| mirgro said: 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. Well, that's a guess. You really have no idea. I'd guess it's grown, as it's so much easier to get a pirated copy nowadays with fast internet connections and Bittorrent. 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. There is a hassle in playing WoW. It's a MMORPG, and MMORPGs have a big social aspect. People want to play with their friends. Yes, you can convince everyone you know to play a game illegally, and get on a pirate server, but due to the type of game it is, people are far more likely to pay the fees and play the real thing. 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). (Bungie was VERY highly regarded before Halo. Infact, they didn't "jump ship." Their new game in development was so impressive (the first Halo) that Microsoft bought them to get their hands on it. 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.(Some valid businesses flourish in Nigeria. That doesn't make it a good place to do business. Yes, Valve and Blizzard are the best of the best, and will sell millions while getting pirated too. That doesn't mean it's viable for everyone) If anything developers are putting themselves out of business by producing subpar games.(One of my all-time favorite game franchises, Wing Commander, had extremely high production values, and the highest development budgets of its time. Simply producing a quality product didn't save them - you also need sales... something greatly effected by piracy) 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.(You seem to consider anything that isn't AAA to be subpar, as the only examples you list are companies that make AAA games. Am I to assume, that you think only games with $30M+ budgets by top tier developers should be produced, and everyone else should fold up? that way each genre can get 2-3 games a year and gamers get a few dozen games a year to choose from? Your only argument seems to be that anything that doesn't sell on PC but sells on consoles must be terrible, because PC gamers are better. Period. When the only FACTS we have to work with, are that PC gamers are far more likely to steal games, while console players are far more likely to buy them. We haven't even so much as anecdotal evidence that console gamers have lower standards than PC gamers, other than games you find to be bad on the PC sell more on consoles. (Newsflash: most everything sells better on consoles. Good games too - except PC focused games) |
P.S. I am assuming this is an altername account of Vlad's. He's normally be posting in these discussions with almost the same argument word for word. Oh, and he's banned.
