Piracy, Not Consoles, Killed the PC Exclusive

[Hisher]

Shitty DRM is certainly a problem there are quite a few games me and many others won't touch because of it. Steam may be DRM but it doesn't stop me from playing my games or limit how many times I can install or for how long.

Unless you don't have an internet connection in which case you cannot play your store-bought game at all. Which is damnable in my opinion. No company should ever put a box in a store that contains 95% of a game. If it's not playable out of the box, as is, it's a broken and incomplete product.

And a partial quote of myself from earlier.

It is time that piracy stops being blamed for "killing" PC exclusives when it is far more likely to be the fault of laziness, bad game design, horrible DRM, and the fact that the console market is larger and easier to sell to.

The thing is, if I were to ask you to qualify some of those points you would probably point to recent practices. But the decline of the PC is not a recent event, it's one that's been ongoing for years now. One has to wonder whether those points, even if valid today, were valid years ago when this decline started to happen.

DRM back in the day used to just be a code you put in. It used to be keeping the disc in the drive while you play the game. These are hardly "horrible" measures by any stretch. It's only compartively recently that we've seen nonsense like ubisoft's "always on" DRM and the like.


If I were to hazard a guess, I would suspect that the decline of the PC exclusive can be linked to the prevalence and speed of the internet. That being, the convenience of downloading content over previous years. And if that suspicion is indeed the case then the obvious correlation to the decline of the exclusive and PC gaming in general is piracy, because with increased download speeds and greater freedom comes greater accesibility.

If you don't have an internet connection all you have to do is start steam in offline mode anything that hinders gameplay after that is not the fault of steam but of whatever DRM was packaged with it by the developer or publisher and that I agree is damnable.

To be completely honest I don't believe PC exclusives are really in decline at all it just seems so because consoles are a much bigger share of the market and that is the main focus of the industry right now.

Edit: If there is a decline of anything it is in game quality which in my opinion is being caused by to much focus on graphical capability and trying to make games appeal to a wider audience or more accessible.

 

[Hisher]

If you don't have an internet connection all you have to do is start steam in offline mode anything that hinders gameplay after that is not the fault of steam but of whatever DRM was packaged with it by the developer or publisher and that I agree is damnable.

Um, incorrect. I bought the Half Life 1 collection for example, I think that's the first time I actually started using Steam. The box I bought didn't include the full game, only about 95% of it, if I hadn't had an internet connnection, I would've been unable to get the final 5% and play the game. While it is true that Steam allow you to play games offline, you do at some point need to be online to get the game running at all.

Okay I see what you are saying now. With physical media you should definitely not be forced to connect to the internet at all to play your game the one time activation included with the disk was a much better solution and having to download the last part or activate it online with even something like project ten dollar should be frowned upon. For digital distribution I still don't think it gets much better than steam.

 

[Legit101]

................

 

[LiquidSolstice]

Well if the game is shit, I don't blame the piracy.
If they pirate the game and it's shit, it's not a lost sale since they'd probably return the game if they could.

You don't know that. That's the whole point. You don't know whether they would have bought the game or returned it.

The only thing you do know is that they are experiencing the game without compensating the developer for it at all. This isn't rocket science, but it appears to be an absolute playground for people to come out and play with the swingsets of rationalization and justification based on nothing more than assumptions.

 

[grigjd3]

When your game just isn't that interesting and it doesn't sell well, blame piracy!

 

[hooksashands]

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?

Titan Quest was a good game. And pirates all but literally gutted it.

http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?t=42663

I was in the "good games sell, bad games don't" camp too for awhile. But then I realized that same argument can be flipped on its head. If a game you think is awful sells a bajillion copies on release day, it's still 'bad', which contradicts the notion that only 'good' games sell. And voila, we arrive at the reason this statement is a logical fallacy: Success and popularity =/= Quality and craftsmanship.

 

[UsefulPlayer 1]

Kinda sounds like the ultimate irony.

The PC elites who so fuss about the decline of the PC games are the ones causing it with their piracy.

And then they defend their piracy too. Can't have it both ways.

 

[Treblaine]

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?

Titan Quest was a good game. And pirates all but literally gutted it.

http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?t=42663

I was in the "good games sell, bad games don't" camp too for awhile. But then I realized that same argument can be flipped on its head. If a game you think is awful sells a bajillion copies on release day, it's still 'bad', which contradicts the notion that only 'good' games sell. And voila, we arrive at the reason this statement is a logical fallacy: Success and popularity =/= Quality and craftsmanship.

