I Want Out

[aMoralAtheist]

@ RANDALL TURNER

Assuming you really are a designer for THQ, try this out, as you already pointed out yourself, drop the price of the game. The Industry seems to want to justify increasing prices because piracy off-sets profits. However, if you decrease price, therefore make the game more accessible, or more pertinently you change the cost-effort ratio. The cheaper the game, the less likely somebody is too pirate it, since its generally quicker to run out to the store and buy it, instead of waiting for your .torrent to finish, along with the associated malware risks.

Furthermore, you better have a trial/demo of the game. People are unsure if the game will be good, or if it will run well on their machines, well, you better offer a trial/demo version that will assuage both these concerns, otherwise bet your butt people will be more likely to pirate it.

More on topic, I agree civ5 is not fun enough. I think if civ5 was the first ever civ game we would praise it for innovation, but that is not the case. Civ4 was much more fun and we expect sequels to be better.

 

[Solo4114]

I guess the problem Brian has is one I'd like to phrase as this question:

If it's possible and even de-riguer in an industry to sign away rights given to you by law, what the hell is the point of having law-given rights?

Because you misunderstand the "right" you're being given. You're not being given a "right" in the sense of Constitutional rights. The "right" you get is not, like, the right to free speech. You're given legal PROTECTION from a copyright infringement lawsuit. That is NOT the same thing as being given a right. Those who are lamenting the giving away of a legal "right" misunderstand what the Copyright Act actually says and what the Act itself is about.


The purpose of the Copyright Act is to establish a set of exclusive property rights for creators of "works." Books, movies, music, etc. for example. It's broader than that, but you get the idea. The whole purpose of the Copyright Act is to lay out what the copyright holder can and cannot do, and what protections they do and do not get with respect to their work. As a copyright holder, you can limit who can use the work, who can display the work, who can reproduce the work, who can make "derivative works" (IE: sequels, spinoffs, etc.), and so on. If someone else does any of those things without your permission (or license), you can sue them for damages. In really big-deal cases, you can get them on criminal charges, but that depends on a bunch of facts.

Now, if you take the rights laid out in the Copyright Act, it would SEEM that the copyright holder has the exclusive right to PREVENT you from selling the work after it's been sold to you. Or at least it could be questionable. If only the copyright holder has the right to say who can and cannot use the work, their selling a license to YOU does not necessarily mean that you can then give the license to someone ELSE. The Copyright Act dodges this by including a section that specifically lists the first-sale doctrine. What that stands for, however, is that it is not copyright INFRINGEMENT. The copyright holder cannot sue you for selling a book you bought to someone else.

All that said, a license agreement CAN restrict the first-sale doctrine. Why? Because it isn't a "right." Not in the sense of a god-given right, or a constitutional right, or some inalienable, inviolate consumer protection. You CAN contract that away, if you choose to do so. The law here presumes that the parties entering into a contract are rational adults capable of making up their minds. So, if you click "I accept" on that EULA, you are agreeing to ALL of the terms, unless those terms run afoul of some public policy.

Now, there IS an argument that the EULA can't restrict the first-sale doctrine, but I'm not sure if that argument has been raised in the context of the copyright holder alleging infringement, as opposed to alleging breach of contract. If the argument was "You can't sell that to him because the contract says so, so you have to give it back to us" that's a far cry from "You can't sell that to him because it is copyright infringement for you to do so."


None of that is "getting around the law." Quite the contrary. It's the law actually being upheld. The law of contracts, that is. If you don't like the language of the EULA, feel free not to accept it. Click "I don't accept" and move on. But you don't have a legal RIGHT to transfer ownership of computer software. You have an exception to the law on copyright infringement. If you CHOOSE to contract that away, that's your dumbass mistake. (Or at least, that's the law's perspective on it.)

 

[Randall Turner]

@ RANDALL TURNER

Assuming you really are a designer for THQ, try this out, as you already pointed out yourself, drop the price of the game. The Industry seems to want to justify increasing prices because piracy off-sets profits. However, if you decrease price, therefore make the game more accessible, or more pertinently you change the cost-effort ratio. The cheaper the game, the less likely somebody is too pirate it, since its generally quicker to run out to the store and buy it, instead of waiting for your .torrent to finish, along with the associated malware risks.

