Game Devs On the Future of PC Gaming 375
Shacknews wraps up a developer panel at PAX East discussing the future of gaming on the PC. They cover topics including DRM, digital download platforms and cloud-based gaming services.
"Joe Kreiner of Terminal Reality: 'If you look at it from a giant publisher perspective, then the numbers on the PC just really don't make financial sense for you to bother with it. But if you start out with the mindset — you know, you're targeting that group, you make a niched product that's going [to] do well, if you look at a lot of the titles on Steam, Torchlight's a really good example — as long as you know that's your audience to begin with, and you make something inside of a budget that you know you're going to be selling those kinds of numbers, you can be very successful. I think it just takes a targeted developer. ... There is no [PC] platform, really. It's just a mish-mosh of hardware, an operating system that kind of supports games. The problem with that platform is, there's no standards and piracy is rampant, so why would we want to make a video game for that platform unless you had some sort of draconian DRM thing to keep it from being stolen?"
Right (Score:5, Insightful)
WoW gives Blizzard 11 million times ~$12 per month and an unknown amount of starting purchases.. that's not financial sense?
Or, if they want people to buy them.. (Score:5, Insightful)
..stop shipping them as obvious console ports. Pretty much every major PC release in the last 2 years has had their control systems ported to the PC in a manner that can only be described as half-assed. Where it's most obvious is in menu systems (Dead Space), Vehicle controls (Red Faction, ME1), and Quick-Time events (Pick any game that had them). If you're going to put something on PC then you need to stop porting crappy control configurations and do the job right.
Piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
...they could start with A. not making PC games that crash when you do anything (yes an exaggeration, but you get the point) and B. letting me play the game without insane drm hoops. When it's easier for me to play a downloaded copy than it is to play the copy you are selling, there is a serious problem.
And don't argue that Ubisoft's newest DRM scheme is the answer. Paying customers are having just as much trouble as the pirates.
Ubisoft. (Score:5, Insightful)
PC is a lost cause, just like the last 25 years (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no [PC] platform, really. It's just a mish-mosh of hardware, an operating system that kind of supports games. The problem with that platform is, there's no standards and piracy is rampant, so why would we want to make a video game for that platform unless you had some sort of draconian DRM thing to keep it from being stolen?
Every point of that has been true for the last 25 years. It hasn't kept PC game companies like Blizzard or EA from becoming multi-billion dollar ventures which rival the largest console companies -- without draconian DRM, without any hardware sales, without a monolithic platform. Why? PC games interfaces are not dumbed down for a living room interface, and thus can present more of a challenge to either creativity (Sim City, The Sims etc) or tactical/strategic skill (FPS, RTS etc). Mario, Wii Sports or Halo might be fun and can be a challenge for hand/eye, but aren't not exactly intellectually stimulating and engaging in the long term.
Sell me a product I like (Score:3, Insightful)
I play the occasional game here and there. I stole a few, sure.
But for instance I just bought the Orange Box two weeks ago and I'm not regretting it one bit. I bought Torchlight because it's some of the most fun you can have for $5 (steam sale). I'm going to buy SC2 because it's going to be an awesome game, etc.
I like buying good stuff, or "ok" stuff for a good price. I don't however like the idea of paying $50 for a shit game. (Looking at you, 90% of the market)
Lower prices to achieve huge net gains (Score:2, Insightful)
... I stole a few ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Hey Joe! (Score:1, Insightful)
Joe Kreiner! Everything you said basically boils down to "Making games for the PC is haaaaard and we don't make as much money from the flawed, pitiful, weaksauce console ports we try to fob off on you."
Got a request for you buddy.
Keep your whining ass as far away from the PC game market as possible. Thanks.
Leave the PC game making to the folks who aren't afraid of putting in a little hard work to make games for players who are capable of controlling games using more than their opposable thumbs.
