Piracy, Not Consoles, Killed the PC Exclusive

[devotedsniper]

Once again pc gets the blame for piracy...yet i'm fairly sure it's always the console version which gets leaked first, yer if it's preloaded on steam then they can get there hands on the majority of it early but they still can't do anything with it. This is all i have to say, i'm fed up with pc getting the blame and trying to defend it.

 

[CharrHearted]

whether this is out of context or not I think piracy occurs sometimes because pc games only come out weeks or months after their console counterpart.

 

[targren]

Poor Titan Quest...

Thanks PC gaming pirates... thanks for fucking that up.

And it becomes a case study for what people have been saying about DRM for years. It was still pirated, and it hurt the brand.

It was a good game, but I'm still glad it happened.

 

[kasperbbs]

Once again pc gets the blame for piracy...yet i'm fairly sure it's always the console version which gets leaked first, yer if it's preloaded on steam then they can get there hands on the majority of it early but they still can't do anything with it. This is all i have to say, i'm fed up with pc getting the blame and trying to defend it.

It's simple, the PC version is way easier to pirate, you don't need to modify your system to run pirated software therefore the PC version will always be the one to get pirated the most. xbox vesrion of kingdoms of amalur was already leaked yesterday, but once PC version gets out it will beat the xbox version in downloads pretty fast. I'm a PC gamer myself, but these are the facts, our games are way too easy to download and play illegaly and no DRM can do anything about it, it can only delay it a few days at best. I'm eager to see what happens with diablos always online DRM, i'll laugh my ass off if it gets cracked easily and legitimate players gets screwed. But if it succeeds then i predict a sad future for PC gaming if other follow blizzards example.

 

[Waaghpowa]

In regards to PC exclusives being killed and whatnot, Not sure if this is acceptable and normally I wouldn't do this but this image helps explain the situation.

Spoiler: PC GAMING IS DEAD!

But ya, I feel this image shows that we shouldn't be worried about games on PC for a while.

But but...HOW WILL I GET DEAD OR ALIVE 5?!

 

[uncanny474]

Another butthurt dev saying "piracy is the reason my game doesn't sell" and, in doing so, pushing draconian legislature like SOPA? Whelp, that's ONE game I won't be investing in. Good job, Dev, in making me completely boycott your games library just because you were butthurt over piracy once.

I'd be more OK with this whining if it didn't come right on the coattails of the SOPA/ACTA/PIPA triforce of censorship. *sigh* It's devs like that that make me just want to never pay for anything ever again, just to give them the obscene hand gesture of your country's choice.

 

[NicoDK]

Excuses if this has already been posted, but the release chart disagrees.

http://imgur.com/r/gaming/iTZtG

 

[omicron1]

Poor Titan Quest...

Thanks PC gaming pirates... thanks for fucking that up.

I also find the last line interesting : "It's really, really hard to be profitable by concentrating only on PC," he said. "Unless you're an MMO."

Wasn't the idea of Kingdoms of Amawhatever supposed to be the intro for their MMO game?

Yeah, darn pirates, they ruin all the PC games, except for all those hugely successful ones.

Oh, hey, crazy thought, but maybe, just maybe, good games sell and bad games don't?

In the case of Titan Quest, it's a good (great!) game that didn't sell. Why? 'cause they tried the same trick as Arkham Asylum - breaking the game for pirates - which made the prerelease pirates (as I recall, the game leaked through manufacturing) post "bug" complaints, which built up such a critical mass as to be mentioned in reviews... Game comes out, no legitimate customers are affected (iirc the "crash" only happened if you circumvented the basic security), but it was too late to save the game. ILE died, we never got a Titan Quest 2, and all the pirates and legitimate consumers alike suffered for it.

On the other hand, ILE has reformed as Crate Entertainment and are trying again. Please support them this time, Internet!

 

[KrossBillNye]

Excuses if this has already been posted, but the release chart disagrees.

http://imgur.com/r/gaming/iTZtG

Actually I beat you to it in my post a few moments ago lol.

But no worries

 

[lucksi]

Can anyone guess how many PC games I have not bought because of DRM? Or online activation? Or permanent online crap even when playing offline? Or that I have to install another program that does devil knows what on my PC?

A metric shitton.

I have not played some of my favorite game-series for sometimes several incarnations and I really really want to play the new ones. But I remain strong and do not support this crap.

But yes, go on about piracy. If people want to pirate your games, they will. If you then want to punish the ones who bought your game, go right ahead. You will lose sales for sure which is of course due to piracy, right?

Back to the consoles and old PC games for me.

 

[Treblaine]

PC exclusives may be dying out. But every PC exclusive I've known has sold rather well. Half-life 2. Starcraft 2. Both games sold horribly. Oh wait, no they didn't.

Yeah... Piracy is not the same as a lost sale I'm afraid. It just seems that they're using piracy as an excuse for THEIR poor sales and lack of creativity. And consoles have had a part to play to some extent...

Not an excuse. A reason. The article specifically describes a situation where a good game got screwed because of piracy. And not because people were pirating in lieu of buying; where a glitch in the leaked pirated version, and only the pirated version, was assumed to be indicative of the final game.

Did you actually read the article?

What kind of logic is that?!?

Correlation =/= causation

All Ian Frazier described was "the amount that it was pirated was the difference between us staying in business and going out of business"

That doesn't "specifically describe" anything and it doesn't mean without piracy it would have been a huge success as that assumes with no piracy there would have been all the sales they needed, especially how it fails to factor for how steps to eliminate piracy might have actually reduced the sales they did have, i.e. unpleasant DRM or a console-only release missing target audience or lack of publicity.

There are a lot of people who have no money but a lot of time, they spend it downloading games compulsivity - they're free, just download anything - and possibly try them. They aren't going to buy anything, even if they had the money they're too lazy to go down the shops.

Look at a piracy-free example: 3D Dot Game Heroes. Released on PS3 back when piracy was all but impossible (still impractical today), it like Titan Quest people might say it was somewhat derivative of a fantasy game that came before it though it was in fact quite good on its own, though not a great score. Yet it sold only 430k, which for a third-party boxed game, that's very bad.

No piracy.
Good game.
Failure.

And there are a dozen other examples of obscure Console-exclusive titles with absolutely no influence of piracy that still fail miserably, very similarly to PC exclusive titles. Even relatively big titles like Enslaved. The only reason they don't blame piracy here is because they can't.

You know what hurts games sales are things like obstructive DRM, unfocused development and delayed PC releases or no PC-releases at all!

The problem with piracy is the "cure" is worse than the disease. And it doesn't cure anything, people will buy good games if enough people know they are good. I am addicted to buying in steam sales, and I know I'm not alone in being more lured by "-40%" than "free". And of course that's not to say about the free-to-play model.

I am against piracy but mainly I am against over-reaction to piracy.

The music industry didn't lick piracy by releasing their songs only on Vinyl. The movie industry can't beat piracy by only ever giving their films cinema releases. Video gaming can't beat piracy by releasing games only on console, especially after it's been shown how Steam and GoG, the itunes of gaming, can change everything.

 

[w00tage]

(New here, but just had to reply to this)

Huh? I thought that with all the studies showing at the very least that the impact of piracy cannot be measured, that this kind of rhetoric was dead. I have the impression of reading something published 5 years ago.

Anyways similarly to Baresark, I pirated Titan Quest when it came out in the period where I bought one game a year and pirated all the rest, and didn't even play it to the end because it got too repetitive. Yet a while ago I purchased it on Steam, where by now I've purchased about every game that I pirated in the past, having finally some money to do it.

If I had ignored every game that I couldn't purchase back then, I wouldn't have had the slightest interest in purchasing them now... I would've gone directly with Torchlight or a similar game instead.

I think my 380+ games on Steam are a pretty good testimony that pirates often end up the biggest fans/customers. Not to mention that most software devs I know have become fans of games by pirating the shit out of everything they could get their hands on, and that's how they decided they wanted to study software engineering and go into games development. So piracy creates devs with a wide game culture for you as well dude! Stop complaining!

I have yet to figure out why game companies do not just go directly to pirate sites and engage them as distributors. Set up the game so it's substantially playable but with a paid unlock system, set up the pirates with a cut of the profits from the unlocks, and everyone is now a happy part of the production / distribution process.

 

[ph0b0s123]

The dumb thing is the PC does not have 'exclusives'. Just games other platforms of the time could not handle.

Incorrect. If it's not on another console, and it's not planned to be on another console, then it's an exclusive. Once they decide to put it on another platform, it's not exclusive anymore.

So now consoles are in the same ball park as PC's as far a processing, exclusives were always going to decrease. Piracy or not PC games sales are always generally going to be less than consoles sales, so people go to the bigger market. You can see this when you notice that most games now are designed for consoles and then ported to the PC after the fact.

But piracy is a factor, in that it makes the sales even lower. Or at the very least, is more of a problem.

