Piracy, Not Consoles, Killed the PC Exclusive

[Joccaren]

I call BS. Consoles have used sales that do as much to the company as PC pirates do, and are legal. No, I'm not going to get into an argument of 'Its legal so its right!' or anything on that matter.
If piracy did not exist the focus would still be on consoles thanks to their monopoly in the market. I get devs have to do PR and such so that PC gamers don't rage, but this just makes us rage more - calling us all pirates. Sure, its not specifically calling us all pirates, but its saying console players are clean as a whistle and that many people - which would have to be the majority by the sounds of his statements - pirate on the PC so its not profitable. BS.

 

[Andy Chalk]

The mad, sad rush to declare that piracy is harmless - or even good! - is why it's so frustrating and difficult to have a serious conversation about piracy. You're just as bad as the people on the other side who blame piracy for costing the entertainment industry a hundred trillion gazillion dollars every year.

And claiming that you're square with the universe because now and then you pick up a game you pirated years ago when you see it for five bucks on Steam? Squirrel, please.

 

[Space Jawa]

its launch was marred by pre-release piracy [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/81926-THQ-Creative-Director-Opens-Up-About-Iron-Lore], specifically an undocumented security check that dumped players out of illegal copies of the game. That led to some very negative word-of-mouth about its buggy, unfinished state prior to launch>

Hello? Guys? Anyone else notice that it was stated that there was DRM in Titan quest that made people think it was buggy? So they didn't buy it. Sounds like DRM hurt sales more than pirates.

Hardly. I don't see any mention of DRM there, I see mention of a security feature designed to keep people out of a game that wasn't even supposed to have been released yet. That just sounds like thieves being greedy about a game that they both didn't pay for and that they felt a need to play before anyone was supposed to get their hands on it anyway.

It all comes back to a sense of entitlement that's just a larger sign of the kind of problem that society as a whole is suffering from these days.

 

[wintercoat]

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?

Imagine if a Bethesda game was released, as riddled with bugs as they usually are, but didn't have the brand name or developer name to prop them up. That's what Titan Quest was. It was a buggy POS that barely got any support. Most of the major bugs had to be fixed by modders when the developers stopped caring. That's why it sold poorly, not because of piracy.

 

[Freyar]

Piracy did not cause Iron Lore to fail. It was Iron Lore trying to be sneaky and trying to hide an anti-piracy countermeasure as a general crash. The mistake was not being forthcoming and trying to be smart about dealing with the inevitability of piracy. Iron Lore may have done well if they told pirates who were experiencing these crashes that they were in fact detected to have pirated the game.

As far as PC-exclusives, they don't happen nearly as much because there's no major figure-head to pay for it. The Xbox 360 has Microsoft, PS3 has Sony, and the Wii/Wii-U-Be-Quiet has Nintendo. Bottom line is, exclusives can provide an injection of cash for development at the risk of cutting the available playerbase by a notable amount.

Ian Frazier is a guy who is failing to identify just where the problem was with Titan Quest, and uses that as leverage to try and push the piracy problem up beyond where it should be. Rather than taking the easy scapegoat, Ian needs to take a hard look at what really caused his product to fail, which was word-of-mouth once the program failed to properly report why it was closing.

 

[Akimoto]

...skirting around the issue.

At least he was being indirectly honest. Although I would think being PC or Console Exclusive is a little elitist. I'm not going to call BS on Fitch for this one, he has the right to say what he wants and I'm pretty sure hundreds of souls are raging now.

 

[Freyar]

Don't get me wrong, I'd rather be able to see more people play games. However I find myself kind of annoyed that yet-another-person-in-the-industry is blaming the scapegoat again.

 

[Zer_]

Ugh, I'm so sick of scapegoating. Let's get real, this guy knows Piracy isn't the damn problem. He's in freakin' denial. Piracy will ALWAYS be an issue, unfortunately, your failings are not caused by piracy, they are caused by the Studio and Publisher, end of story.

Stop living in denial. The more you (people who actually DEVELOP these games) try to ignore the real issues, the more Publishers will be inclined to slap on abhorrent DRM onto YOUR games. The fact that PC developers are able to succeed, or better, thrive in the PC gaming market should only serve to prove you wrong. Better service, better games, better sales.

The best thing you can do to discourage pirates is to acknowledge them, and provide a better service to your customers than what the pirates do.

 

[Kapol]

The mad, sad rush to declare that piracy is harmless - or even good! - is why it's so frustrating and difficult to have a serious conversation about piracy. You're just as bad as the people on the other side who blame piracy for costing the entertainment industry a hundred trillion gazillion dollars every year.

And claiming that you're square with the universe because now and then you pick up a game you pirated years ago when you see it for five bucks on Steam? Squirrel, please.

Honestly, that's why I avoid trying to involve myself with any conversation about piracy. It's obvious pretty much nobody is going to change their mind on the issue, so... what's the point? People who do things others don't agree with will pretty much always try to justify their actions. And the people who insist that piracy is actually a good thing drive me slightly mad. I would go into more detail about the major arguments I hear of it being good and how they make no sense, but I'm not really in the mood to argue about an issue when neither side will bend.