Console vs PC (Score:2, Insightful)
What stupid babble (Score:5, Insightful)
Holy cow, some of this is simply pure garbage:
* "The problem with that platform is, there's no standards and piracy is rampant, so why would we want to make a video game for that platform unless you had some sort of draconian DRM thing to keep it from being stolen?"
In other words, DRM is what we need, and we need more of it! The current DRM cannot be a possible reason for low sales!
* "If you look at how many guys have high-end graphics cards--well, yeah, all of you do--but the more casual players, the more general audience might not. The percentage is probably pretty low."
Thus, you're forced to allow us options to set graphics options - ranging from very simple all the way up to dual-cards. Which is difficult because... ?
* "If everybody would stop pirating, if everybody would stop doing DRM, it would be a much happier world, wouldn't it? We'd have a lot more PC games sold and a lot more happier customers."
Piracy will never, ever stop. And as we've seen very clearly in the past ten years, DRM is quite worthless, succeeding merely in stopping people from buying the originals, as the pirate copies are so much better.
* "I think you're going to continue to see what we've seen in the past five years, which is just console games ported to the PC..."
Which usually don't sell all that well, as PCs are simply more capable than consoles. High-end PCs, that is - the others can have plenty of graphics options.
* "PC gaming isn't dead, it's just in a partially vegetative state."
Which is why the indies are doing so well - have a look at "Plants vs. Zombies", for example...
* "At some point, there's going to have to be a fundamental paradigm shift in how we interface with the PC. The screen's just not going to do it anymore."
I... see. So, let's not use the monitor. Sounds brilliant
I'm sorry, chaps, but that discussion seemed pretty useless, particularly as the DRM attitude of some of the are idiotic (especially Joe Kreiner, Engine Licensing VP - but what do you expect from a manager anyway?)
Ciao,
Klaus
If this is what they think get out of the industry (Score:4, Insightful)
Publishers who think they have to DRM things to death or the PC market isn't "worth it" who also think that the console market is "piracy" free nirvana (it isn't) should simply leave the PC gaming industry.
Chances are, they are making crap games that are just half-assed console ports, or trying to shove radical schemes (Ubisoft's constant phone home system) down people's throats. Companies that do either should EXPECT TO FAIL, and "piracy" has nothing to do with it.
If these companies leave the market that just makes new room for the next Bioware or similar company to rise. I note that even EA, the 600 pound gorilla has been mostly abandoning DRM of late, first sign of intelligent thought from that company in over 10 years.
The PC gaming industry will never die. The platform is too large, and it is the only platform that is actually open to independent publishers, since you don't have to pay a "Sony, Nintendo, or Microsoft tax" just to access the platform. That, coupled with faster and faster internet connections and the rise of digital distribution (I buy all my games this way now) there is more opportunity than ever for competition.
This, I suspect, is why certain publishers actually WISH the PC would die. On the PC anyone who wants to can compete with them. On the consoles, access is restricted in a RIAA/MPAA fashion. I would say that the console publishers are actually the ones clinging to a dying business model, not the PC...
Re:Right (Score:3, Insightful)
I believe they are one of (and the biggest) exceptions to the rule. Still, the rule does have a number of exceptions...
Re:Ubisoft. (Score:4, Insightful)
You know what you should do where this happens?
Refuse to buy it. Refuse to crack it. Do not support this game in any way that would endorse it (that includes pirating it btw.).
Instead, go and purchase game that you do not fear will fuck your experience up when drm fails (for any reason).
Make sure developers understand that your only option to playing their game in way you enjoy it is to pirate it and/or crack drm. Make sure makers of games that you find that have acceptable rights management learn that you enjoy and buy their products party because of it. Write a email or two.
Re:Right (Score:3, Insightful)
And WoW essentially has, mentioned in the summary, draconian DRM; you can't really do anything with the game without the explicit authorisation and cooperation of Blizzard servers.
Re:Getting frustrating (Score:3, Insightful)
As a game developer myself, I must say that you've got it wrong.
These 'pirates' are NOT A LOSS.