Furthermore, you better have a trial/demo of the game. People are unsure if the game will be good, or if it will run well on their machines, well, you better offer a trial/demo version that will assuage both these concerns, otherwise bet your butt people will be more likely to pirate it.

More on topic, I agree civ5 is not fun enough. I think if civ5 was the first ever civ game we would praise it for innovation, but that is not the case. Civ4 was much more fun and we expect sequels to be better.

Dude, google is your friend. Plug my name in and hit "enter". I'm not a designer for THQ, I'm a senior engineer. I'm working as a consultant to them at the current time so I might not show up on their corporate sites anymore, but you'll at least get a hit on my concurrency talk at the Game Developer's Conference five years ago.

Designers are lightweights. Of course, they may have a different viewpoint on that, but designers get the limelight, senior technical people get the work done.

Dropping the price is pretty simplistic, and as a consumer you've got to admit, a bit self-serving. We're getting games for $50-60 that're ten times as complex and ten times as expensive to produce as the same games we were paying $50-60 for a decade or two ago. Unless they're getting an order of magnitude more distribution, ie, we're selling 10x as many copies now, we're not even going to break even on the same price, let alone a reduced price.

Understand that vis a vis PC games, I'm also a consumer, not a producer. In other words, we have shared interests in this area. That's actually part of the problem though - PC developers can't really afford me anymore, I have to work in the console industry, or at least on titles that're console leads and PC sku ports.

Let's explore for a minute why that is. First of all, I don't see any indication that the average poster here has a good handle on how much modern computer games cost to develop. Our budget's pretty typical for a modern game, something like 30mil. That's not any sort of record, Take2 recently spent over 100mil on GTA. I'd expect that the Civ 5 boys only spent some lower double-digit millions, maybe 12? or so. They could have benefitted from a longer development cycle, of course, that's how you get rid of bugs and polish features. But, they probably couldn't afford it.

Now. Where is that money going? The bulk of it's going to asset creation. The deeper a game is, the more assets it'll eat up. Modern computer games are "denser", they have larger bitmaps, higher fidelity audio, more complex physical worlds, boatloads of animation keyframe data, complex programmatic and pre-rendered scenes, complex 3d models, yadda yadda yadda. But that's just the tip of the iceberg, the killer is that they've also got more complex interactions - the different asset types interact with each other in a way that increases complexity as a square of the raw total (which again is already HUGE) and requires substantial infrastructure investment to manage.

The second largest cost is engineering. We're expensive, dude. We're not expensive because we're greedy, on the contrary any half-ass competent gaming engineer could be making twice as much working for an insurance company or a medical imaging firm. But, we've got to make a living, even if it's a labor of love. The economics of standalone PC games just don't allow for significant profit margins anymore, and sooner or later most of us would like to have a family. (And even if one of us is willing to work for peanuts, selling that to the spouse is a non-starter.) Working on console games, on the other hand, at least you know if you do a good job you'll get paid for the units sold. It's still often killer work hour-wise, but it pays the bills.

And, let's go to units sold. Look, PC gaming should be the most lucrative field for game companies. If we're making a game for Microsoft's 360 or Sony's PS3, they take a huge slice of the profits off the top and they charge another huge slice for disk production. (Has to be proprietary because of, you guessed it, copy protection.) That doesn't apply in the PC market, so PC games have a higher per-unit profit margin, something like 3x. So, for a console game you're making something like $8 per unit, while a PC game is making more like $20 per unit.

Does not matter. A "success" in the console market is about 3mil units sold. You sell only 1mil, you've got a "soft failure" - the game isn't a total flop, but you didn't get enough return on your investment to let you fund your next project, and you lost money for your investors. Do that twice in a row, and you're out of business.

A "success" in the PC market is something like a half-mil sold. But it's not a big success, and you've better have skimped on the production quality, because you only grossed some 10mil. You'll have the warm-fuzzy of some 5mil people really playing your game, but aside from the intangible benefits you're probably going to have to go work for an insurance company pretty soon. Or a console developer, though that's also getting tight.

We've now only some 3-4 major PC titles released per-year, if that. I'd say more like "zero" major titles per-year, none of them have a budget near what a top line console title does. Don't look for the per-unit price to drop anytime soon, partner. It's not going to happen. On the other hand, DO look for any number of MMO's to come out, even thought the investment bar is far, far higher for one of those (100mil MINIMUM) - because they've got a pirate-proof business model.

My problem (and likely yours, if you're posting here) is, of course, that I don't particularly like dealing with other idiots while I'm playing a game. So, I'm screwed. Maybe you too, ??

EDIT: oh, yeah - and if you think designers have any say whatsoever over the price point their products are offered at, your worldview is desperately skewed. Even the top publishing execs are often at the mercy of market dynamics.

 

[Solo4114]

Interesting points, and I think it highlights one of the underlying concerns in gaming:

Namely, what will sell?


I tend to be of the opinion (which I freely admit I lack any evidence to support) that the "suits" who make the call on what is a good game to produce and what is a bad game to produce are largely unimaginative, conservative (design-wise, I mean. Not politically), and tend to err on the side of caution. Innovation and trailblazing is a bad idea because it risks your funds. I suspect they tend to latch on to certain "buzzwords" or concepts and order their dev teams to produce the requested feature or element or include it in a game. You can see this in the various "trends" that pop up in the industry. Anyone remember the FMV craze? Or how about when 3D first hit, how every game suddenly HAD to be 3D? Multiplayer is another one. And so on, and so forth.

Often, these "features" seem shoehorned in, or as if they're taking away valuable resources that'd be better spent on other things, and end up diluting the quality of the game. If you have to code multiplayer, that's time you CAN'T spend on developing the single-player side of things.

The same applies to which games get greenlit, I'm betting. WW2 FPS games were, for a while, a really safe bet. I think they still are. Space combat games? Not so much. Not in the US, anyway. Adventure games only JUST started making a comeback, and that's been at least partially fueled by repackaging old proven titles like the Monkey Island series. I suspect this also has to do with figuring out effective price points for sales, taking into account distribution methods that focus heavily on downloads rather than disc pressing, and figuring out how to manage budgets to produce financially successful games in that genre again. Regardless, I think this is why every MMO is basically a WoW clone. (Yes, I know there are differences.) WoW is a proven model, and a safe bet.




Long story short, while I recognize that it's a business, I think that the "suits" tend to view it TOO much from the business perspective, and not from a larger gestalt perspective. Instead of saying "Are we making a really terrific game?", the question seems to be "Are we making money?" I think you could answer "Yes" to the latter if you can consistently say "Yes" to the former, and ultimately, that's what I feel is lacking.

There will be piracy, of course, and the less scrupulous gamers will try to drink your milkshake, but in the end, I do think that gamers will pay for top-notch games most of the time. Not always, mind you. Some truly innovative, excellent games go sadly unnoticed (IE: Tim Schafer's Brutal Legend), but on the whole I think a really well done game can offset the piracy element via creating quality. Part of that also factors into building goodwill. Bioware, at the moment, has a tip-top reputation AMONG GAMERS for making tip-top quality games. Even though gamers will say they liked this or that Bioware product more or less than others, the general reputation is "Bioware makes awesome games." While I'm sure their budget is pretty solid for each of these, the other thing that's clear is that their concept of the overall gaming experience focuses on quality. (Although I hear rumblings that this perception may change with the new Star Wars MMO...) I'm sure people still pirate Bioware games, of course, but I'd bet they have more loyal customers because they deliver consistent quality. When you buy a Bioware game, you pretty much know you're getting a good game. Ergo people are willing to risk their $60 on a Bioware game, whereas they might think twice about buying from [unknown company] unless it's been well reviewed.

So, while I recognize that the publishing execs (the "suits") may be at the mercy of perceived market trends, I think they'd do better if they took a step back, took a breath, and said "Yes, we are making a WWII FPS game. But what are we doing to make it a really fantastic gaming experience as opposed to just an 'also-ran'?"

 

[Randall Turner]

Well, the executives are conservative. Much moreso than the developers themselves. But, it's their money to lose (or the investors' money, same thing.) Can't really blame them, an innovative idea may strike home, but it only takes one that isn't appreciated and/or is too complex to execute on and the money's down the drain.

Hence the sequel syndrome.

 

[ohioastronomy]

Randall: I think what's being missed is very similar to what happened in the music business. The moves made against piracy end up annoying the people who are perfectly willing to pay for things. In the case of things like Steam it's especially obnoxious that they come with things like ads, and they actually degrade performance compared to the status quo ante (e.g. you can't play if you can't reach the net.)

