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."

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50.

Re: I gotta question or 10...
Mar 4, 2008, 02:20

Jerykk

50.

Re: I gotta question or 10... Mar 4, 2008, 02:20

Mar 4, 2008, 02:20

Jerykk

Is it wrong of him to blame piracy? If Bioshock had been cracked in 24 hours instead of taking much longer, would they have gotten less sales? Or what about Splinter Cell 2?

1) Yes.
2) Bioshock took approximately a week and half to get cracked on the PC. It was pirated a week before it was released on the 360. The 360 sold more copies.
3) I think you mean Splinter Cell 3, as that was the one that used Starforce. The copy-protection alone likely convinced many people not to buy the game.

Granted it's harder to pirate console games, but if it was as easy for the consoles as it is for the PC, would we see the same sort of sales figures for games like Halo 3, Mass Effect, etc?

A huge chunk of profits from those heavily hyped games comes from preorders. If I recall correctly, Halo 3 had over four million preorders in North America alone. When you have that many idiots willing to lay down money for a game that isn't even out yet, I highly doubt that piracy would have had any adverse effect on profits.

At the end of the day we are getting entertainment value out of a game, but to the dev's it's putting food in their mouths and a roof over their head, and I gotta wonder what sorta draconian DRM would I want to put onto my work that I spent the last few years working on (not to mention 'crunch time'), in order to not be out of a job.

The thing is that developers aren't the ones who choose to use copy-protection. It's publishers. And publishers seem to believe the ridiculous notion that copy-protection actually works. Instead of wasting money on licensing useless protection, they should be giving the money to the developers so they can make better games and potentially increase profits by delivering a better product.

It sucks that studios close down and people lose their livelihood. However, there are many factors that lead up to that unfortunate end and I highly doubt that piracy is the biggest one.