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."
'One guy went so far as to say he'd bought the retail game and it was having the exact same crashes, so it must be the game itself. This was one of the most vocal detractors, and we got into it a little bit. He swore up and down that he'd done everything above-board, installed it on a clean machine, updated everything, still getting the same crashes. It was our fault, we were stupid, our programmers didn't know how to make games - some other guy asked "do they code with their feet?". About a week later, he realized that he'd forgotten to re-install his BIOS update after he wiped the machine. He fixed that, all his crashes went away. At least he was man enough to admit it.'
See, the main problem I have with that idiocy, beyond the "re-install the BIOS" part that others have mentioned is, what the hell does that have to do with piracy? He was supposedly using that as an example of a guy who was swearing he had the retail copy, but didn't. But apparently the guy DID have the retail copy. So if he had the retail copy, and the only problem was requiring a BIOS update (whatever the hell that's supposed to do to make a game work), then where does the piracy angle come in?
If you're going to be talking about crashes because of your copy protection system, and then give an example, that example damn well better have something to do with the copy protection system. If it doesn't, you just look like a complete idiot.
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