The pool of people willing to play your game for free is also a lot larger than the pool of people willing to pay; the vast majority of the "lost" sales, in other words, would not actually have been sales. That's a practical reason why the anti-piracy stuff is so pointless, and why the actual yield is so minimal.

 

[Randall Turner]

The pool of people willing to play your game for free is also a lot larger than the pool of people willing to pay; the vast majority of the "lost" sales, in other words, would not actually have been sales. That's a practical reason why the anti-piracy stuff is so pointless, and why the actual yield is so minimal.

Don't characterize PC games as "mine". Like most industry veterans, I've switched to console games. They used to be "mine". They're not anymore. <shrug> I don't have a dog in this fight. And I can't afford to play what-if hand waving games.

As for whether there would have been sales, whatever makes you feel better. The last game I shipped on the PC sold as many copies (in '96) as a successful PC game does now, with an order of magnitude smaller installed base. Again - I can't afford the smoke and mirrors of whatever rationalizations you'd like to indulge in, but feel free.

Of course - A cursory glance through subscription figures for games with ironclad anti-piracy measures shows the market is there and the installed base is there for those games. Which is why I hope you like MMO's. grumble, grumble. I can adjust to working on console games. I'm not playing MMO's.

ps - the music industry is dead, partner. Same deal.

 

[Nares]

Randall: I think what's being missed is very similar to what happened in the music business.

Without going into the rest of your analysis, I think there's a good point to be made here. Both the music and movie industries became bloated over the decades. Piracy removed the risks of purchasing their products. Some combination of releasing less crap combined with moderate anti-piracy efforts will bring them to a more stable financial situation.

So far, they haven't been willing to innovate their own business, and so they continue to lean on anti-piracy as their salvation. This won't work, I believe; too many people are too aware of how much these industries have packaged and sold to us with a smile, and no longer are interesting in taking the risk.

Even if the worst fears of contemporary gamers comes true, that every developer resorts to the cookie-cutter console/MMO models, we'll see innovation a decade or more down the road, after the industry has contracted sufficiently such that taking a risk offers worthwhile rewards.

 

[Randall Turner]

Even if the worst fears of contemporary gamers comes true, that every developer resorts to the cookie-cutter console/MMO models, we'll see innovation a decade or more down the road, after the industry has contracted sufficiently such that taking a risk offers worthwhile rewards.

I guess that's an interesting viewpoint, but I don't see how it'll work that way. I can see some vague Adam Smithian "more potatoes for us" fuzzy logic going on here, but can't see how any mechanism kicks in to actually spawn more potatoes.

As far as innovation goes, dude, you give me a 50mil budget to work on a PC game and I'll innovate your eyeballs out! Until then -the only innovation that'll matter is one to improve copy protection. (Which is all consoles are at the end of the day, big sparkly anti-pirate devices.)

Anyway. What's really going to happen is PC's will continue to get more powerful, assets and logic will continue to get more complex, games (MMO's and consoles and the odd standalone strategy game) will continue to get more expensive to produce, and we'll end up with fewer and fewer good ones.

There's really no way to spin something as "healthy" for an industry that ends up with us being able to download all of that year's titles for free and still not have one worth playing.

 

[Iranon]

Yes, but how likely is a 50 million budget tied to a mandate to innovate your eyes out? Big-budget productions need to recoup the investment to be viable; playing it safe is a very kind thing to call the result.
Less kindly put: games made by and for people who don't care about games, held up by ridiculous hype and psychological tricks.

Recently, I have been very disappointed with the mainstream industry's ability to translate bigger budgets into a better experience. I often get the impression of a summer blockbuster in the worst way: Flashy, but not made for movie lovers... and sometimes seemingly with utter contempt for the customer and the medium.

 

[Randall Turner]

Yes, but how likely is a 50 million budget tied to a mandate to innovate your eyes out? Big-budget productions need to recoup the investment to be viable; playing it safe is a very kind thing to call the result.
Less kindly put: games made by and for people who don't care about games, held up by ridiculous hype and psychological tricks.

