The thing that pisses me off the most about game pirates...

[vlad321]

twesterm said:

vlad321 said:

twesterm said:

 

h, but the problem is that there are a lot of good games out there that don't make money because they can't make money because people aren't buying them for any one of 100 reaons.

I'm not sure if you realize this, but even good games are heavily pirated.  I know your definition of good in the last five years is apparently Portal, Dragon Age, World of Goo, and nothing else, but there's actually a very large range of good games out there of all budgets.  Those games lose out on a large chunk of well deserved money because of piracy.

Furthermore, even your bad games that don't get a metacritic of 90+ still deserve compensation for their efforts.  As I said, when you actually manage to break in and make games, you'll see all the effort that goes into even "bad" games that only rate an 80.

I agree that even thegames which are not 90+ deserve compensation, however they do NOT deserve the same compensation as those that are 90+. They should be priced at $30, not $50. Worse/smaller games should hen be priced at 10-15, not $50.

Also I haven't heard of too many good games that have come out that have gone under and where the developers and heir families haave starved or gone bankrupt. An example or two would be nice, preferably of games that are actually popular, and whose unfortunate fate can be directly linked to piracy.

A good recent example-- Pandemic.

Yes, they've made some bad games, some really bad games, but they've also made some good games like The Saboteur and they just went under.  Now I doubt that's due to piracy, but I'm sure if people hadn't pirated their previous, who knows, they could have stayed open long enough to pull themselves out of their slump.

Anyways, so how do you judge before a game is even made how much it should be?  Do you think a publisher says hmm, I want to make a semi-shitty game so lets make a $30 game.  No, that's retarded.

Games are about making money and nothing else.  Games are sold for $50-60 because they cost a shit load of money to make and that $50-60 goes A LOT of different places.  The developer actually only sees a *very* small fraction of that money if any.

You can quote games that got their price cut by so much, but those sold so much because they were *really* good games for *really* cheap.  Of course people are going to take advantage of that.  Do you think that if Mirror's Edge, a middle of the road game, released for $30 it would fly off the shelves?

No.

It would sell more yes, but it wouldn't sell enough to cover that kind of price cut right off the bat and they would lose even more money because they would have to sell even more copies to just break even.

Your average game last gen needs to sell about 700-750k to just break even.  Budgets for this gen have nearly doubled so that means a normal game needs to sell well over 1 million copies to break even. 

If a publisher releases an average game, something in the 70-80 range, and decides to release it for $30, do you think it would sell more than 2 million copies?

What games in the last 10 years have sold 2 million+ copies within the first year of release?

Not many in the 70-80 range.

In a perfect world what you say about the price makes sense, but in the real world, it's just flat out stupid and doesn't work.

I actually hear The Saboteur is pretty tame. Haven't played it so its all word of mouth, but I haven't heard anything great of it. I would also not put any of their games above tame as well. Their best ones were the Battlefront ones nd they were just Battlefield clones, literally. Furthermore, they got shut down by EA, they didn't just close down. As you remember Microsoft shut down Ensemble and I'm fairly sure they were making enough money.

The grading thing is not for the consumers to figure out, it's for the developers to figure out. It's not our burden to solve a producer's problem, it's for the producers to figure out how to sell their iems effectively. As such, many developers/publishers have failed miserably at that task and are now blaming piracy (which may even actually help them, going by the music studies). It's also heir own fault they spend so much money on games, also maybe if they spend more money on making the game and less on advertising (didn't MW2 have only 1/4 of its budget dedicated to development and 3/4 to marketing?) then they would make a game that's actually worth the money.

I can't speak for Mirror's Edge, but if it had gone up for $30 I would have been a hell of a lot more willing to buy it than its original $60. I recently just got it for like 5 bucks off a deal on Steam. I'm fairly sure there would also have been a lot more people willing to buy the game for $30 than they did knowing it was a medium-grade game at $60. I guess we will never know though. I can't say it would have made hem enough money, but neither can you say that it wouldn't have.

Again, it's not the consumer's fault budgets have gone up, so why should we be paying for that? As Blizzard has consistently shown, making games not graphically impressive actually makes you more money (at least on the PC). I swear I can probably run WoW on my toaster.

As for those 70-80 range games, then maybe it would be a better idea for developers to figure out how to bring development costs down and offer the best experience the medium can provide (for games it's gameplay) rather than inflating budgets needlessly on superficial elements. I'm not entirely sure how a developer feels, but I would venture to guess that sometimes they realize that they just don't have a 90+ experience (and I mean an actual 90+, not the recent bullshit 90s) and then maybe figure out how to make money off of that.

I realize it's not a perfect world, but if anything the huge amount of piracy shows there is a problem on both sides, not just the pirates side. The 2 sides should meet in the middle, asking consumers to conform to business models and products is the exact opposite of what should be happening. Businesses should be conforming to consumers.