Piracy-Related Damages Are Exaggerated, Says Developer

[wraggster]

Piracy has been the main guilty party for everything going wrong in the PC gaming business. Still, there are some voices who disagree and claim that the issue has been significantly overblown.


According to Tom Jubert (Penumbra game writer), game developers should start blaming themselves more for various mishaps such as bad reviews, poor sales and overall failure of a certain game: “rampant piracy is no longer the catch-all excuse it's often employed as.”
Jubert's analysis (posted in an Edge blog) starts with a statement made by the CEO of Crytek: he claiemd that there were 20 illegal copies of Crysis for each legitimate one. However, the game writers says, the actual ratio is far less. According to data from GameShadow Metrics, an online service 5:1 in the US

To back up his statement, Jubert cites figures from GameShadow Metrics, an online service that automatically patches games and, thus, also detects modified .exe files. Thus, he concludes:

“Revenues on some PC titles may well be down by as much as 15% - 20% due to piracy, but I've yet to see evidence for any greater piracy related impact on the platform's decline. Meanwhile, online and casual products are popularly held as moving from strength to strength. At the end of the day, faltering sales must not be pinned solely to pirate activity. We must also blame increased competition from consoles, lack of platform support in the form of a major stakeholder, and the snowballing effect of declining exclusives.”

http://news.portalit.net/fullnews_piracy-related-damages-are-exaggerated-says-developer_1528.html

[vicious1988]

Ya, 5:1 isn't bad :D . Piracy has been happening since the days of the BBS. STFU about it already.

EDIT: That STFU was not aimed at wraggster.

[SnoopKatt]

Modded .exe's mean nothing. I own Crysis and I have a No-CD patch, and I didn't pirate it; I just got sick of always having to switch CD's around.

[osgeld]

thank you for being at least a little realistic

pirating pc games have been going on since the c64 and apple ][

what is killing the PC market is EVERY DARN GAME is either a

mmo
fps
rts

wow, a 3d online point n click, or a first person point n click or a map based point n click

i point and click all freakin day long, excel or crysis who cares

[vicious1988]

I'd like to see a resurgence in older style games. Anybody remember Zombies Ate My Neighbors? I'm thinking about reinstalling DkP and creating a homebrew sequel for it. Maybe adding in the entire original game using the new graphics and items as well.

[osgeld]

me too

games that got me fired up, and when i completed a challenge i sat back as if i just had sex

not point at dudes head and click

[Broadus]

What SnoopKatt said. I have no-CD patches for ALL of my PC games. I only put my discs in to install the games and then they pretty much never go in again. Since games requiring the CD to be inserted just to play obviously does not stop piracy since virtually every PC game can be (and is) modified to be played without a CD, why do they keep making games require CDs, anyway? That just forces me to move and do things. And that's no fun!

Anyway, yeah, games also just suck. I keep looking forward to new games months before their release, really excited and letting my imagination run wild with thoughts that they must be like the best games ever, then the games come out and, because I set myself up for disappointment months before, I am really really really disappointed and unimpressed.

Also I hate Crysis. I did not think it was going to be good before I played it, anyway.

[ish420ism]

Most PC buyers don't consider pc gaming, when buying a pc. A game and gamepad should be included with the hardware. This would straight forwardly imply gaming on pc and quite possibly ignite a spark for a whole new revitalized pc gaming market. It may help revitalize a staled OS. If MS can license WinX and WinV, it can certainly include a games for windows and a sidewinder. It's a new approach for a changing world.;)

[Triv1um]

PC gaming will never take off massively.

Its to expensive to stay up-to-date with hardware just to play the newest games.

[Marcosll]

Ok, to begin with, real gamers game on PC, everyone knows this.

Secondly, the PC game market is alive and well, if not just ask Blizzard entertainment.

The thing with consoles is that people will buy terrible games for them. My friend has an Xbox360 and owns 30 titles, of which he only plays 1 (pro evo). Out of those 30 games only 3 are any good and the rest are unplayable garbage.

With PC you can really reasearch a game before you buy it. All my PC titles are excellent games and I can proudly say I don't own any bad PC games except World of Warcraft.

So bad game developers can't survive in the PC industry and they move to consoles? Well I don't really care about all those FPS clone games anyways.