Recently, I have been very disappointed with the mainstream industry's ability to translate bigger budgets into a better experience. I often get the impression of a summer blockbuster in the worst way: Flashy, but not made for movie lovers... and sometimes seemingly with utter contempt for the customer and the medium.

What are you talking about? What big-budget productions are you referring to? There aren't any, that's the point, everything's made on the cheap in PC-land. The budget's barely enough to cover production costs.

re: "contempt for the customer" : I don't know if the posters here are representative of the consuming audience as a whole, or if we're just getting a disgruntled slice of ignorant users who act like asses behind a shield of posting anonymity. But you guys are terrible. You insult the character of developers who're in it for the love of the product, not at all "people who don't care about games". They've a ton of options, they're working their butts off for peanuts while giving up lucrative careers in other fields. I've nothing but respect for the people who choose to give up the prospect of a decent payday to stay in the business.

AGAIN - The quality problem is simply a lack of development funds. Ideas are cheap - executing is expensive. Sorta tough to manage with an understaffed team and a development cycle half as long as it should be.

 

[Lheim]

What are you talking about? What big-budget productions are you referring to? There aren't any, that's the point, everything's made on the cheap in PC-land. The budget's barely enough to cover production costs.

re: "contempt for the customer" : I don't know if the posters here are representative of the consuming audience as a whole, or if we're just getting a disgruntled slice of ignorant users who act like asses behind a shield of posting anonymity. But you guys are terrible. You insult the character of developers who're in it for the love of the product, not at all "people who don't care about games". They've a ton of options, they're working their butts off for peanuts while giving up lucrative careers in other fields. I've nothing but respect for the people who choose to give up the prospect of a decent payday to stay in the business.

AGAIN - The quality problem is simply a lack of development funds. Ideas are cheap - executing is expensive. Sorta tough to manage with an understaffed team and a development cycle half as long as it should be.

Randall..

I don't, and I'm sure other users here, don't mean to be offensive to you.

But:

When we see rip-off after rip-off, sequel after bug-filled sequel, cash-grab and DLC after DLC - no matter the internal motivations or budget limitations, it feels like disrespect to the consumers. That's it; that's the bottom line - cheap games produced badly alienate your consumers. That's not an insult; that's how it feels. Plain fact, not editorial or slapping the developers in the face. That's simply how it feels to the guy walking into a future shop - every dang box on the shelves is a RISK to purchase. Respect is earned by the quality of what you produce, not the untold hours and sweat you put in.

We (consumers as a group) are not a bunch of arses for saying it. I question your perspective for thinking so. If there's a communications and reality disconnect between us and developers it's nobody fault but the marketing department's.

I'm sure there's a substantial group of consumers who don't care for all the expensive flash bang and would rather have a great, original, creative game to play. What we get is vapid system-straining prettiness again and again. Even a poor-looking addictive simple game would sell - witness the thousands of little iphone apps and downloadable mini console games doing wonderfully.

From my point of view, graphics hit a reasonable peek years back. Improvements nowadays are incremental, not revolutionary - and expensive in terms of computer resources and equipment and sheer cost! Meanwhile, gameplay vaporizes and settles in the dust.

Put this in your thought experiment box and run it: Produce a game with less expensive, reasonable graphics (say equivalent to games 5, 7 years ago) .. that can run on older systems and toasters and has really really great gameplay and some reasonable non-intrusive piracy protection, and a moderate price point ($30ish bucks). How many people do you think'd buy it?

Again: games are only getting better in terms of graphics - which is the most expensive thing, development-wise. STOP IT, IT SUCKS. You don't need 50 million dollars to be creative. You need an idea. Your perspective reminds me of hollywood nowadays - more flash, more bling, but they always neglect to hire writers. What the heck is the point of a Water world or Star Wars Episode 4 if the dialogue is going to be disgustingly wooden? ("Your skin is softer than sand. Sand is rough, I don't like sand. I like your skin.", blarg). Gimme a Field of Dreams any day - cheap lil movie produced in a bleedin' Iowan crop field. Yay.

 

[Randall Turner]

Randall..

I don't, and I'm sure other users here, don't mean to be offensive to you.

But:

When we see rip-off after rip-off, sequel after bug-filled sequel, cash-grab and DLC after DLC - no matter the internal motivations or budget limitations, it feels like disrespect to the consumers. That's it; that's the bottom line - cheap games produced badly alienate your consumers. That's not an insult; that's how it feels. Plain fact, not editorial or slapping the developers in the face. That's simply how it feels to the guy walking into a future shop - every dang box on the shelves is a RISK to purchase.

