So I went and bought some PC games yesterday at a price I liked. A lot. Admittedly they were from GameStation second hand so all the money goes in their pockets not the dev/publishers pockets.
Company of Heroes
Dawn of War
Medal of Honour: Allied Assault
Battlefield 1942
Command and Conquer Generals.
£7.99. For all of them, total.
wow. thats really cheap indeed.
Sorry to dredge up an old thread, but this seemed relevant to it and might prove interesting for some people. Basically, Iron Lore Entertainment, who made Titan Quest, just shut down. One of the devs - fairly senior, I gather - wrote a forum thread about their frustrations with the games industry, and PC game development in particular. 70-90% piracy rates? Holy jesus...
And while I'm at it, I don't want to spare the reviewers either. We had one reviewer - I won't name names, you can find it if you look hard enough - who missed the fact that you can teleport from wherever you are in TQ back to any of the major towns you've visited. So, this guy was hand-carting all of his stuff back to town every time his inventory was full. Through the entire game. Now, not only was this in the manual, and in the roll-over tooltips for the UI, but it was also in the tutorial, the very first time you walk past one of these giant pads that lights up like a beacon to the heavens. Nonetheless, he missed it, and he commented in his review how tedious this was and how much he missed being able to portal back to town. When we - and lots of our fans - pointed out that this was the reviewer's fault, not the game's, they amended the review. But, they didn't change the score. Do you honestly think that not having to run back to town all the time to sell your stuff wouldn't have made the game a better experience?We had another reviewer who got crashes on both the original and the expansion pack. We worked with him to figure out what was going on; the first time, it was an obscure peripheral that was causing the crash, a classic hardware conflict for a type of hardware that very, very few people have. The second time, it was in a pre-release build that we had told him was pre-release. After identifying the problem, getting him around it, and verifying that the bug was a known issue and had been fixed in the interim, he still ran the story with a prominent mention of this bug. With friends like that...
Icing on the cake.
maybe they should have used an anti-piracy system that actually works instead of some hacked and easily defeatable system that makes it appear as if the game is broken. If 85% of people pirate your game, it's probably pretty fucking easy to do it. They might as well sprinkle copies on the ground and yell at people for picking them up. Why go through the trouble of making an awesome game if you release it KNOWING that it will be extremely easy to crack / pirate? Or did they really think whatever system they had in place would work?
I have been through studios closing in the past - it sucks, and I feel for them. But it pisses me off if people see this coming and are knowledgeable about these piracy rates and don't adapt or change the way they release games to compensate. These people deserve to be paid for every copy played, and there are systems out there that can accomplish that, you just can't rely on copy protection techniques from the last decade. They didn't work then, and they don't work now. A lot of developers might say "well we shouldn't have to do that!!!" well I'm sorry - but it's a fact of the market, and you can't "reason" with a market force, you can only react to it. The people that realize this and react accordingly will be the ones that drink the milkshake of the PC market as the others dry up.
I just bought TQ like last week and it is a great game, very polished and fun. Sucks that they went down...
They obviously messed it up with the copy protection, but none the less is the whole thing with idiotic reviewers and people tis rue. Any idiot can basically go write reviews. Hell, you can go write a review even if you have never ever ever touched a game before, and then score the game a 2/10 because you are too damn stupid to understand it. None the less that makes the developer lose at least a couple of thousand dollars on income because of one guys random thoughts... Cant do anything against it, but it is messed up...
That post by the IL guy amplifies the feeling of how weird this whole situation in pc games development has become.
I can remember when 2 years game developers said "yea, piracy...always been around, never will go away, you lose sales due to it but they are marginal overall.." and now we've come to the situation where developers are screaming "90%+ loss of sales due to piracy". If he says TQ still did "ok" and they didn't lose money from it, so my interpretation is that they did break even. So consequentially (comparing the numbers) they would be swimming in gold if 100% of the players had actually paid for the game? That doesn't sound right...I don't mean to make piracy look less worse than it is, but I think the truth is somewhere in between.
It doesn't help that he rants on how frustratingly hard it is to develop on the PC: Different hardware components, third party apps,...hey I tell you what - that's how it's always been and that's why it has always been so convinient to put your cartridge into the SNES and play mario kart right away, without any hassle, because it was on a console DOH!
People whining and reviewers writing bad about your game - well, you will have that on consoles too.
So overall this sounds more like a list of excuses for why the game failed/why they didn't receive any funding for their next project/why they had to shut down the studio. I know it's tough and I feel sorry for the people at IL, but you need to adapt or you get hit by the meteor.
Titan Quest was a good game, I was really looking forward to their next project after the DoW Expansion. Was supposed to be a 360 title I believe.
As for the piracy thing, this is really something the Games for Windows initiative (or: Utter Failure) should be focusing on, no? Microsoft, above all other companies, must have the resources and people to provide a secure/transparent copy protection solution for PC games. Why the fuck aren't they focusing on things like that? It seems like there's no one at all stepping up to take hold of what's, at least perceived, as a huge fucking problem for the PC platform and the one company that could pull it off chooses to focus on Gamer Card linking with the 360.
an interesting and relevant read: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_i ... tory=17350
I feel sorry for that dude at Iron Lore, but the anti-piracy thing just dropping people to their desktop could've been handled so much better - I hate to think how many sales they lost due to word of mouth.
i am not sure if this is the 100% perfect thread to post this but:
i just installed an old pc game prince of persia 2: warrior within because i was kinda in an environment motivation LOW and usually what helps is play a game that has really excellent and inspiring environment art ...usually i play god of war or resident evil 4 when this happens.
but this time i felt the need for something different and i remembered pop2 to have the best env art of the 3 ubi prince of persia games.
i am just gonna run down a bullet point list of things that happened to me:
-first i open the dvd box to find out that it has 3 cds rather than one dvd in it that i am gonna have to install from ... *sigh*
-than during the install (which takes forever is just insulting all by itself) when ever i needed to swap cds i am prompted to click ok when i do it lags for roughly 5 minutes before it keeps copying files
-once done installing i get prompted with this register your shit and if you don't want to ill annoy you again in 7 days fuck shit ! when was the last time a console game asked you to register yourself ? what is registering for anyway ? i have never registered anything in my life and i don't know anyone who has !
-when launching the game mysteriously during the opening videos the game minimizes itself every 5 seconds ?! wtf ?!
-wouldn't be a problem if i could just maximize it again and skip through the ubisoft and lintel advertisement ... but .... THEY ARE UNSKIPABLE
- so the game menu has booted ... and i have to find out that despite a prompt during the install that: "ubi recommends a dual-analog-controlpad to play" the game didn't natively discover my 360 control pad ?!
- so after some fiddling in windows pop2 recognizes my 360 pad and to my suprise during the launch of the game i discover the contorll pad CAN skip videos but mouse and keyboard cant W T F ?
- so i launch the game only to find out that despite the fact that i can skip videos and navigate the menus with the pad i can NOT control the prince out of the box with my pad all the key bindings for the gamepad are blank ( probably because it didn't recognize the game pad on first boot ) so the prince just stand there on his burning ship taking the abuse form all the monsters coming form all directions
- so i hit esc to go to the menu only to have the screen turn black on me while all the game sounds keep running apparently nobody QAed that someone might try to exit the game after 5 seconds of playing D: ctrl alt delte alt f4 and alt tab didn't help but the windows key managed to minimize the black screen.
-i apply the default key bindings for the gamepad via the "RESET DEFAULT" button only to find out that they are shit and don't map at all to the console
controls attacking on l2 ? jumping on triangle wall running is not bound at all?! open the menu is on thumbstick rather than start ?! you gotta be shitting me
- so i try to make my own control which is rather difficult because rather than having your gampad buttons name after what they are like: "start, right thumbstick up and down, a, b x, y, l1, l2, r1, r2 or right trigger and right bumper" they are called button 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 y+ y- x+ x- ?! there must be some way to find out the names of the buttons from the gamepad drivers ! and if not just call em the xbox 360 pad buttons the 360 controller is like the fucking official microsoft endorsed gamepad for windows and iam playing a windows game here right ?!
-now the in game tutorial is equally worthless as the keybinding. press: "button 1 button 3 button 1 button 3 button 7 button 3" to perform an air combo ?! ok ... ?!
i stopped playing after 30 minutes because this was just a fucking joke ... and ubisoft is one of the companys that actually does pretty decent pc ports ... ... so people wonder why they don't make pc games anymore ? because they don't sell as we have all concluded. but why dont they sell ? i say its not because they are so easy to pirate its because they are just way to much of a hassle to deal with compare my bullet point list with the equivalent procedures on a console:
-pop in the disc
-start playing
-fun
it's true that this might happen with a pc port, but if you look at titles that are pc exclusive, there's alot less of these problems because it is tailor made for the pc.
warby's reasoning is my argument against buying pc ports of games
Apologies if this has been posted: Valve Explains Why PC Gaming's Gaining Steam.
Steam itself circumvents many problems, but as I understand Steam itself does not have enough users currently for a company to only release on that platform. So ultimately they still have to put out a boxed version to be cracked before it hits the store.
and ubisoft is one of the companys that actually does pretty decent pc ports .
After seeing myself what a joke the Resident Evil 4 PC port is, I must say I can't share this experience, but you are probably talking about different ports!
Thanks for sharing that article Taylor! That was a somewhat uplifting read for PC devs! 
Very good read there Taylor, thanks for posting it.
I would also add that while Ubisoft has done things relatively well in the past regarding PC ports, I have yet to find a single company doing a good job of it...... I know my GTAIV and Mafia 2 will be on X360, just as much as playing the Orange Box anywhere but on my PC would feel just wrong
Brandon Sheffield had some pretty interesting points in his column in the latest issue of Game Developer Magazine, specifically relating to distribution and game industry profits. It's not directly piracy he was talking about, but it's related.
Recommended reading, because what it's all about is finding new working marketing and distribution models. That's where bigger profits will come from.
...I thought Steam was the answer to piracy?
Quote from dissonance...I thought Steam was the answer to piracy?
Dito there.
Quote from FrieChampAfter seeing myself what a joke the Resident Evil 4 PC port is, I must say I can't share this experience, but you are probably talking about different ports!
Thanks for sharing that article Taylor! That was a somewhat uplifting read for PC devs!
i was thinking splintercell 1+2 mainly but i also REALLY enjoyed re4 on PC except for the lowres hud sprites that game DID natively support my 360 controller therefor: 
Weren't most of the apparent problems with the RE4 port from a beta leak?
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