The pirates didn't give it a 77% metascore rating (professional reviewers review legit copies), nor reputation as a generic Diablo clone at a time when Diablo 2 was still so highly lauded, nor the extreme lack of marketing. Nor did piracy cause them to spend a lot of money developing a sequel that they didn't release which was ultimately what caused the company to default.

Titan Quest may have been a good game, but back in 2006 to much of the market looking to buy the game it did NOT look like a safe bet.

 

[hooksashands]

The pirates didn't give it a 77% metascore rating (professional reviewers review legit copies), nor reputation as a generic Diablo clone at a time when Diablo 2 was still so highly lauded, nor the extreme lack of marketing. Nor did piracy cause them to spend a lot of money developing a sequel that they didn't release which was ultimately what caused the company to default.

Titan Quest may have been a good game, but back in 2006 to much of the market looking to buy the game it did NOT look like a safe bet.

Describe 77% to me. What does that even MEAN? If they need a percentile rating system to tell them whether or not they're allowed to enjoy a game, then I weep for humanity. And how is the lack of marketing their fault? They can only hype their game as much as their publishers can afford, and since a pitiful amount of people actually bought TQ, the reason they couldn't push their product is because everyone fucking stole it, not because they were working on a sequel. I'm sorry, but I really can't find fault with a studio making a follow-up before their first game has even had time to crash and burn. If anything, that just shows how hard they're willing to work and how dedicated they are as a creative team despite the atmosphere of utter hopelessness. If your first game is stillborn and the second one is a miscarriage, you better believe you're still gonna remember it when making the third.

 

[Treblaine]

The pirates didn't give it a 77% metascore rating (professional reviewers review legit copies), nor reputation as a generic Diablo clone at a time when Diablo 2 was still so highly lauded, nor the extreme lack of marketing. Nor did piracy cause them to spend a lot of money developing a sequel that they didn't release which was ultimately what caused the company to default.

Titan Quest may have been a good game, but back in 2006 to much of the market looking to buy the game it did NOT look like a safe bet.

Describe 77% to me. What does that even MEAN? If they need a percentile rating system to tell them whether or not they're allowed to enjoy a game, then I weep for humanity. And how is the lack of marketing their fault? They can only hype their game as much as their publishers can afford, and since a pitiful amount of people actually bought TQ, the reason they couldn't push their product is because everyone fucking stole it, not because they were working on a sequel. I'm sorry, but I really can't find fault with a studio making a follow-up before their first game has even had time to crash and burn. If anything, that just shows how hard they're willing to work and how dedicated they are as a creative team despite the atmosphere of utter hopelessness. If your first game is stillborn and the second one is a miscarriage, you better believe you're still gonna remember it when making the third.

77% doesn't mean anything about the game itself.

It just doesn't look very good to people who HAVEN'T tried the game, it doesn't mean the game is ACTUALLY bad, it just means on average the critics were pretty harsh on it. It already looks like a Diablo clone, and metascore just means on average the critics were harsher to it.

I recommend Titan Quest, but you can see why a lot of people might have skipped it.

It's not their "fault" they have a lack of marketing, but is IS a factor.

 

[Doom972]

It seems companies like Valve, CD Projekt (I'd mention Blizzard but they do run an MMO) and many indie developers manage just fine even with the piracy.
If you make a good game, people will buy it. If you just make a clone of another successful game (like Titan Quest), don't expect too many people to buy it. Especially if you include annoying DRM.
Yes, the PC does have a piracy problem, but it's not big enough to make developing for it not worth it.

Clearly, developers disagree. See also; Crysis. People are more likely to pirate popular/good games, not less, DRM or not (The Witcher 2). DRM's actual effect is negligible, and no one is responsible for people choosing to pirate their game. That's he equivalent of "She was asking for it, your Honor!"

Crysis 2 was a short, and not very innovative. Some people won't buy a game for 6 hours of single player (remember when demos were as long as that?), but would still like to give it a go.
Witcher 2 was very successful. CDP said that about for every 1 copy sold 2 were pirated IIRC - but I think they took into account countries where where you can almost only get pirated copies (There's an excellent article about such a situation in Brazil, here on the Escapist). Anyway, the game still was a big commercial success.
You can't deny games of good quality (long playing time, replayability, immesion, storytelling, etc) that appeal to the PC audience do become commercial successes.