC developers (Infinity ward, anyone?)

 

[KalosCast]

Studies have shown that people who pirate music also (on average) buy more music than their fully legal counterparts. It's not impossible that piracy may also help spur game sales (unlikely, but possible).

 

[hazabaza1]

Only if everyone starts pirating.

 

[veloper]

The pirate to legit ratio used to be much worse, only up until this millenium.
PC gaming survived that and unlike now, there existed consoles then (SNES) that were actually better than the PCs of the time.

PC game sales have gone up relatively and absolutely. There is no problem.

 

[Nexoram]

Eventually if it got too great, it would kill gaming that you and I enjoy playing. You know, the (sorry for using the word) "hardcore" games. However, games like Farmville and Bejewled appeal more to the casual crowd and won't change.

 

[Antari]

Right now piracy is the least of PC gaming's worries. Poor production quality, and half finished projects are. If these companies would start making better more origional and interesting games, what little damage piracy could do, would be unnoticable for the sales they'd make with a decent game.

 

[EllEzDee]

It's unjust to punish all of the legitimate buyers, simply because of a developer fault. Either add some sort of anti-pirate measure(Steam)or just don't care at all.

Steam isn't an anti piracy measure. Take a look at every single game released with steam, and then check your favourite torrent site for that exact game. There's, to this day, no such thing as anti-pirate software. It can delay pirates for a week, maybe. But that's about it.
The only certain anti-piracy measure would be for developers to stop being such lazy fuckers who release half a game at full price before selling the other half of the game as DLC.

 

[Gigano]

Hardly, but the traditional forms of it can help kill some smaller less financially stable producers before they take off the ground, and limit the amount of money available to put into development of new games, and thus also how willing developers are to experiment and take risks with their games.

So it's certainly harmful to the industry (though it does probably also help advertise franchises and create new fans of them to some uncertain degree), but it's not something that'll break it.

Doesn't help that the concept covers very different situations, not all of which are remotely harmful; There's considerable difference in someone in China pirating a French indie title that'll never ever see release there, or Crysis 2. It can only be harmful when there's a market position it takes away from, yet no such distinction is generally made in copyright laws. Making "piracy" a hard term to discuss or unanimously condemn.

 

[veloper]

As you can see the general gaming spend is about 50% on the PC platform overall, even in the US, which is dominated by consoles, about 20% for boxed and digital products, 10% from MMOs and 20% from web-based "gaming portals". In other countries the PC dominates even more.

It also says they even included used sales and rentals.
Used sales make the publishers no money and are huge in console land, while almost non-existant on the PC.

So consoles = (10,6 - used) divided by PS3, 360 and wii

Mainstream/core on PC = 2.1(boxed) + 2.5(steam and other others) = 4.6 billion.

That would make the PC the #1 mainstream gaming platform in the US by far, if the survey is correct.
Add MMOs and casual online games for an even bigger market share.

Nice. Also Valve must be doing very well.

 

[imperialreign]

No - piracy will not kill PC gaming or development.

Keep in mind - years ago piracy in the PC realm was 10x worse than it is now. It was very easy to copy disks, and even more copy them to your hard drive. Hell, you could install a game, then copy the game folder to a disk, re-copy that to another PC, and it would work fine.

Back in the day, the only real counter measure in use was to randomly ask for a word or phrase from the game's manual - and this was easily dealt with by simply photo-copying the game manual. All this could be dealt with by the average user, with no technical skill needed or involved.

Today, though, due to the size of modern games, it practically requires an image of the game's disk passed via torrent, and some form of crack and/or serial number to bypass the disk-check and serial authentification. Breaking anti-piracy solutions now requires a user to have better technical knowledge to start, and even setting up a pirated game is beyond the skills of the general user.

Granted, it's nowhere near of a PITA as it is to pirate console games, which is why the PC piracy "market" continues to thrive . . . but it hasn't seriously hurt PC gaming yet, and I seriously doubt it ever will. At the most, it will slowly lead to crap-tastic PC games where the devs have spent more time cross-developing the titles for console as it's a more "secure" market (ATM). Or, it will lead to more draconian piracy counter measures.

Either way it'll hurt the PC market further, but it will not kill it.

 

[Digitaldreamer7]

It's not going to kill PC gaming. if it weren't for PC's, consoles wouldn't exist right now. A console is just a PC with the ultimate DRM built in at the hardware level.

What piracy IS doing to social gaming is killing the LAN party.