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."
For everyone going on about piracy not being a real excuse, have a think about this.
If 100% of the consumers pirate the game, pretty soon there just won't be PC games... I don't see this happening soon but people expect to get paid for their work. If they don't get fair recompense for their work, they'll stop producing. Simple enough.
However...
The intrusive DRM that caused so much problems is total bullshit and contributed to the downfall of this title.
Saying that they were given a black box piece of code to insert in to the game that they couldn't code around elegantly is so much bullshit and doesn't cut it. Jesus, would a car manufacturer take a mystery part and bolt it on the engine of new cars not knowing what the hell it would do exactly?
As a legal owner of the game, I was experiencing terrible performance until one of the later patches, so much so that I gave up playing between the early patches because of the poor performance on my more than adequate PC.
Disclaimer: Yeah, did all the standard troubleshooting shite including swapping to my "it's not me, it's your f#cking crap software" spare OS drive (for rebuilding when you don't want to trash your entire system ; ).
The nuked crack + piracy might have hurt sales, but the legitimate flaws with the game (that is, the paying customers get punished with the same faults the pirates do) are easily as responsible.
The half baked nature of the add on didn't help. IP owners want their property protected like a physical item, but they are content to release it in a flawed state knowing they can patch it later. Going back to the car analogy, how many sales would you get if the customer took the thing for a test drive and a wheel fell off...? "Oh, we're working on a patch for that, expect the wheel to stay on in a couple of months when we release it."...
If 100% of the consumers pirate the game, pretty soon there just won't be PC games... I don't see this happening soon but people expect to get paid for their work. If they don't get fair recompense for their work, they'll stop producing. Simple enough.
However...
The intrusive DRM that caused so much problems is total bullshit and contributed to the downfall of this title.
Saying that they were given a black box piece of code to insert in to the game that they couldn't code around elegantly is so much bullshit and doesn't cut it. Jesus, would a car manufacturer take a mystery part and bolt it on the engine of new cars not knowing what the hell it would do exactly?
As a legal owner of the game, I was experiencing terrible performance until one of the later patches, so much so that I gave up playing between the early patches because of the poor performance on my more than adequate PC.
Disclaimer: Yeah, did all the standard troubleshooting shite including swapping to my "it's not me, it's your f#cking crap software" spare OS drive (for rebuilding when you don't want to trash your entire system ; ).
The nuked crack + piracy might have hurt sales, but the legitimate flaws with the game (that is, the paying customers get punished with the same faults the pirates do) are easily as responsible.
The half baked nature of the add on didn't help. IP owners want their property protected like a physical item, but they are content to release it in a flawed state knowing they can patch it later. Going back to the car analogy, how many sales would you get if the customer took the thing for a test drive and a wheel fell off...? "Oh, we're working on a patch for that, expect the wheel to stay on in a couple of months when we release it."...
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