There is -no- appreciable cost to them having a "pirated" version of the software, so spending the millions they do on DRM schemes is complete and utter lunacy. Instead they should reinvest those millions into making their games better, and enticing "those who didn't buy", or even -not- spending it at all, and requiring lower returns to still make a profit. There is NO logical business sense to DRM.
Re:Piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
And If I don't want to play with/against other humans?
Re:Ubisoft. (Score:4, Insightful)
You've sort-of missed something in there, though.
In this modern world, if sales drop, it's not because the game is naff, it's not because there's a recession or the price point is set too high. It's because of piracy! PIRACY!!!!
Writing emails is unlikely to have any impact, because you're only attempting to justify your decision to pirate it rather than buy it.
Re:Right (Score:2, Insightful)
Tell that to all those private wow servers please. Some of them have 14k players online at peak times.
Re:Piracy (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Ubisoft. (Score:3, Insightful)
Bunch of whiny bitches (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Well... (Score:3, Insightful)
To play devil's advocate, I don't think that would work. Most people* don't care about the box and physical manual, and the soundtrack can copied as well (as well as a pdf of the manual).
* Personal experience. I have no data to back it up. If you do, please share :)
An iddy biddy niche market... (Score:5, Insightful)
Of one billion PC users.
Sure, you can carve that up with whatever limitations and excuses you want, but throwing away a market with potential like that shows either an incredible ignorance of economics, or a willful strategy of shifting retail practices to closed mediums where users can be controlled and gouged on price.
Re:Piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
Multiplayer does not add value for everybody. I rarely if ever play multiplayer games because I simply don't have the time. If I'm playing single player games, I can usually get away with being interrupted by real-life but pausing (or saving) and coming back later. I can't do that in a multiplayer game. In a multiplayer game I have to make a commitment of a block of uninterrupted time to play, and my life just doesn't work that way.
The only multiplayer action I could realistically do would be short (~5-10 minutes) rounds in a shooter, and I want more than that from my gaming time.
DRM stopping pirates? (Score:2, Insightful)
"The problem with that platform is, there's no standards and piracy is rampant, so why would we want to make a video game for that platform unless you had some sort of draconian DRM thing to keep it from being stolen?"
The problem is that the draconian DRM isn't keeping it from being pirated. Pirates get to play free while us paying customers sometimes don't get to play what we payed for. The system is inherently broken, and it's starting to push toward a trend of 'rented game licenses'. By pushing DRM, you are only hurting your paying customers.
Re:Right (Score:4, Insightful)
So they have a game that people want to play and are willing to pay for.
If computer gaming is "dead" then it's because there haven't been enough killer games out.
And why the hell don't game companies actually make use of their products. I really enjoyed Far Cry. Now they had all kinds of assets already developed when they were done with Far Cry, yet they made the decision when going to Far Cry 2 to start from scratch with brand new engine. They could have made a second Far Cry with a lot less investment and it would have sold. I'm glad to see that Bioware is taking this approach with Dragon Age: Awakenings. I'm still waiting for a new Burnout Paradise game. I mean, how much would it cost to just put out Burnout Paradise 2? Just do some new textures, design a new town, some new races and a few new skins for cars and people like me would be happy to have it. And I wouldn't pirate it because I like to do the online racing and events with other people.
I think the game companies are leaving a lot of money on the table for PC, "rampant piracy" or not.
Re:Or, if they want people to buy them.. (Score:2, Insightful)
What is even more ridiculous is how a handful of these "developers" presume to speak for the entire PC gaming world.
I think the title of the article should be "Greedy Game Devs On THEIR Future in PC Gaming". I'm tired of all this shit where some guy who works for some mega game corporation decides that they speak for EVERY PC game developer and player.
DRM and gamer groups (Score:5, Insightful)
Generally, there have traditionally been five different groups of people who (want to) have a game.
