Piracy, Not Consoles, Killed the PC Exclusive

Glordit said:
Don't think I have ever seen a Gaming Studio close it's doors due to piracy, have seen one do it due to extortion though. :)



+1
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Well, Ironlore was closed due to bad sales for Titan Quest, but I still maintain it can't be blamed on piracy. If people couldn't pirate Titan Quest, there's nothing to indicate that they would have bought it instead. A few might have, but it would probably have been so few that it wouldn't change their financial situation enough anyway.
 
Its not because of piracy, you can pirate console games too.....Its because there are more casual gamers out there with consoles, so making a pc exclusive title would be pretty bad for a company.

PC's still have mmo's and RTS games though ! :)
 
Graal said:
Well, Ironlore was closed due to bad sales for Titan Quest, but I still maintain it can't be blamed on piracy. If people couldn't pirate Titan Quest, there's nothing to indicate that they would have bought it instead. A few might have, but it would probably have been so few that it wouldn't change their financial situation enough anyway.
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That's an interesting point of view but Michael Fitch, the creative director of at THQ said in 2008:

Let's dig a little deeper there. So, if 90% of your audience is stealing your game, even if you got a little bit more, say 10% of that audience to change their ways and pony up, what's the difference in income? Just about double. That's right, double. That's easily the difference between commercial failure and success. That's definitely the difference between doing okay and founding a lasting franchise. Even if you cut that down to 1% - 1 out of every hundred people who are pirating the game - who would actually buy the game, that's still a 10% increase in revenue. Again, that's big enough to make the difference between breaking even and making a profit.
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In fact people should read the whole post. Ian Frazier blamed piracy alone but Fitch claimed it was a variety of reasons in that post. Titan Quest didn't make a loss financially an d still has an active community today, the studio just did not have financial backing to make another game.
 
Fivel said:
Does it matter that there are no PC exclusives - a good game remains a good game?
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Doesn't matter at all!

...

Outside of "that" group of people that always immediately assume that a multi-platform game is going to be stupid, ugly, buggy, and silly :P
 
Kharrak said:
Doesn't matter at all!

...

Outside of "that" group of people that always immediately assume that a multi-platform game is going to be stupid, ugly, buggy, and silly :P
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Thats because the Lead platform 90% of the time is the console, PC comes afterwards, look at GTA IV, Definitely ported from a console, and once upon a time GTA Games used to be PC exclusives.
 
Glordit said:
Thats because the Lead platform 90% of the time is the console, PC comes afterwards, look at GTA IV, Definitely ported from a console, and once upon a time GTA Games used to be PC exclusives.
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Lol. When? Every single GTA game since GTA 1 was available on consoles from the start.
 
Title should've been DRM killed PC gaming, personally having too jump through hoops everytime I want to install a game, OS, application on my PC is a headache. My motherboard blows, hard drive packs in etc I have to contact the necessary publisher and explain the situation just to play the game I bought with my own money.
 
Lupus said:
Title should've been DRM killed PC gaming, personally having too jump through hoops everytime I want to install a game, OS, application on my PC is a headache. My motherboard blows, hard drive packs in etc I have to contact the necessary publisher and explain the situation just to play the game I bought with my own money.
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Maybe you should try to unnarrow your vision. DRM is a symptom, why do you think it's there? Take away that cause then part of the original problem is solved.
 
Pr⊕phet said:
Maybe you should try to unnarrow your vision. DRM is a symptom, why do you think it's there? Take away that cause then part of the original problem is solved.
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thing is, DRM clearly does not work. If anything, it's causing publishers to bleed customers. Ubisoft is a perfect example of this with their 90% drop in PC game sales.
 
Ubisoft is a perfect example of this with their 90% drop in PC game sales.
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Please everyone knows that was just some random jagoff statement by a smaller dev that I'm sure everyone can agree was an extreme exaggeration.
 
Graal said:
thing is, DRM clearly does not work. If anything, it's causing publishers to bleed customers. Ubisoft is a perfect example of this with their 90% drop in PC game sales.
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I fully agree, but it's only one part of the problem not the sole cause of the problem. It's still a symptom of a cause once you address that cause then we are partly there.

Ubisoft isn't a perfect example... In fact they are a brilliant example of how bad titles, sales and drm can affect you as a company. If they when with decent, zomg out of the world and light drm then they might have had better success. However there is still the other parts that must come to the party. That being gamers that will actually buy their titles, PR that would release when it's ready over rushing it out. Distributors that won't force off silly pricing models.

Now you can clearly see that DRM is only bit a part thereof. Even if it's just a cd check and the game gets released too early it won't contribute towards fixing the scenario. If it gets releases at good time and DRM is light, but most people pirate it it still would fail. This is excluding the fact that the title can be over priced or "split" in too many dlc or epicsodic. No one really wants to buy 3 separate games at AAA pricing where it could easily been one title...

So we all have to play our part, all factors have to be at the table. Just having a fence around your house doesn't stop crime in the country.
 
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Titan Quest was buggy as all hell when it first came out. Maybe if the quality of the the game was higher less people would feel done-in by having bought the game and wouldn't advise their friends to pirate it instead of throwing money into the dustbin.

That said I really enjoyed Titan Quest later on.
 
Unless I stand corrected, I think it's Hawx 2 that's the only game which hasn't been pirated yet.
 
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