Reasonable said:
Oh I know all that - I was just saying don't tar all PC gamers with a generic accusation. Clearly on PC, as happened with Napster initially with music, the fact that people seem perfectly happy to 'copy' a digital asset vs pay for it because it's not really stealing, just said copying, and very, very, very easy it happens a lot, to the extent it swamps everything else in the end. For developers the attractions of consoles are pretty clear, particularly with what the 360/PS3 have shown regarding DLC. The bottom line is that millions of people will buy the game on a console, then happily pay for content that would more than likely have been provided free on PC in previous years, and that they'll buy the latest iteration of a franchise even though it is essentially the same game with new maps. Why wouldn't you go for that? On PC each title in a franchise was expected to show a decent jump, with an engine tweaked to take advantage of 2 years of new tech. On a console, taking MW2 as the obvious example, you take the same engine, tweak it a bit (and in MW2 it really was only a bit because it looks almost identical to MW from a rendering/map size/performance perspective) build some new maps and off you go. I'd go for that in a second. Just to be clear, I'm not the type of PC gamer lamenting the changing market. A PC and a console are simply pieces of HW to me. So long as they deliver what I want I don't really care which I use. But I've never pirated, and just don't like the way it's assumed that everyone who uses a PC to play games must pirate everything. Some of us are actually paying for the game. Not many though, which is the issue of course.
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When we have fewer paying customers on PC platform, those same customers get lower priority from developers.
Sure, paying customers have every right to feel shortchanged, but when you have fewer supporting the industry, it's a harder sell to expect that same industry to try even harder to court those customers.
I think you're dead on the nose in regards to the development cycles of sequels on consoles as opposed to PCs.
Historically, PC sequels have had longer turn around times between each sequel relative to consoles, which could be expected to see 2-3 games from the same series within a 5 year hardware cycle (barring the even faster annual release type games like sports titles).
Two year turn around times for franchises like Modern Warfare, Uncharted, Resistance, Gears of War, Assassin's Creed, etc. work best for console platform demographics that tend to buy a lot of new games on a consistent basis, regardless of how much each subsequent sequel takes further advantage of the same static hardware than the previous game. Sure, it's great to see developers continue to push the envelope, but it's not like their efforts are selling video cards as they often do in the PC gaming market.
It feels to me like Steam and other DD services are becoming one of the last, main holdouts for honest PC customers in terms of consumers who buy often, or simply buy rather than pirate.
Personally, I don't bother pirating games I have little to no intention of playing considering that it is physically impossible for me to thoroughly play all the games I've purchased through normal, legitimate means. But I don't think I'm in the majority among PC gamers where the attitude is often "if X developer doesn't completely impress me with this next sequel, I'm just going to pirate it instead." Or "if there's just X about the game that really bothers me I won't pay for it" even though they'll be perfectly happy to pirate it and play it anyway. And at times it's "I'll just buy it legitimately later after it's been slashed in price to show how good I thought the game was." After pirating and playing when it was selling for full price.
Part of the problem with the PC game market is that there is very limited value in used games often due to DRM features and the simple fact that game prices do drop fairly quick relative to console games. No licensing fee goes a long way in being able to sell old games for not much more than the price of a print/press/ship per unit.
So for major development studios that drop large budgets into games, it's one of those things they have to prioritize if they want an ROI. Consoles seem to do this when developers release decent products.
For smaller studios like Remedy (had no idea they were only 50), it's actually beneficial for them to be under the umbrella of the platform developer in exchange for exclusivity when it means guaranteed funding for their next project (assuming they don't have a dud).
Essay Pro