Reckoning Dev: Piracy Prevents PC Exclusives

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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Re: Reckoning Dev: Piracy Prevents PC Exclusives
Feb 3, 2012, 15:48
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Re: Reckoning Dev: Piracy Prevents PC Exclusives Feb 3, 2012, 15:48
Feb 3, 2012, 15:48
 
Oh yeah, and the obvious summary:

if the price is low enough (I purposely avoid "fair" here) and the ease of buying is low people will happily buy over pirate.

The issues that remain are the gap in what each party considers "fair," which probably points to budgets (and consumer technical expectations) being too high, and the simple fact that ease of buying often means one source. Nobody wants to juggle multiple programs just to run games, so everyone sticks to Steam (which we're already tied to by virtue of huge libraries.) The easy solution is to untie games from platforms, which makes the platform just a delivery mention like a store, but you lose DRM (which defeats the entire point) and you lose the hook in the consumer (which no vendor wants to give up.)
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   Re: Reckoning Dev: Piracy Prevents PC Exclusives