THQ Director Blames Piracy for Iron Lore Closure

THQ Director Blames Piracy for Iron Lore Closure
[Mar 03, 2008, 10:06 pm ET] – Share – Viewing Comments

GamesIndustry.biz reports on a post on the Quarter To Three Forums by THQ director of creative management Michael Fitch venting his frustrations with the state of PC gaming following the closure of Iron Lore Entertainment (story). The lengthy post outlines concerns about rampant piracy, how Titan Quest's reputation suffered when pirates reported crashes (which were caused by failure to properly crack the game's DRM), complaints about hardware vendors creating compatibility issues, stupid users and bad reviewers. He concludes trying to look at the bright side: "Alright, I'm done. Making PC products is not all fun and games. It's an uphill slog, definitely. I'm a lifelong PC gamer, and hope to continue to work on PC games in the future, but man, they sure don't make it easy."

View : : :

Post Comment

Search Log In

Search Log In Post Comment

23.

Re: No subject
Mar 3, 2008, 23:42

elefunk

23.

Re: No subject Mar 3, 2008, 23:42

Mar 3, 2008, 23:42

elefunk

The rant makes some decent points, but at the same time, there are other issues he didn't bring up. Why they hell did they use a copy protection mechanism that crashed pirates' games without notifying them of why their game was crashing? Why did tons of people who fully legally bought the game still have reliability issues?

Plainly and simply, Iron Lore was a brand new developer, and Titan Quest was their first game. At the same time, they created a brand new graphics engine from the ground-up. I don't for a second deny that the vast amount of hardware and possibly software configurations out there screws things up - integrated graphics hardware especially - but when your first project as a brand new developer is a high-budget project that takes you 4-5 years to create, what do you expect?

Even on consoles, Iron Lore would have had a nightmare of problems. Their engine was pretty inefficient, running slowly on even the best computer hardware at the time - computer hardware faster than what consoles offered. Even without the headache of getting their engine to run on many different pieces of hardware, I have a hard time believing that they could have gotten it running smoothly on a console. It's the facts of life that any new developer has to deal with. Adapting their user interface to a controller would be practically impossible too.

Iron Lore should have started with some smaller projects first - get their shaky engine up to speed before trying to build a 40 hour experience on top of it. Get their name out there so it's reconizable by gamers. Maybe do some more things like Dawn of War SoulStorm before releasing their own game.

This producer has many good points, but there is so much other stuff as well. This reply to his original forum post says some of it:

Am I understanding this part correctly? You implemented a copy-control system that caused the game to crash without notifying the user that this was a deliberate termination of the game caused by failing an anti-piracy check, not a random crash? Consequently, people who pirated your game described it as being buggy which then caused you to lose sales from legitimate customers.

So not only did your DRM fail to prevent people from pirating the game, it also cost you sales. You might have been better off if you hadn't used any copy-protection at all (like Stardock); pirates are still going to copy the game, but at least it wouldn't have received a reputation (undeserved, granted, but it happened nonetheless) for being buggy. Is this yet another data point showing that DRM does more harm than good?

I wonder which of these is greater:

a) People who would have normally pirated the game but were deterred by the copy-protection, so they bought it instead

or

b) People who would have normally bought the game but were deterred by reports from pirates that it was buggy and crashed a lot, so they pirated it instead (or avoided it completely)

There's probably no way to know for sure, but I suspect there were more people in the second category than the first.