Piracy Forced id's Hand To Multiplatform Gaming 224
CVG is reporting on comments from a GDC talk last week by id CEO Todd Hollenshead on the necessity of multiplatform development. Essentially, said Hollenshead, id was forced to start developing for consoles because of the rampant piracy of PC games. "Enemy Territory: Quake Wars was given as an example of id's multiplatform direction. Originally in development for PC at the hands of Splash Damage and id Software, the multiplayer-focussed action game is now additionally heading to Xbox 360 and PS3."
Yeah, because nobody pirates console games, huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Speaking of which, I wish they would stop lumping some guy at home who burns a game from his buddy to play on his machine in with some guy in china who produces and sells tens of thousands of copies of a game.
Anyway, I can't remember the last time I played a truly great id game, so I would say the real reason they had to start developing for consoles was to pick from a larger and less discerning player base.
Re:Yeah, because nobody pirates console games, huh (Score:2, Interesting)
Who needs to pirate console games? (Score:4, Insightful)
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I bought used PC games on at least 3 occasions. I bought used copies of "Hitman 2: Silent Assassin" and "SimCity 4" at a 'round the corner game store (real brick&mortar, not black or grey market), as well as a used copy o
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Nice that you have an independently-owned game store near you, but there's nothing like that where I live. The only place I can go for used PC games is eBay.
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Oh they do, they really do. Look back at the uproar that publishers and authors unleashed when photocopiers because standard equipment for libraries.
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For the record, I g
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I've _never_ bought a new car. My current car (a '95 Audi, I bought in 2002) - the total I paid for that car is less than the depreciation that I'd have lost on a 2002 Audi to today - so even if I gave the car away tomorrow, I would still be ahead. Si
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Well don't trust me for financial advice, but I'd say that buying a car new was your first oversight. Ah well, at least you only need to learn that lesson once - unless you're rich.
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Re:Yeah, because nobody pirates console games, huh (Score:2)
I'm not much of a gamer and I can remember great ID games. Surely with a 4-digit Slashdot id you must have tried Doom or Quake, so you never play at all or you have a memory problem.
As for console players, are you sure they're less discerning? I would think that, with the price they pay for the console and fo
Re:Yeah, because nobody pirates console games, huh (Score:4, Insightful)
I hope that makes sense...
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It's called ET: Quake Wars: http://www.enemyterritory.com/ [enemyterritory.com]
Friedmud
Re:Yeah, because nobody pirates console games, huh (Score:5, Insightful)
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Right, when loaning the game wouldn't have worked?
Let's call them:
Big Evil Chinese Pirates - Pirates tons of games at $5 a shot, that the second class of pirate won't even spring for.
Little Cheap Skate Piddle Pirates - Extends the logic that, if I can make a back up copy as fair use, then I should be allowed to ma
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The number of people who have potential access to it isn't the issue. Copyright infringement is illegally copying something you don't have permission to. Piracy is the sale of illegally copied or reproduced goods. Its meaning has been slaughtered thanks to the media conflating piracy with copyright infringement, but one is far worse. Why? Because what does the kid gain by posting it to a torrent? Nothing. What do the chinese duplicators gain? A ni
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Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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You talk as though the rules are sacrosanct. What you ignore is that they exist as a result of a social contract, the entire point of which is to grow the public domain. The idea is that we, society, benefit from the production and public release of works. Thus, to encourage this process, society agrees to certain provisions (copyright). However, the media industry has v
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Eldred v. Ashcroft amicus briefs (Score:2)
I have *NEVER* seen the industry go after a person that is making copies of 50 year old media.
Then you haven't read the amicus briefs in Eldred v. Ashcroft, such as this one by Dr. Seuss Enterprises.
I have *NEVER* seen the industry go after a person that is making copies of 50 year old media.
Tell that to the child care facilities who get sued for putting up drawings of Mickey Mouse [snopes.com]. Tell that to the scouting organizations who get sued for singing "God Bless America" and "This Land Is Your Land" [google.com].
Personally, I believe the creators of media should have the right to keep or bury their creations for as long as they want (and pass along this right to anyone that they so choose). Why? Because they created it.
It appears you favor perpetual copyright. So what happens once a significant chunk of all possible melodies is copyrighted (see "Melancholy Elephants" by Spider Robinson [baen.com]), and songwriters who compo
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That's understandable. The contract is not agreeable to the consumer so they don't accept it or its condition.
But the result of not accepting the contract is that the consumer does not receive the product and the seller does not receive payment.
