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."
PC game profits started to decline when publishers abandoned this community and decided to opt for multiplatform, designed-for-console releases.By this logic, high budget, PC exclusive "hard core" oriented titles (and by this I only mean no Sims or Barbie) should do noticeably better on PC than the multiplatform games do.
It's trivially easy to point to examples of multiplatform games that outsell PC exclusive games - Bioshock and CoD4 leap to mind.
My feeling is that Stardock's games are selling really well for them, which is awesome, but I seriously doubt they're outselling Bioshock, CoD4, Orange Box, etc. on PC.
My point in listing these games isn't to argue their merits vs. one another, just to point out that THIS is the data that publishers are going to look at when deciding whether or not to make their games PC exclusive.
The fact that even Valve is making console games now has to be significant, right?
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