1. The group that cannot afford it and thus copies it.
2. The group that simply collects copies, no matter if it's good or sucks or whatever, gotta have 'em all.
3. The group that kinda-sorta likes the game, or thinks they might, and copies it if possible. If not, so be it.
4. The group that WANTS a game, preferably free, but buys if it can't be gotten another way.
5. The group that simply buys a game and doesn't care about copying.
Depending on your genre and particular game, you may have different weighs in those groups, a sequel will probably have more weigh in group four than a casual game without a brand behind it, which will probably have more weigh in group four or five.
Now imagine you implement the absolute, perfect and unbreakable DRM. What will change.
You will not gain any sales from group one. They couldn't afford buying your game before, that won't change with any DRM you could tack onto it.
You will also not gain any sales from group two. They just collect because it's free.
You might gain a few sales from group three, IF your game price is below the threshold where people would rather abstain if they're unsure whether it's worth it.
You will certainly gain sales from group four, who will now be forced to buy your game. They will even accept any DRM you force down their throat because they want that game.
You will OTOH also certainly lose sales from group five, though, due to DRM and them not accepting it.
The question is now, do you expect your fanboys to be numerous enough to outweigh the losses from the (almost certainly financially potent) group five, who probably didn't care about the price but do possibly care about the paternalism?
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
This was true back in the mid-90's, but realistically there are only two companies releasing designs that everyone else uses for gaming purposes: AMD and Intel for CPUs, and AMD/ATI and Nvidia for video cards. Yes, I know that trouble shows up with different architectures on older cards, but come on.
No longer do they have to worry about Verite, 3DFX, S3ViRGE, etc...they are using the same basic APIs, and really only have to optimize for ATI or Nvidia. True, there are other options like Intel's GMA, but you aren't going to be gaming on that underpowered thing anyway.
There was a time when the "wide variety of config" argument made sense...but it just sounds like lazy developers to me at this point.
My apologies if my ignorance preceeds me.
Re:Right (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Piracy (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
that would be my cue to stop gaming alltogether.
In case you didnt notice (if you never played Halo online, or battlefield), anonymous internet people are asshats. Halo online is a constant barage of 13 year old squeaky teens trying to teabag you, every single battlefield server has at least a few tards completely ruining the immersion by trying their best to exploit certain engine features (dolphin diving, running around with a 'nade launcher like they are playing quake, killing you with airdropped-supplies). I'm pretty sure every online game has some of this.
When i want to enjoy the environment of a video game, i do not trust anonymous internet asshats to co-operate with giving me a nice WW2 (or whatever) like experience, they will fuck it up. In those cases i much prefer the slightly less smart, but much more realistic IA the developer puts in the game.
online gaming is fine for no-holds-barred Deathmatch, unreal/quake already is unrealistic as fuck, but i dont need some asshat ruining my RPG-experience jumping around and killing NPCs
Re:Piracy (Score:2, Insightful)
Valve offers the very same for free through Steam.
Quandry online vs offline. (Score:2, Insightful)
There are two large divisions in the marketing of PC games and some minor ones.
I think everyone could agree that cd-keys for online play could easily be a sufficient deterrent against piracy. The real problem is the single player portion and what is sufficient.
Online play with cd-key authentication systems quite simply work as a deterrent to piracy. Well it does, if there is a will by game companies to shutdown leaked cd-keys and to close out cracked servers as they appear, then piracy is negligible. There are no cd-key generator that work for online play unless the game company makes a mistake in how it seed the hashes. Monitoring stolen cd-keys is quite easy. It only takes the will on the company to shut them down. Sure there will be a few people complain because they were stupid enough to allow their cd-key to be stolen, but those people are idiots and have no one to blame but themselves. They lone their cd-keys out or load cd-key stealers onto their comp. I have no sympathy for either type of person. cd-key stealers are usually contained in game downloads over torrents or most commonly when they download cheats for online play. Simply to bad for them.