We (consumers as a group) are not a bunch of arses for saying it. If there's a communications and reality disconnect between us and developers it's nobody fault but the marketing department's.

I'm sure there's a substantial group of consumers who don't care for all the expensive flash bang and would rather have a great, original, creative game to play. What we get is vapid system-straining prettiness again and again. Even a poor-looking addictive simple game would sell - witness the thousands of little iphone apps and downloadable console games doing wonderfully.

From my point of view, graphics hit a reasonable peek years back. Improvements nowadays are incremental, not revolutionary - and expensive in terms of computer resources and equipment and sheer cost! Meanwhile, gameplay vaporizes and settles in the dust.

Put this in your thought experiment box and run it: Produce a game with less expensive, reasonable graphics (say equivalent to games 5, 7 years ago) .. that can run on older systems and toasters and has really really great gameplay and some reasonable non-intrusive piracy protection, and a moderate price point ($30ish bucks). How many people do you think'd buy it?

Lhiem, these little iPhone apps and downloadable console gamelets sell because people have to pay for them. We don't have to pay for PC games. We don't have to.

I didn't argue with your point about graphics vs. gameplay some posts back because I agreed with it. As I said to essemjay, preaching to the choir, and it's my fault that I just don't find it as pressing to reply to something I agree with. That's a character flaw, no stress.

I can see how a buggy program would make people disgruntled. I can also see how it'd lead to assumptions of disrespect to the consumer. And again, I'm a consumer in this context. But I also understand a lot about the game development process and the mentality of the people involved.

No developer wants to release a buggy game. Even the executives are usually gamers, it's universal. But the tail end of the development cycle is expensive. You can do 80% of the application with 20% of the budget. That includes all the innovation, asset and program design, etc. The last bit, though, you're debugging edge cases, you're often sitting around trying to repro issues that happen once a day (or more rarely), you've got your best people in the office without having them adding anything of substance to the game - it's expensive. Usually everyone's running on a set config (whatever the company can get for their "standard" dev station), you have to import oddball setups and depend on testers (usually one per) to repro for you - then they often don't have the horsepower to run the dev tools, it's a pain. The burnrate is the same (or worse) as mainstream, early cycle development. And sooner or later you just run out of money.

You know, I'm going to put this in a separate post. This doesn't really have that much to do with the OP's original point, except tangentially as pertains to Steam, DRM and the PC market in general. I'll expand there, and do it tomorrow when I'm sitting around w/my thumb up my ass. (I'm in that end-game w/my current project, which they can afford to pay for b/c it's a console project.)

Also, don't worry about being offensive. I'm not even taking what the other dudes are saying personal, it's a Plight of the Commons, human nature issue. I'm just trying to explain what's going on.

Randall

ps - there's a certain bar vis a vis production quality (what some call "eye-candy") that you've got to reach to appeal to the general public. It varies from person to person, but even though people like you and I may be willing to accept what might be called placeholder art, there's a business reason the bulk of the budget goes to flash. The problem is that it turns into the bulk of the budget because it's so hard to reach that stoopit bar, even for off-the-shelf art animation and audio assets. (ie, double the budget, halve the percentage effort.) Then, wiring in the AI we want to see well is still a geometrically more complex task.

Edit: to be clear, I'll start another thread on this tomorrow, not bailing. Just no time tonight.

 

[markieness]

Some games youll like, some you won't. Stop worrying about what they're called.

I buy lots of games that i end up not liking, and i buy lots i do. I dont see it as a big company out to get me, I see it as my personal taste.

 

[Lheim]

Thanks for the reply, Randall.

I'm just not certain the medium-graphics route has really been tried, and I hope and believe that the 'bar' you speak of is a bit lower than it might seem to those in the biz. I understand that bug testing and finalizing a game is really a lot of work and rather expensive.. but it is the first or second-most critical thing, to me.

Nintendo's Miyamoto, arguably one of the greatest innovators and most creative people in the gaming industry.. I hear, demands that the control system of a game be perfect FIRST, before anything else. That would be my other contender for most critical part of whether or not I'll like and be willing to pay for a game.

