Well Myst, along with sequels, sold a shitload on PCs for such a niche genre (12 mils or so, 6 millions for Myst 1 alone) - that's what I was reffering to when I said genre briefly entered mainstream. But other than that, that was about it...sure, there were few IPs that did somewhat well, but genre as a whole never really managed to gain popularity of their P&C adventure counterparts.

I can't say what Blow's ambitions are for Witness, but given how much time (and money) he spent on it VS how niche the game is, I really hope he doesn't go under with this one.

So true. And people is using this to fullfil their agendas even when this has been happening forever. Last year a ton of games like Pillars of Eternity, Cities skylines, The Witcher 3 or GTAV had really high sales on Steam, despite all the piracy, in fact, is possible that piracy helped somewhat, since a lot of people use it not only as a demo about the quality of the game, but also to see if is well optimized for their PC before buying it, and dont forget that this people talks about the game, even if they didnt buy it, they become part of their audience and potential fans, and the bigger the audience the better. Also I remember when i used to pirate my Ps1 games, 90% of the games I had I would never have bought them, at all, is very easy to try for free a game of a genre that you dont even like, pay for it is another story. 


The worst part is the amount of people blaming the PC gamer for that, as if the PC gamer was a special kind of profile, when the most pirated thing of the history was the freaking PS2 followed by Ps1 and PSP LOL. If people can have access to piracy, some of they will, it doesnt matter the platform at all.

Yes it is an insult. Just because you think it's not, doesn't magically make it ok. Also, what exactly has been proven here? That people make a claim without having anything to back it up? Yeah, thought so. The funniest thing is seeing people calling others ignorant while they're the ignorant ones.

@bolded. Where did I say that? Why do you feel like putting words into people's mouths? Every single time I have commented on piracy, I said that a percentage of those pirated copies would have led to sales. Now if that % is 5%, 1%. 0.001% is debatable and we will likely never know. All I know is that when I was pirating games I was giving 0 money to the industry (only bought the consoles and sony wasn't making any money off them) and when I couldn't pirate games and had to pay for them, I did. There are others who have admitted so as well, but certain people choose to ignore all such stories in an effort to defend piracy.

Yes, I am aware how piracy can help sales and how a lot of companies are still making money despite piracy. But people like to ignore how piracy affects certain types of games more than others. Dante's Inferno was the most pirated game on xb360 the year it came out. The developers didn't make enough money and there wasn't a sequel. The game scored well on meta and the quality had nothing to do with its lack of sales. People are more likely to pirate single player games, beat them (not try them as a demo) and then never buy them.

Because it is digital only (for the moment) and then you can only catch it on a sale for cheaper.  

Prices tend to go down and plenty of games get permanent price cuts at certain points. So you don't always have to look out for a sale. And many games are on discount in several sales. Dragon Age Inquisition must have been discounted at least 10 different times already. I waited till it was £15 and played other games in the meantime.

^ this.

If you allow them same time launch, you ll have more people going pc and pirateing.

You really should launch atleast a few months early on consoles, to minimise the impact piracy can have on your game.

I think one thing we don't talk about with piracy is actually the positives it can have. I was burned out on Far Cry by the time 3 came out, after saying no more playing the awful Wii one and having skipped 2 entirely, my friends kept telling me how amazing 3 was, so knowing I'd never buy it even at discount I looked for a demo, couldn't find one so I yarr'd it, played it for two hours, fell in love with it and bought it new off Amazon for console and a Steam copy too along with the dlc. I bought Blood Dragon on launch day as well as 4 and all it's DLC which I had for console and then recently picked up the DX edition on Steam. Heck, I already pre ordered Primal. What I'm saying is, while I wouldn't do that anymore quite often people use torrents and piracy because the developers don't put a demo out.

haha what you except if you charge 40€ for an indie puzzle game?

Yeah.... But no. 

We're not talking about Ubisoft and a guaranteed million-seller here, but an indie game and developer. Even if people like The Witness because they pirated it, if the studio goes under and J. Blow can't make a new game, we don't care about the "positives" of piracy. Lots of games are pirated, it's just a lot more hurtful for an indie developer. The price also has nothing to do with it (Portal 2 didn't have more content and was $60 for example). People just don't care. If it's $5, they buy it because they don't care about such a small price and can afford to "lose" this money, but they don't care what the game is really worth. A player will pay 5 or 10 bucks for a game worth $1, but will cry if we ask 30 or 40 bucks for a game worth 60. 

I agree with others, all games should release on console first, and 6 months or a year later on PC, after the game brought some money already. A lot of PC players don't pay their games full price, they pirate it or wait for Steam sales. So it's useless to give them the new releases if the studios wants to make money. And if PC players keep at it, we will have online verification and other DRM for all games. Too bad J. Blow couldn't afford Denuvo or another tool like that.

You say that, but I personally hated his last game Braid which I played on console so wouldn't even try this one on PC or otherwise without some form of demo. I appreciate I'm in the minority on that one but I also don't think what he is charging for this game really helps for what it is.