News Piracy killed the PC game star?

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2006/08/08/piracy_killed_the_PC_game_star/



Look out for those third-world pirates...maybe the reason they don't have running water is because they're spending their generous cash on Quad-SLI. Must be...they sure aren't spending it on games.

 

piracy is in every country for example spain has a massive piracy movement and its a 1st world country you cant say its 3rd world only problem....

but i know 3rd world has something to do i live in venezuela, and i can tell you for us a original brand new game cost up to 100$ which is 1/3 of the minimum wage so you can guess why there is piracy.... i only can afford game bought in USA and only good ones because even there is expensive, pc games should have digital distribution to keep costs down i bought DoD S for 19$ and for me thats good value i can buy more games like that

 

I'm sorry, I'm confused.

I'm sure we've all got the "Piracy bad, grrr..." message (we've had it shoved down our throats long enough by groups like the MPAA at the start of every DVD...) but I don't think piracy is killing the PC gaming 'industry' the way they are making out.

I think incredibly long development cycles (closely followed by rush to market that leaves the end user needing multi patches), increasing prices and fixed 'Top 20 Games' lists are doing that. I mean, come on; does anyone really believe that the Simpsons: Hit 'n' Run could be in the top 5 selling games for more than three months? And when a game costs £35, and the console version costs £40, it's a little harder to justify the outlay of £1500+ on a PC to play them, when a £200 console does the same thing. Add-on packs used to be £10. Now they're £25 - almost the same as the original game (that you still need to run the add-on)!

 

I think whats killing PC gaming is, as paradigm_shifter said, the price comparison between a console and a PC to play the same game at the same level of quality.

Personally in my current financal state I can not justify spending $2k on a new computer that will be outdated in six months or less. And I think this mentality is prevelant in a lot of gamers today. "Why should I spend 2k on a new computer to play the newest games when I can spend $300-500 on the newest console and play the same game at the same, or better quality?"

I think if you could build a computer comperable to a console at console price PC gaming would take off again. But until such time I think PC gaming will continue to fall behind.

 

in a consumers mind i guess they rather spend $500 on console than $500 on a graphics card that will be outdated fairly soon and their consoles won't. guess that could partially explain or is another factor in why pc games are declining

 

I never said that consoles were 'same or better quality' than PC games. They're not - often console games are a massive drop in quality. It's improved with 720p and 1080i etc, but playing a game on a TV screen won't be the same as playing it on a 2405 at 1920x1200.

Even so, if I was starting out right now in the gaming world, I'd pick up a console; despite the increased price in games. If I desperately needed a PC, I'd pick up a cheap Celeron job that could word process and surf the net.

A console lasts eight to ten years (presuming it doesn't break down) a PC struggles with new games in one.

 

Developers of 'proper' software like Photoshop and DreamWeaver can count on bread and butter sales from business even when every kid in the western world has a 'free' copy. The games developer doesn't have that. All he's got is relatives buying the game as a gift and bundle deals.

 

The previous statements are quite fitting. It is my belief that PC gaming as we know it will be a thing of the past. Within the next 10 years I expect to see a console that will let you do all that you can on a pc, and also boot to a gaming console. The idea of PC development is absurd for devs anyway. There are so many configurations and trying to get a game to run well on a majority is very hard. Consoles eliminate that problem and allow devs to make a game run the best it can on one machine. Consoles are computers anyway, they are just a whole lot cheaper.

 

One reason why I dont buy a lot of games is because most of them are w**k...

All graphics and no gameplay/storyline, they should all just get over it and start making decent games, maybe start listening to what we want?!

 

Amen to that!
I hate playing driving games on consoles, especially in split screen, as you have a vertical resolution of 360 pixels max, which is blurry anyway due to it not being 1:1 mapped and the TV scaling the output. so objects in the distance like arrow bollards pointing left or right are drawn using a couple of pixels making them hard to see until you run into them.

Comapre that to driving games on the PC.
Rarely splitscreen but even if it was, I would have 600 1:1 mapped pixels on my screen (1920x1200 2405FPW) which would give miles more clarity than any console.
The price to pay for this is the cost of a powerful gfx card since the PC would need to manipulate just under double the number of pixels.

So to say consoles are anywhere near the qualit of PCs is crazy.
Consoles may be getting better and better, but they're not really a match for a powerful PC IMO.

That's the whole reason for APIs. DirectX makes it easy for devs to code for multiple platforms at once. With the PS3 and PCs going dual-core, more games will start to be multi-threaded. The fact consoles are getting more PC-like makes it more and more faesible to develop for all platforms.

 

But even APIs can't cover for the huge range of hardware that stuff has to be compatible with. I'll take a recent example: Titan Quest. Lots and lots of lovely bugs for most people; crash to desktops, spontaneous loss of characters... and the all time greatest: the killing of graphics cards.

It's easier to code (and sort out bugs) when the hardware is always the same for everyone.

 

Agreed, I didn't mean to suggest that APIs sorted everything, just that they did make it way more faesible to code for multiple platforms.

 

QFT

 

the problem of games today is that they are over priced, i cant aford to buy any games with a normal wage here, but if games were 1/2 price then i would buy more original games, and if games were more like sony makes their games platinum, then i would certainly buy more games.

Imagine, the game comes out at 40$ with a fair and correct conversion of prices for all of the world, 21.12£ and 31.21€, and then X months later make them 1/2 price, Y months later make it 1/4 price and Z months later put it into a bundle and sell 3 Z+ months old games at 1/2 price of the original price of one, games would fly of the shelfs, huge profits would hit the gaming industry, etc..... and all the good stuff.

copy protection is also killing the game industry, games are becoming overprotected and most of the time a donwloaded copy gives less problems than a original copy.

 

Sad but true.
I read so much stories about that starforce (IIRC) copy protection breaking people's legitimately bought games, not to mention the whole Sony rootkit debacle.

I wish the content producers would realise that they'll never beat the pirates and just release cheaper games so more people can afford them and they feel less need to copy them.

 

Maybe they need a better business model? In a free market people have choice. If people are pirating as much as is reported, maybe the things really do cost too much. If games cost £5 maybe people would buy more, not fewer games.

 

i just say LOL

cmon there are tons of game which don't worth 50€ so why should we pay 50€ for them? why don't they sell them with a lower price?
Do you think that a game like PREY worth 50€? 15 hours of single player and a multyplayer that i think is too much easy to be played for a while...
nowdays it has nosens to make a singleplayer only game like oblivion...

why don't they make 1 good game every year instead making a lot of stupid games... for example quake 4 was a flop whith all the hype around that game and one of the largest game comunity on the net, and we can't say "is piracy fault" that game sux.

They should make what they did in the past with quake3 or UT2003/04 1 game played all around the world for years and who want to play it ONLINE must buy it.
Or they should do what other software house are doing, MMOPRG with mounthly fees.

the other thing that is killing the PC game market is the console... not the piracy.

 

i know a guy that loved to play games, but he is so dumb, he is easily fooled, he got a P4 3.2 (at the time it was great), with 1Gb ram and a 256Mb graphics card and a 120Gb HD, you are saying that this is great, no way in hell, IIRC it was a ATI 9250 , a seagate crapy slow HD, an asrock mobo, and the cooling was the one that came with the cpu and the oem power suply, the thing was overheating all the time, it went back to the store and came back worse, he loves to game, he got some great games at the time, dont remember what were the games but i remember liking them, for him to instal one of the games he took about 1 hour, why? because he the game did not work or he did not instaled it (cancel button), i finaly went there, instaled the games, tried them, they runned like a brick trying to go up a ledge by its own power, and then i called him a stupid ass because he got a crapy computer for a price that i would get him something 10x superior.

now he kind of hates games because he got fooled once, -1 client.

 

Two of my mates and myself have been pc gamers for years but we cant afford to keep up the hardware cost anymore. When we did upgrade we would all be anxious to see how long it would keep up with current software. It just wasnt worth it for us so we decided to get 360s and by a mac minis or mac books for the price of a decent gaming pc. The 360s games are more expensive but when you have mates you can just swap games with each other or rent them. TBH I think piracy is only part of the decline in pc games.

 

I've mostly stopped buying games because (a) they're too expensive, and (b) my tastes don't agree with those of the mass market to which the majority of developers cater by throwing in lots of blood and guts.

Piracy has nothing to do with it.