So the seller gets no money, and that's their incentive to give fair offers. The consumer already has this as a mechanism of coerc
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Ignoring the idiots that are going to naturally tell me that even though I've lost a sale to someone that now has no need except for 'good will' to actually purchase my product, that piracy and theft are not the same. I'll never be able to explain to them how it is, and they will never have a rational explanation for why it isn't (yet some teen will try to explain).
Allow me to be the one that feeds the trolls.
Copyright violation [wikipedia.org]...
is the unauthorized use of material protected by intellectual property rights
Re:Yeah, because nobody pirates console games, huh (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you'll find that if you took these two cases before a judge and jury, the outcomes would be very different, and they might even be prosecuted under different statutes. The OP never said personal-use piracy was OK, just that it was different from running a massive pirate empire for profit. And he's absolutely right.
Piracy and theft are different in two major ways. First, as many others have stated, when you steal something, you're depriving its rightful owner of physical goods. If you steal something, you have it and he no longer does. That's not the case with piracy.
Second, it's relatively straightforward to measure the (monetary) amount of damage a thief does, but it's extremely difficult to do so in software piracy cases. If someone steals a CD from Best Buy, that's $14 in damages. If that person instead downloads a rip of that album from a BitTorrent tracker, how do you measure that? Not everyone who pirates something would have purchased it at full price. If, say, 10% of pirates would have bought the album if they couldn't get it otherwise, does that mean the company is out $1.40? And who, exactly, was deprived of that money? Are all of the retail stores in which a person might have bought it entitled to a cut? It's not at all a clear-cut issue.
As I'm sure is obvious by now, IANAL. YMMV. LOLOMGWTFBBQ.
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Re:Yeah, because nobody pirates console games, huh (Score:5, Insightful)
You're putting words into the grandparent poster [slashdot.org]'s mouth.
The grandparent poster didn't say it is was all right, they said that there is a difference. Which there is. A gas station would rather you shoplifted a single pack of cigarettes instead of hijacking their next shipment of cigarettes. Both are still wrong, but they warrant entirely different responses.
Of course, it's a sillier comparison because you're comparing traditional theft (which deprives the legal owner of a scarce commodity) with copyright infringement (which reduces the artificial scarcity copyright creates). They're different problems with different economics to consider. Indeed...
I haven't been a teen for a bit over a decade now, but I'll try to explain anyway.
Theft of property and copyright infringement are different crimes. They have different victims and different economic effects. If a thief breaks in Best Buy and steals a $50 (retail price) Sony TV, Best Buy suffers because they no longer has a TV. Best Buy has lost $40 (or whatever wholesale is). Sony has lost nothing. If the thief breaks into my house and steals my TV, neither Best Buy nor Sony have lost anything, but I've lost $50.
Conversely, (for the sake of argument) if an infringer breaks into Best Buy and makes an infringing copy of a $50 (retail price) game, Best Buy still has the original. The value of that original is slightly reduced because the artificial scarcity has dropped. This is potentially a "lost sale." This lost revenue from potential sale impacts both Sony and Best Buy. How much? Definitely not $50. The reality is that some portion of copyright infringers, if infringement was not an option, would not purchase the game. It's hard guess what the percentage is, but let's guess only 10%. Now on average over multiple illegal copies, Sony has lost $36 (90% of the $40 they'd expect) and Best Buy $9. Total loss to "the world": $45.
By any stretch of the imagination, clearly individual copyright infringement cases are slightly less harmful than individual cases of theft. The total economic loss for the above hypothetical example is $45 to $50. Both are bad, but given the choice I'd prefer losing $45 to $50. The situation because even more clear if you believe the "can't or won't pay for it" percentage is higher, or if the thefts involve damage to other property (breaking a window to get in).
The situation gets even weirder when I buy the game. So when I bought my $50 Sony TV, I also bought this $50 game. Our hypothetical and slightly insane thief breaks in, steals my TV and makes a copy of the game. I'm out $50 for the TV, but for the game I've lost... nothing. Perhaps a very small amount of value from potential resale value on the game, but nothing significant. Despite the thief having broken into my house the real economic damage is done to Best Buy and Sony. That's a heck of a trick, to have a thief break into my house, "steal" my copy of the game, but have third parties suffer financially.
This is not to suggest that copyright infringement is "okay." Indeed, copyright infringement has a definite detrimental impact on society. But it's a different impact from theft. The steps to defend against these crimes are different.
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You're just willfully misinterpreting me now.
All of my rambling was to a few simple points. I'm going to try once more to make them clear:
1. Copyright infringement is wrong. It hurts individuals specifically and society as a whole. (Despite your claims, I have not argued otherwise. You're seeing attackers where they don't exist.)
