Piracy versus PC Gaming [Mar 09, 2007, 8:23 pm ET] – Share – Viewing Comments
Next Generation recaps a GDC talk titled "The Videogame Piracy Problem:
Fifteen Men on a Dead Man’s Chest" by id Software CEO Todd Hollenshead about the
impact of piracy on the game industry. They outline how Mr. Hollenshead says the
estimated $3 billion economic loss caused by piracy in 2004 does not include
piracy that takes place on the Internet. There is also an article about this
talk on
Joystiq that focuses on the statement that piracy is a factor in id's
embrace of consoles, quoting Todd as saying "Piracy has pushed id as being
multiplatform." On a related note,
Can PC
Gaming Survive in a Console World (thanks
Digg) recaps a panel discussion on the topic that brought up a similar
point:
Part of the problem is piracy. Big titles get stolen by cyber thieves, and it hurts revenue. "The market," said Capps, "that would buy a $600 video card knows how Bittorrent works."
Does that mean casual games, which exponentially outsell what PC gaming traditionalists think of as A-list titles, will one day rule? Hilleman made a point: casual is a poor choice of words. The average player on EA's Pogo "casual" game network plays "for 24 hours a week. There's nothing casual about that."
There is some light in the PC gaming world. World of Warcraft, for instance, is a massive hit, and the upcoming Spore looks not only creative and different, but promising. The MMO and other social networking games could become the norm for PC gaming, with big-ticket titles growing rarer with each passing year. Johnson added that MMOs are "successful because you can't pirate WoW. You cannot pirate an MMO. Period." Therefore, he said, "game design on the PC is going to bend toward persistence."
And? Nobody forces you to upgrade your hardware more often than you wish just as nobody forces you to buy every game on the market.
Don't have to be buying every game on the market. You buy a new game that you are really interested in... it stutters like fuck at the resolution you want, even after tweaking the settings and ini files... you go and buy new hardware. Period.
If you go complain on a forum about the ridiculous performance, and every @sshat fanboi and their mother tells you to go upgrade... which supports the devs not having to do some actual work to optimize. It's getting worse with every new engine release. It's not like the good old days when there was a dominant engine (like quake 3 based games), and you could roughly predict the performance you were going to get (minus any tweaks the game company may have done to "enhance" the engine).
So yes, it's indirectly FORCED upon you.
Get your games from GOG DAMMIT!
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