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."
Yes, they have lots and lots of statistics that tell them exactly nothing. There's really no way to determine the effect of piracy on the industry. They can claim all the harm they want, but they can't support it. Earthworm is right though. If piracy was really killing the industry, it would've died a long time ago.Well, they have more data than we do, that's for damn sure. Unless you know of a site that accurately tracks PC game sales from all sources for a given publisher?
This all sounds like a whole lot of sticking your fingers in your ears and yelling "lalala there is no problem here there is no problem here" to me.
PC gaming isn't going to die, but I do see the AAA publishers a lot more leery about getting into or continuing in the market. The exceptions people always quote are the folks that bring a market with them wholesale ala. Blizzard, Will Wright, Valve etc. It takes a lot more than that to make the market viable as a whole overall, though. As good as some of them are, I am not going to be satisfied with just flash and indie games long term.
I'll say it again - it doesn't matter what we bitch about on the forums no matter what side of the argument you're on. Piracy, anti-piracy, none of it matters but what the publishers believe to be true.
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