Piracy, Not Consoles, Killed the PC Exclusive
- Thread starter Andy Chalk
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It must be nice to be able to see the world in absolute shades of black and white. I can only think it has to be enlightening to be able to judge the actions of others, know their reasons for doing said action, and state with total certainty your opinion of their actions as an indisputable fact. We should all be so lucky I guess.Andy Chalk said:
As for the issue at hand you know as well as I do that these forums are not the place you will ever be able to have a fair or serious conversation about piracy due to one side getting slapped with warnings, bans, or suspensions for voicing anything that could even slightly be construed as a pro piracy argument.
It's pretty easy to attack others when those people aren't even allowed to argue their points in response. I would absolutely love to continue this conversation someplace where both sides are free to argue their points equally. Sadly this is not that place.
So what is that 15 - 30% of extra sales a games would get to 15 - 30% of piracy could be converted to sales?Kapol said:
If it only resulted in 15% extra sales, would that have been enough to change a games from unsuccessful to successful, the idea the dev in the story is pushing.
So the industry makes highly inflated claims about the cost of piracy, and as a backlash people start to wonder if it is not as bad as they are making out. Wow, that is surprising. Piracy is wrong, that is a given, the question that is more important is how much damage is it actually doing. If the damage is less than the cost of the anti-piracy measures needed to defeat it, I don't see it as unreasonable to ask if it is worth jumping up and down against, even if wrong.Andy Chalk said:
It's not. People are entitled to protect their creative content.ravenshrike said:
Which assumes that it already isn't.
Piracy is copyright infringement. People reproducing and distributing intellectual property--that is, creative output, not just "ideas"--without permission, against the wishes of the person it belongs to.
I love how you're arguing that piracy being wrong depends, in part, on DRM being illegal. Piracy is wrong because it violates rights.
Yes, a moral evil of giving people the right to sell their stuff. Boo hoo.
Nice quote. Too bad the vast majority of piracy is from people who are alive. And Lord Macauley was against piracy. He literally says as much. He was arguing against the extension of copyright for sixty years after death. Of course, this was in 1841, in a country where most people didn't have indoor plumbing, and the situation today might just be a tad different.
http://www.baen.com/library/palaver4.htm
He also argued that copyright should extend 42 years from publication instead of the then-standard 28. Not "the creator's life". Under the 48-year terms, To Kill a Mockingbird would've passed into the publc domain four years ago, and Harper Lee is still alive. The lord also argued an extension of copyright for books published in the last 17 years of an author's life, which he says, in general, are when an author writes his most valuable books. Do you support these?
Of course, given that the vast majority of piracy is from people who are still alive, I'm not sure what you're on about. And this is coming from a guy who likes Baen Books.
Obvious cat is obvious? Really, I thought that most people would have realized piracy is the reason there are so few PC exclusives. It's kinda obvious.
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.
The funny thing is that even when a developer, like Crytek, specifically says piracy drove them to consoles, people accuse them of "making excuses". In other words, lying. Despite the fact that Crysis was pirated at a rate of 15-1, pirated to legit. That couldn't have anything to do with the decision.spartan231490 said:
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.ph0b0s123 said:
But piracy is a factor, in that it makes the sales even lower. Or at the very least, is more of a problem.
Not a very objective opinion you have there. I mean, "the reason, obviously, is the rise of the console". You're of course entitled to your opinion, but when posting News... its best to leave YOUR personal opinion out of it. At least in my opinion... maybe you could provide some proof? Some reason why you believe this? I mean, its not brain surgery... so it shouldn't be hard to prove.Andy Chalk said:Piracy, Not Consoles, Killed the PC Exclusive
The lead designer of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning says it's piracy, not the dominance of consoles, that makes big-budget PC exclusives impossible today.
Big-budget PC exclusives are pretty much unheard of in this day and age. They do happen but they tend to be either indie affairs, low-budget niche products or Ukrainian. The reason, obviously, is the rise of the console, which drove gaming from the computer desk to the far more consumer-friendly confines of the living room. PCs are expensive and complicated, consoles are cheap and easy - it's not exactly brain surgery.
But according to Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning Lead Designer Ian Frazier, nailing the lucrative console market isn't necessarily the biggest impediment to major PC exclusives. "No, probably not. A game this big is very expensive, to be blunt about it," he told IncGamers [http://www.incgamers.com/News/30386/reckoning-dev-rampant-piracy-makes-big-budget-pc-exclusives-unlikely] when asked whether a game like Kingdoms of Amalur could make it on the PC alone. "The PC, with piracy being as rampant as it is, is really hard to make money from. My first game was Titan Quest, a hack 'n' slash RPG, which was PC only, but the amount that it was pirated was the difference between us staying in business and going out of business."
Frazier was a designer on marred by pre-release piracy [http://www.amazon.com/Titan-Quest-Gold-Immortal-Throne-Pc/dp/B000WCCURW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1328231129&sr=8-1], 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, which turned out to be inaccurate but still hampered sales and contributed to the studio's demise.
It's not impossible to do well by focusing on the PC but the bottom line is that the open nature of the system makes the risk of failure, even with a really good game, much higher. "It's really, really hard to be profitable by concentrating only on PC," he said. "Unless you're an MMO."
Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning [http://www.amazon.com/Kingdoms-Amalur-Reckoning-Xbox-360/dp/B0044SA70M/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1328231241&sr=8-1] comes out on February 7 for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC.
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That's why you keep opinions out of news posts.
However, I agree partially. Consoles are a factor into it. But they are not the only one, and piracy is also a factor.
In my personal opinion, the greatest factor in consoles>pcs for gaming, is that they are easier to design for, there is much less stress and worry what with all the different PC setups, graphics cards, manufacturers... when designing for consoles, because theyre all the SAME configuration. That provides easier work for game makers, and a more enjoyable (less frustrating) experience for players.
PC users cannot deny that blue screens of death, freezing, crashing, glitches, bugs and all kinds of tedious problems plague their gaming. Its a fact that consoles are almost free of these issues, at least when put under the microscope and compared to a PC experience over a long period of time.
Anyone ever bought a computer specifically for gaming, only to find out that it has major issues with CERTAIN games that you bought it for? HAYOO! *raises hand*. That's not fun, and the larger price tags and necessary technical know how required, make this.. "not brain surgery" and "obviously" a part of the problem.
That's interesting as it allows us to do some maths. Witcher 2 was 'estimated' by the dev to have been pirated 4.5 million times. The dev said Witcher 2 had had 1 million legitimate sales at that point.direkiller said:
1/20 th of 4.5 million is about 200000 extra sales that could have happened is if piracy was stopped. So an increase in sales of 20%.
The thing is Witcher 2 did not have any DRM, so the question becomes how much would have the DRM cost them to implemented in licensing, development and testing? It could have cost as much money as those 200000 sales to implement, which would have stopped the piracy but meant the company still made the same amount of profit.
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.
But ya, I feel this image shows that we shouldn't be worried about games on PC for a while.
But ya, I feel this image shows that we shouldn't be worried about games on PC for a while.
It's easier for them to believe a convenient lie than the truth because the truth would make them responsible. Would make them have to accept the fact that there are consequences to piracy, and to letting your friends pirate without reproach. We are all of us culpable in this because we have created an atmosphere where it's ok to pirate because pirating can't possibly affect the developers or the industry. Pirating can't possibly cost them sales. It's easier to be willfully ignorant than it is to be an adult, that's why you meet so few of the latter nowadays.JonnWood said: