nightsurge said:
The PC market is huge, and piracy has slowly been growing. In the 1980's personal computers didn't even exist in many homes. Piracy grew with the industry. Now that PCs have saturated nearly the entire market, piracy will continue to grow while the PC market doesn't. As to your very safe uses for developers... Valve flourishes thanks to most of their games seeing much stronger Digital Distribution sales via their own network, Steam. They also sell many other games this way which is a nice revenue stream for them. Blizzard flourishes by making subscription based games. Pirating the game means nothing when they make all their profits on the month-to-month subscriptions. And actual manipulating the system to get free WoW on Blizzard servers is just not worth the hassle or the risk of the standard PC pirates. |
Exactly the piracy grew with the industry so while there were less pirates there were also less people to use it. Proportionally it has been more or less the same.
As for Valve and Blizzard, they were doing just fine before Steam and WoW, how do you explain that? Also there is no hassle in pirating WoW. Just download it, install it, and run the crack, done, just like any other game.
So far your explanations have been lacking. My theory is that developers noticed that PC gamers have a much higher standard of quality than do console gamers. Then a lot of the less good devs jumped ship to consoles (look at Bungie pre-Halo to see what I mean). Then companies make a crappy game that is not up to snuff to PC gamers' standards and then they blame piracy on it (Assassin's Creed, new PoP, Crysis, I can keep listing these mediocre games all day long). Meanwhile the people who DO create amazing games flourish, ala Valve and Blizzard. If anything developers are putting themselves out of business by producing subpar games. Then they don't wanna admit they made a mediocre game so they just use piracy as a scapegoat and cite how people with lower standards (because they never had any great games to raise their standards to begin with) are buying the game by the millions.