XD yeah, but that's where some of the best conversations are.

well, since most 3rd part devs release on everything anymore anyway, not really an issues, unless your one of those PC elitists, then sucks to be you i guess.

good luck with that >.> Microsoft doesn't seem to know what the hell they're doing release wise, how many titles do they actually that are exclusive? not to mention the ' we don't want it if some one else gets it first' policy the have -.-

Meh, I'm more of a console person anyways due to controllers. Which is why I love so many games for PC have controller support now. My Steam library is huge now because of the sales and such since I can just use my controller on most of what I buy.

But, I'm going off topic again. Most 3rd party devs do, but there are always series that slip by one console or another. It's too bad game developers have/want to keep their experience away from certain groups.

Microsoft does have a few left that are exclusive. But most that aren't developed by them have been moving to other platforms. The idea of wanting to get something first is actually not a bad idea. It gives people a reason to go for their console without keeping other platforms in the dark. But I do agree that they should get anything they can. It makes more sense to offer as much content as possible to give less reason to go to other consoles.

 

[Bostur]

The mad, sad rush to declare that piracy is harmless - or even good! - is why it's so frustrating and difficult to have a serious conversation about piracy. You're just as bad as the people on the other side who blame piracy for costing the entertainment industry a hundred trillion gazillion dollars every year.

And claiming that you're square with the universe because now and then you pick up a game you pirated years ago when you see it for five bucks on Steam? Squirrel, please.

Give us a break will you. A lot of your newsposts are one-sided opinion pieces. It's no surprise to me that they don't result in serious conversations.

Serious discussions do happen - on this very site. But not as a result of your 'news'.

And a strawman argument about a fictional person spending five bucks on Steam doesn't add anything constructive to the debate.

 

[Andy Chalk]

Serious discussions do happen - on this very site. But not as a result of your 'news'.

Piracy is douchebag behaviour. That's not opinion, that's fact. It's a sense of entitlement run wild: I can't afford this game, or I'm not sure if I'll like this game, or I don't know if it's worth the money, BUT I have some god-given right to play it, so I'll take it without paying for it.

Serious conversations come from serious people who are willing to think and speak seriously. People who opt for silly rationalizations get what they get.

And if you don't care for my "news" - quote unquote - stay away from it.

 

[Freyar]

Piracy is douchebag behaviour. That's not opinion, that's fact.

That is inherently a subjective statement. I may agree that piracy is unacceptable, but let's not confuse our facts and opinions.

 

[bakan]

Titan Quest was a kinda bad example, as far as I can remember there was nearly no advertisement for it, except maybe one or two reviews, and you had to look for them. (oh, and not to mention it had some problems in the beginning..)

I bought it and its expansion, and I got my friends to get it too - but if I wouldn't have heard of it by accident, chances are high I only would have bought it on a steam sale some years after release.

 

[Smooth Operator]

Talking out of his ass leading on to shameless plug, gee I wonder why he would make such a controversial statement, one might think he likes attention...

Let's just break this down marketing wise, you make and Xbox exclusive MS will throw a big bag of cash at you, make a PS3 exclusive and Sony will be showering you in dubloons, then make a PC exclusive and... absolutely nothing, it's an open platform and you are on your own.
Now let's take a guess what accountants prefer... *queue jeopardy music*

 

[isometry]

What do these execs hope to gain by complaining about the PC platform in interviews. I'm never going to buy games from companies that bash the PC platform to excuse their bad sales, idiots. They need to face the fact that other games on PC have been very successful but their games were not. Don't make excuses, step up and make better games.

 

[direkiller]

Fear Of Piracy, Not Consoles, Killed the PC Exclusive

That's a more accurate headline.

We could get into the argument of that each piracy case isn't a lost sale and so on, but the fact is that piracy DOES end up costing the company sales.

The question is how many sales. Just saying it cost them sales does not help much as it could be an extra 50% sales, which is worth jumping up and down about, or 1% sales which is not. Saying piracy costs sales, just does not cut it anymore as people are now more cynical.

And as someone else has said, it looks like it was the DRM that did not work in the pirated copies that screwed things up. So the inclusion of faulty DRM causing the loss of sales is just as logical an argument as piracy did it.

Was there a demo released for this game anywhere near release? A demo would have proved the game was working OK.

From stuff I have seen on the music industry a pirated copy of a song is about 1/15 to 1/20th a cd sold

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1609847

i don't know how well that translates to games but the conclusion seems to hit at home for the games industry as well as music.

 

[Bostur]

Piracy is douchebag behaviour. That's not opinion, that's fact.

You have a weird perspective about what facts are sometimes. If you were posting in another context I would simply consider your posts as trolling, since you are bound to know the exact outcome of the comments.

Until you start blocking my access to this site, I will read whatever newsposts I like. And I will make whatever comments I like. If you don't like it you have the power to prevent it.