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richardhutnik on 17 November 2009
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Xelloss said:
richardhutnik said:
Xelloss said:

GG IW, you might be rolling in bank from the console versions, but you still missed out on tens of millions you would have had, had you not been so arrogant.

 

 

What 10s of millions were going to buy Modern Warfare 2?  How copies of the PC version of COD4 were sold?  Someone here said it outsold the console versions, making COD4 a 20+ million total sales title, which it hasn't shown to me.  Millions of pirated copies of a gamer doesn't matter to a game company at all.  And if a game is pirated at a rate of 10 copies for every sale, then that is a pandemic problem. 

Have any idea what the total sales for COD4 were on the PC?  There is indication that piracy was rampant though:

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2008/01/17/call_of_duty_4_piracy_is_rampant/1

 

 Tens of millions of dollars, not units. Noone is saying CoD4 sold tens of millions of units on PC, but Acti pockets somewhere in the range of 30-40$ per unit sold, so if it sits at around 6% on PC and that = 500k units, where PC sales should be in the 15-20% of console range... for easy math lets just triple the figure and say a million sales, or roughly speaking somewhere in the range of 30-40 million dollars lost give or take. Very rough numbers to be sure, but worst case its definately over 10million$ lost... best case - could be as high as 60-70 million$ over the course of a couple years... so its not chump change.

 

 As for piracy, that has no relevance here. Unless you are going to try and assert that the general piracy rate has changed very recently and very drastically and there is no evidence to support that.

AND if the costs of the PC approximate what it generates in revenue, then Activision crunches the numbers and decides it just isn't worth it going that route.  They may find that having an integrated development route, with uniformity between products across all platforms, is the way to go.  And, if it doesn't sell well, they may decide not to support it at all, particularly when they feel they can make more money pursuing other things.  The moment you need to support having dedicated servers, and lose revenue from driving people to a matchmaking service the way Bliizzard runs there, you decide not to go with dedicated servers.  They get dropped for good.  And then you think of World of Warcraft and try to position the PC version as something you are able to extract monthly fees from, the way you do with World of Warcraft.  You make Modern Warfare a massive multiplayer gamer, for PC users. 

Based on what I have read Activision doing, this is on their mind.  Forego the hardcore community, and either have the PC version map to the console version, or do a new version, which is massive multiplayer.  Of course, the hardcore PC gamer is in an uproar over it, but Activision is thinking maximizing revenues above this, by killing off piracy to boot, and also keeping development costs.  This, in the mind of executives feels like a big win for them.