2. Copyright infringement is different from theft (or rape, since you made the comparison). It has different victims, different levels of damage, and different prevention
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I gotta say, that $50 television cost Best Buy $20, and it cost the manufacturer $10.
Where as if someone steals my work, its not just a reduction in artificial scarcity, it is a real loss of productivity. No. At most it is a "potential loss of income". Your productivity is how much finished work can be output in some unit of time. Particularly in the era of digital distribution, you only have to make something once, and can distribute it a countless number of times without having to make another original. On its own, this makes your work (and mine, for that matter) distinctly different
Re:Yeah, because nobody pirates console games, huh (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd say it's less rape, less theft, and more like trespass to land. When someone steps onto your property, they aren't depriving you of the property, but they're using it without permission, which is sufficient for that offense. With copyright infringement, they're not depriving you of your copyright or of the creative work, but they are using the creative work without permission.
Still, given that you backed down from saying that it was "EXACTLY the same as theft" in nearly the same breath, I don't know if you're really the right person to judge the situation objectively.
Argue as much as you like, an illegal act is the same as another illegal act
So you're saying that you think that we ought to execute people for jaywalking because jaywalking is the same as premeditated murder? I'm going to have to disagree with you there, and I think that pretty much everyone else in the world will too. One offense is not the same as another. Even Hammurabi knew this.
The only muddying is coming from folks that want to distinguish two separate items into a group of tangible vs. intangible because the general public is still trapped into blue collar lifestyles and thus incapable of understanding the second.
Actually, I want to distinguish between them because they are not the same, and it is unwise (as we've seen) to treat them identically. I want very much for people to understand the latter, and many of my posts here, including this one, are aimed at just this. It doesn't bother me if you think that copyright infringement should be illegal. Even I think it should be illegal (though we may differ on precisely what should constitute it). It does bother me if the reason you think that is because you don't understand the issues. I'd rather have people making informed decisions.
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It's ok right?
Taking stuff you haven't paid for is morally wrong. you can call it what you like, it doesn't change the fact that its a dirty low-down thing to do.
Most games have demos, there are reviews, previews and screenshots, movies of gameplay etc etc.
And its not like its buying a house, its a thirty-fourty dollar PC game.
People who
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It's ok right?
Taking stuff you haven't paid for is morally wrong. you can call it what you like, it doesn't change the fact that its a dirty low-down thing to do.
The difference being that when you steal a packet of biscuits, the store is now missing a packet of biscuits that could have been sold to someone else. When you copy elec
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Is it ok if I give a few of the biscuits to my neighbor?
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Re:Yeah, because nobody pirates console games, huh (Score:2)
We need back the innovative company that brought you Commander Keen and Wolfenstein 3D because they pushed the state of the art at the time, not Quake fifty-million because they can make a quick buck.
-uso.
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As an older (30+) gamer who played games heavily throughout the 90s, I have never understood the esteem that Commander Keen is held in. The graphics were pretty mediocre even for the time, the platform gameplay was tedious, and the responsiveness was lousy (though that was a very common problem in PC arcade-style games of the time).
Wolfenstein 3D was awesome, though.
Hate to break it to you Id... (Score:2)
Re:Hate to break it to you Id... (Score:5, Insightful)
Many people who own consoles don't even think of piracy, know it's possible, or care. They just want something they can turn on and play.
Does Piracy Even Have a Future? (Score:2, Interesting)
What happens when almost every game that comes out includes core design functionality that requires online play, and therefor, online registration?
Does this put an end to piracy or are there some n
Re:Does Piracy Even Have a Future? (Score:4, Insightful)
Two words... Private servers.
Re:Does Piracy Even Have a Future? (Score:4, Insightful)
PP2P2P2PP2P (Score:2)
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Game clients have a completely opposite networking purpose; they're meant to be dependent on a centralized system, and the specs and software that this system runs are never publicly released or supported. Remember when some group of hackers cloned Battle.net to play pirated Starcraft? It took them YEARS to accomplish that.
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By playing on a private server you are missing out on a big portion of the game experience in an MMO type of game. I can only speak for WoW. One of my favorite parts of WoW is the world PVP aspect. World PvP works because there are hundreds of people logged into a server at any given time. Do private servers really have that much of an audience. What about battlegrounds? How are you going to do BGs if your server can't connect up to the legit ones?
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Four words: "Not releasing the server."
Writing a decent game server when you don't have the details of the protocol is far from trivial. You might be able to reverse-engineer the protocol, till they start obfuscting or encrypting them.
