Freddo wrote:They blame PC piracy for it, and I belive that. […]
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red_avatar wrote:id Software have become cockier and cockier in the last few years - a while ago they announced that they would focus on consoles mainly while it was the PC that got them as far as they did.
They blame PC piracy for it, and I belive that.
Not to say there's piracy on the consoles too, there is, but it's not as widespread as on the PC. When you make a game that cost over 20 million USD to make, then you want to get some money in return.
And the US usage of the consoles has grown a lot over the past 10 years while the PC pretty much stayed the same. In 1997 the PC had 47% of the US game market, and in 2004 it was less than 15%, and now I would guess it's less than 10%.
From a business standpoint, the consoles are the future. And it's only natural to want a piece of that cake.
I'll start by saying that piracy is an exagerated problem. The whole problem lies with the industry seeing that every pirated copy is a lost sale and focus the blame on just the fact that you can get games for free as the only reason why piracy exists.
In reality, this is just one of the many reasons. People will buy games that are good, full stop. Oblivion had NO protection (you could copy the DVD in Nero without having to do anything special and it would work) and it sold loads. The same goes for GTA San Andreas, etc. etc.
The real reason for piracy lies with many factors:
- a graphics card has become very expensive meaning that people often have too little money left to buy many games
- people get the warez version to try the game and decide it's not worth buying
- people don't have the money to buy the game in the first place
- games no longer give any incentive to buy them - you used to get big boxes with large manuals and often got freebies. Nowadays you get a 10 cent DVD case, a manual with 20 pages if you're lucky, and a DVD. Thats it. Hell, you can buy games on Steam for more than the store price and then you get f**k all.
So yeah, the industry is largely responsible for the situation now. When one graphics card is as expensive as an entire console, things are starting to get silly. Publishers want to skimp on every cent they can, and then tag on some hideously annoying and invasive copy protection (i.e. Starforce). The result is that people would rather download a warez version which has that protection removed (much easier not needing a DVD in your drive all the time), it's cheaper, and you're not missing anything because the retail version has a joke for a manual!
Also, comparing PCs and consoles directly in percentages is silly. You need to break it down to percentages per console since a console to console port is as much work as a port to PC. More so if it's a move from Xbox to PS3 (Xbox and PC are similar in architecture). if you break it down like that, the PC isn't doing that badly - don't forget consoles always get a boost right at the start of the new generation - the same happened with the PS2 at the end of the 90s.