Third would be the gameplay itself. The strategy, depth, replayability, sheer fun-factor, etc.

Fourth is graphics. I won't deny it's important, but other things are far more powerful in torpedoing a game.

I've dropped games like a hot potato after half an hour of playing because the inventory system is despicable, despite how pretty and interesting it might be.

 

[ohioastronomy]

Don't characterize PC games as "mine". Like most industry veterans, I've switched to console games. They used to be "mine". They're not anymore. <shrug> I don't have a dog in this fight. And I can't afford to play what-if hand waving games.

As for whether there would have been sales, whatever makes you feel better. The last game I shipped on the PC sold as many copies (in '96) as a successful PC game does now, with an order of magnitude smaller installed base. Again - I can't afford the smoke and mirrors of whatever rationalizations you'd like to indulge in, but feel free.

Of course - A cursory glance through subscription figures for games with ironclad anti-piracy measures shows the market is there and the installed base is there for those games. Which is why I hope you like MMO's. grumble, grumble. I can adjust to working on console games. I'm not playing MMO's.

ps - the music industry is dead, partner. Same deal.

You're really not getting my point, so I'll try again. First, the anti-piracy stuff annoys the customers that you want to keep. I've bought plenty of games, never pirated any. But I really get annoyed when I get ads, can't let my son try out a game when I'm done with it, and so on. There is a real cost associated with the anti-piracy mentality. I own hundreds of vinyl disks and hundreds of CDs. I eventually got so angry at the tactics of the recording industry on piracy issues that I stopped buying - I can listen on YouTube or the radio for new music, and own plenty of my own. I reluctantly bought Steam for Civ 5, loathe it, and refused to buy Fallout New Vegas (despite buying all prior entries in the series.) I'll do without rather than dealing with that junk. The cure can be worse than the disease.

And it doesn't help that prices are bloated, reviews compromised (is there a AAA franchise with poor reviews of any major release?), and quality so spotty.

I'd also disagree that piracy substantially reduces sales - going back to the days of cassettes, the actual evidence for harm has relied on gut intuition instead of data. But that's fundamentally secondary to my point - that by obsessing on security concerns you end up alienating precisely the people who are most sympathetic and form your customer base.

 

[Randall Turner]

It doesn't matter. (Piracy metrics.) It's dead. (PC game industry.) We're seeing the ghostly remnants of an industry killed in its infancy, unlike the recording industry, which was mature when it died.

and I'm not going to get into it. (Lheim.) Not going to start another thread, let it go. All it's going to do is make people feel bad about themselves. Including me - I may not pirate games, but how many mp3's do I have, or music CD's I borrowed from the library and loaded into my car's music box? <sigh>

No industry that depends on people paying for something they don't have to will succeed.

Just don't hammer the underpaid devs for quality issues. That's a greater evil. But I'm not going to babysit you on it.

All I wanted was a stupid scout.

 

[callahan9119]

Randall: I think what's being missed is very similar to what happened in the music business. The moves made against piracy end up annoying the people who are perfectly willing to pay for things. In the case of things like Steam it's especially obnoxious that they come with things like ads, and they actually degrade performance compared to the status quo ante (e.g. you can't play if you can't reach the net.)

The pool of people willing to play your game for free is also a lot larger than the pool of people willing to pay; the vast majority of the "lost" sales, in other words, would not actually have been sales. That's a practical reason why the anti-piracy stuff is so pointless, and why the actual yield is so minimal.

There are no ads while you play and it takes a second to log into the game. I love Steam.Also I think you have to log into Steam a mere 1 time every 3 weeks to maintain offline status.

 

[Clement]

There are no ads while you play and it takes a second to log into the game. I love Steam.Also I think you have to log into Steam a mere 1 time every 3 weeks to maintain offline status.

Interesting, i have steam, i had no idea it was on a timer, truth is if it didnt have team fortress 2, which i consider to be one of the best games ever made, i wouldnt bother with it, theres too many negatives about the steam platform itself in my opinion.

 

[callahan9119]

Like what? I own about 40 Steam games and have no issues, never have. I bought TF2 for 2 dollars during a steam sale...those things are glorious.

I think you can be offline for up to 3 weeks, it might be two though. All you gotta do is go online and you can immediately go offline again.