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To the best of my knowledge, and I may well be wrong, neither Everquest nor World of Warcraft have officially released server code for end users to toy with. Both have private servers out there in the world to play on. It's certainly not trivial in the grand scheme of things. But neither is actually coming up with the mod chip and such for existing consoles. Game companies can continue to obfuscate and change code around, and I'm sure they do. But if you already
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When was the last time you were able to buy a CD/DVD of a game that didn't require a patch to fix some rather significant bugs that "just happened" to be missed by their Q/A department? Patches that would break any ISO or other type of image for a pirated copy?
Even the so called "Collector's Edition" games that come out a year or two later than the original release tend to need a patch somewhere along the line.
I suspect Blizzard keeps on giving out pat
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I agree with your post overall, but isn't there legal standing in place for "abandonware," or circumventing copy protection if the content that's protected is from a company that no longer exists or no longer supports the platform? I seem to recall hearing a handful of stories about it.
Still, I'd much rather have the support right out of the gate,
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None whatsoever, nada zip zilch. Granted, however, the original copyright holder is usually not in a position to sue you, but usually there's some parent company that now owns it that will.
Details? (Score:3, Insightful)
The game in question is, reportedly, multi-player. Which almost certainly means that it will be linked to servers under the publisher's control. Done correctly, no amount of crackz, warez, numberz, etc can defeat an online, real-time verification system.
I think it is a lot more likely that they chose to develop for the consoles because, surprise there is a market there!
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The order of most-pirated must be something like:
1) single-player and old multi-pleyer PC games
2) single-player console games
3) modern multi-player PC & console games
"modern multi-player PC & console games" is at the bottom of the list because, as you state, real-time multi-player portals are impossible to crack unless you can guess ones of the CD-Keys from a gam
JC Annoying f'ing web page! (Score:2)
I'd love to have a meaningful debate about what ever the message was, but I gave up trying to read it after I couldn't successfully block out the advertising with my hand while trying to read the text.
-Rick
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-Rick
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Okay, animated banner at the top, ticker at the head of the page, image swapping adds when you cursor over the menu, animated vertical add on the right, flash add mid text, two smaller animated box adds on the left... did I miss any this time?
-Rick
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-Rick
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Uh, maybe it's because Doom III sucked? (Score:4, Interesting)
Doom III was massively pirated, to be sure, but every pirate =/= a lost purchase. My theory is this: people pirated Doom III, realized it was complete and utter shit, and simply didn't buy it. That's what a certain person I know did...
In any event, online games are a sure-fire way to combat piracy, and a reasonable one at that. ET: Quake Wars looks amazing and I'll buy it the day it comes out.
But I can also pirate console games. It just takes a little more work.
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I remember the big mess when Doom 3 came out. History has not looked upon Doom 3 kindly, but upon first release the game was touted as a graphical revolution with incredible twitch gameplay. The whole "duct-taped flashlight" joke didn't even kick in till weeks after the game's release.
D3 is also a prime example of what piracy does to sales. The game was pirated far more than any other game before its time, there were torrents *everywhere*, and *everyone* had a copy. Anticipation was high, and when a warez
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How many because it really sucked, and how many because, well, they already played the game (and most likely beat it)?
I remember very distinctly that Doom 3, while not the revolutionary end-all of shooters, was well-received when it was first released. It wasn't until later that people complained about the cheap jump-at-you gameplay and darkness. On IRC at the time it was constantly full of "ZOMG check out Doom 3" exclamations.
I believe strongly that Doom 3's sales were completely decimated by piracy. W
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If they played Doom 3 all the way to the end, then they've already been punished enough.
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Actually, it's really bad.
"The whole "duct-taped flashlight" joke didn't even kick in till weeks after the game's release."
I know I posted about this, the same day the game was to be released.
I know the one reason for not buying the game, was that it was just so boring and nothing like what was promised.
I know a lot of other people who also didn't buy the game, because it just wasn't any good.
"D3 is also a prime example of what piracy does to sales."
D3 is a prime example
Re:Uh, maybe it's because Doom III sucked? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm curious where your information comes from. Doom 3 lost 10% of its sales because of the early illegal release? How can you know what the number would have been without that release? It was pirated more than any other game previously? I wasn't aware that NPD was tracking those numbers. "Everyone" had a copy? Hyperbole just makes you look like you lack real evidence.
Ultimately you're guessing. You have no more evidence that piracy caused fewer sales than expected than the grandparent post claiming that the game just sucked.
