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Reckoning Dev: Piracy Prevents PC Exclusives

[Feb 02, 2012, 11:48 am ET] - Share - Viewing Comments

IncGamers quotes Ian Frazier from a soon-to-be-published interview with the lead designer on Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, the imminent RPG from 38 Studios' Big Huge Games. He expresses the opinion that it's piracy, not the allure of console sales, that's making big PC exclusive games a thing of the past. "No, probably not. A game this big is very expensive to be blunt about it. The PC, with piracy being as rampant as it is, is really hard to make money from. My first game was Titan Quest, a hack ‘n’ slash RPG, which was PC only but the amount that it was pirated was the difference between us staying in business and going out of business," he tells them. "It’s really, really hard to be profitable by concentrating only on PC. Unless you’re an MMO."

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53.

Re: Reckoning Dev: Piracy Prevents PC Exclusives

Feb 3, 2012, 15:28

Beamer

Steam has proven a few things:

1) Lots of people want to buy games
2) But they're price sensitive
3) To the point that they're often unwilling to pay enough to truly recoup development costs, as there still aren't enough people buying (this is arguable. A game like MW3 would never have made nearly as much if it cost half as much, but a game like Psychonauts may have sold enough more to warrant the drop in margin, meaning that MW3 would have to subsidize more niche risks less)
4) But they're easily tempted by bargains and sales, especially when they know exactly when the sale expires and their credit card is stored so it's one-click buy




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