The issue of cracked servers. First thing is to exclude them from showing up in the game server list and in the common server browser programs. The rest of the remaining few servers are easy to find and kill with a simple take down notice. Then the extreme cracked server located on the net are reduced to hiding in some third world country where their use is very limited. Even then there are legal ways to make the server so unplayable as to be useless, but by then the crowd is what? A few hundred players and so full of idiots and cheaters not even pirates are attracted. Ooopps... ya it is usually the pirates that are idiots and cheats. Hardly worth further effort. Doing these simple things means that for the common average person a cracked copy is unattractive, useless and reduces piracy in this online segment to negligible.
So where does this leave the single player game. This is the problem area. Perhaps some choices must be made. People can argue about the causes all they want over semantics, but the reality is piracy is simply about convenience and has nothing todo with some personal philosophy once you start looking at the amount of piracy involved are hundreds of thousands and in some cases millions. This is where for a long time game companies wanted it stopped but it meant unusual harsh methods that would affect their actual customers. I don't blame traditional PC game companies from being pissed at this. However I don't have much sympathy for those same companies that deal in primarily online games with putting in DRM that affects it's online customers. Not when 90% or better buy the game to play online and have little interest in the single player portion. This is where game companies can make a choice about their product. They do have options in how they split single player and online play so that online isn't pirated as stated above.
So this comes down to only single player games or the single player portion of a game that have issues with piracy and heavy handed and intrusive DRM. What Ubisoft has done is hit this issue with a hammer. They took the easy way out with the least cost involved, so of course the solution is horrid.There are registration and monitoring methods for single player that are far less obtrusive but are more costly that can control piracy. Yes it does require a connection to the net, but not a live connection all the time. Ubisoft choose the cheap way, not the best way. At least not the best way for their customers that is. But for those that don't want more control. Well you are living in a dream world where there is free beer. I'm sorry but the days of free beer are over and large scale piracy is to blame.
Now there are game companies or their publishers that are greedy. There is no doubt about that. They have new models in mind that are strictly to increase profits. However this primarily has noth
Re:Right (Score:3, Insightful)
EA PC reveneue isn't on the same level as XBox 360, but it's pretty equal to PS3 ... frankly Joe Kreiner is an idiot. No "giant publisher" can ignore that kind of potential in this day and age of multiplatform games.
Re:Piracy (Score:3, Insightful)
Look, the AC was obviously just trolling you, but it is kind of unfair to imply that not having interruptions is "not having a life". I have a good life, thank you very much, and I have tons of free time to spend as I see fit. If I'm doing something that's not gaming, I generally spend the whole evening doing it... I don't have sporadic interruptions in my gaming.
Not that I took it personally, I just think that there's a large perception that "having large blocks of time you can devote to gaming [or whatever else]" equates to not having a life, which simply isn't true, and it needs to be shown to be false whenever possible.
Re:Right (Score:2, Insightful)
If computer gaming is "dead" then it's because there haven't been enough killer games out.
No, it's "dead" because people are playing consoles more than PC's. They don't have to deal with compatibility issues with their operating system, hardware, driver versions, etc. etc. They don't have to deal with DRM and activations. They don't have to install anything. They just plug the disc in and start playing.
I used to be a die-hard PC gamer but as I got older, building PC's and constantly upgrading hardware became too time-consuming. About the only thing I use my computer for is playing a few casual games on facebook and that's about it. For my gaming fix, I play Wii and Playstation 3.
Re:Ubisoft. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm of a different take. If the big guys don't like the PC industry due to "piracy", don't let the door hit them on the way out.
PC gaming is a big market. If the big guys who make another sequel leave, then indies will step in and start making titles people want to play, with little to no DRM.
Look at Bioware. They have been immensely successful even with little to no DRM. After a later patch patched out disk checks, NWN1 still sold quite well for several years. Dragon's Age is doing extremely well with just basic CD-ROM protection (no constant Internet connections, no activation, etc.)
Yes, piracy sucks, but it is a fact of life. The best thing to do is have some multiplayer access which requires unique CD keys, and just leave the clientside alone. This way, serious players will always have legal copies. The pirates will have their copies no matter what, so might as not annoy the real players.