No exclusives are games that Sony or Microsoft don't allow on any other platform but theirs. All PC games have the potential to be ported to other platforms, they just don't becuase consoles of the time cannot handle the game or the control method required, eg RTS's. Exclusives are a console only phenomenon.

The fear of piracy is a factor as no-one has been able to give a concrete idea of how much damage it actually does. What is fact is the difference in sales on PC for multiformat games vs console sales for the same title.

 

[ph0b0s123]

The dumb thing is the PC does not have 'exclusives'. Just games other platforms of the time could not handle. So now consoles are in the same ball park as PC's as far a processing, exclusives were always going to decrease. Piracy or not PC games sales are always generally going to be less than consoles sales, so people go to the bigger market. You can see this when you notice that most games now are designed for consoles and then ported to the PC after the fact.

A good pc is actually many times more powerful than a console. That power wont get you much since we haven't had a game that chews up rigs and spits them out like Crysis since then though. Since most games are made for consoles, all that extra power goes mostly unused.

But the gap is not as big as it was in the PS2 days, when completely different versions of the same game were made for the console market verses the PC market. That's when games unique to the PC were more prevalent.

 

[Treblaine]

Pc gaming is on its last breath...

...

What incentive do developers have to create pc exclusives? None!

Wow, people can really make any baseless statement and get away with it without citing any sources.

http://www.1up.com/news/valve-more-profitable-google-apple-per-employee

Yeah, Valve is that profitable per employee from Steam. For PC gaming.

EA launches Origin, for PC gaming.

EA invests hundreds of millions (half a billion possibly) in The Old Republic. A PC exclusive.

PC has more exclusives than all the other home platforms combined. For both the past year and coming year.

PC hardware is now 10 times more powerful than PS3 or 360, it is easily a whole generation ahead in processing power. PC exclusive development allows their product to stand out amongst all others by its incredible graphical fidelity. It's the future.

PC is home to far more flexible business opportunities able to sell games at a whole continuum of prices, not just $60 or $15. Even Free-to-play is a viable and successful business model on PC.

So, do you still think PC gaming is on it's "last breath"?

 

[omicron1]

Poor Titan Quest...

Thanks PC gaming pirates... thanks for fucking that up.

I also find the last line interesting : "It's really, really hard to be profitable by concentrating only on PC," he said. "Unless you're an MMO."

Wasn't the idea of Kingdoms of Amawhatever supposed to be the intro for their MMO game?

Yeah, darn pirates, they ruin all the PC games, except for all those hugely successful ones.

Oh, hey, crazy thought, but maybe, just maybe, good games sell and bad games don't?

In the case of Titan Quest, it's a good (great!) game that didn't sell. Why? 'cause they tried the same trick as Arkham Asylum - breaking the game for pirates - which made the prerelease pirates (as I recall, the game leaked through manufacturing) post "bug" complaints, which built up such a critical mass as to be mentioned in reviews... Game comes out, no legitimate customers are affected (iirc the "crash" only happened if you circumvented the basic security), but it was too late to save the game. ILE died, we never got a Titan Quest 2, and all the pirates and legitimate consumers alike suffered for it.

On the other hand, ILE has reformed as Crate Entertainment and are trying again. Please support them this time, Internet!

I think it's more likely Titan's Quest didn't sell because it was a boring looking Diablo clone, who's demo proved that it was nothing new and nothing worth getting excited about.

And if the pre-release DRM hurt it so much, why did the same thing not happen to Arkham Asylum, or any of the other games that have done similar strategies? There aren't many of them, but enough to make that argument seem a little flimsy.

Your personal opinions on its quality matter little, if at all. Titan Quest routinely comes up in conversation in the same context as Torchlight - as a worthy Diablo alternative. Its metacritic score, likewise, is quite good, even with the aforementioned perception (GameSpot even acknowledged the bug reports as reasons for a lower score).
I believe the difference in outcome is a combination of relative hype levels and the way the story broke. While Titan Quest's security features were revealed weeks after the fact (I believe this story broke very soon after release, whereas piracy had been spreading its version for some time already), Arkham Asylum's features were revealed almost immediately as piracy countermeasures, and that's the story that was carried forwards. Same with Take On Helicopters and Serious Sam 3.
I don't really blame the publisher/developer for this, though - if they had shown their hand Pre-launch, it would have been circumvented by the time it became useful. The real problem was the leak, which gave less scrupulous folks time to sully the gamer's public perception.