Here are some actual numbers. You've suggested that "Piracy ruined Doom 3...." Doom 3 sold 3.5 million copies. [shacknews.com] Most publishers would love to sell 3.5 million copies of a game. Games generally considered to be highly successful, like Warcraft III [blizzard.co.uk] , Baldur's Gate [bioware.com] , and Unreal Tournament [gearboxsoftware.com] didn't sell 3.5 million copies. There are only perhaps a dozen or two PC games that can claim to have topped that. [wikipedia.org] id claimed Doom 3 was "...id's most successful game to date. [shacknews.com]" If that's ruination, I'm afraid of success. Assuming you claim of decimation is correct, we're talking about id losing about 350,000 sales. That is a huge number of sales; many PC games never sell that many. But really is the different between 3.5 and 3.85 million copies really ruination?
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And for many people, the additional work of pirating a console game makes it cheaper to just buy the game. I can do two hours of work for a client, or spend two hours tracking down a pirated version, downloading, burning it to DVD, etc. Unless pirating is a hobby you enjoy for its own sake, it is more expensive to pirate console games than to buy them.
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Homebrew enables piracy and vice versa (Score:2)
And for many people, the additional work of pirating a console game makes it cheaper to just buy the game.
Unless you value being able to run homebrew [wikipedia.org] on a console enough that homebrew alone justifies the price. Look at all the people who modded their Xbox just to run standard-definition media playback software [wikipedia.org], and look at people who mod their Nintendo DS to run DSOrganize, MoonShell, and LMP-ng. In that case, piracy is just a bonus.
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I haven't pirated a PC game in years, but I am
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This is just the same old developer blame game we've seen hundreds of times before, blame anybody and everything for your own shortcomings.
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I liked Doom 3 too. Genuinely scary stuff, very atmospheric, and a good update of the original.
Half-life 2 was good as well, but felt a bit directionless in comparison. (What? I have to go on another long journey? Is there a reason for this one? No? Oh.)
How Quickly They forget. (Score:4, Insightful)
If memory servers, John Carmack, Mr id., himself, once said 'that they are happy that there game is being pirated, because that means that so many people will want to play it. Eventually people will be happy to throw money our way'.
That came true in so many ways.
The whole foundation of their company is based on piracy.
Crazy, crazy days.
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It's one thing when you're just supporting a dozen programmers or so on your game. When you're 20 million dollars in the red by the time the game sees the shelves, you can't take such a casual attitude towards lost sales.
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Casual schmasual. How about just in the low-cost segment. Video games have become hollywoodized, where people believe that only by investing huge amounts of money to make photorealistic, physically accurate games that you can have a hit. Sure, there's a place for that, but by the same token, no one DESERVES to have a hit if they invest a lot of money and time (see: Daikatana).
For my part, I go with the "it just wasn't that fun of a game" crowd for Doom III. Sure it was pirated a lot, but so was Half-L
Re:How Quickly They forget. (Score:4, Insightful)
Doom3 not being as good as the hype they had on that game (Hell, they had all kinds of it
being flung about at the two QuakeCons before release... You could've drowned in the
hype it was that bad... But yet, the glimpses they handed us looked SO good, we all
bought into it...) is the real reason it didn't sell as well as it could have, not piracy.
really? (Score:2)
Dont you think they rather just target the console market, because more people can play (and buy) their games than?
Maybe id has economic problems because they didnt have a real hit title recently? I mean some of their older games where groundbreaking but y
Confusion (Score:2)
...started to eye console platforms as a method to battle the financial loss piracy incurs.
1) Expanding into consoles does nothing to stem piracy. If piracy was the cause, then they would stop making the PC version.
2) Selling for console platforms is a method to make more money. Expanding your market is a good move regardless of the existance of piracy.
Dev Costs (Score:3, Insightful)
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That depends on whether their are cracked servers out there to play on. If the server doesn't require validation, then you don't need a real serial to play.
Duuh. Works half the time. (Score:3, Funny)
Little-Known Facts (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know Mr. Hollenshead personally, so all I have to go on are his public remarks. And it seems every time I see his name in the press, he's bleating about how much money he's "losing" to unsanctioned copies all over the net.
Let me clue in the business types at id Software on why they "lost" a sale to yours truly.
Doom III was widely anticipated, yes. And it looked like it was going to be a visually amazing piece of work. However, it was also widely reported that, unless you had the absolutely latest and greatest PC hardware at the time, it was going to run very poorly. Well, at the time, I didn't have the latest and greatest PC hardware. All I had was a paltry dual-CPU Pentium-III running at 1GHz (and 100MHz memory bus) with 256MiB of RAM and a GeForce FX5900. It was apparent from the press that Doom III would run like crap on this rig. So I didn't buy it. I didn't buy Quake 4 for the same reason.
It wasn't until last year that I finally bought a completely new machine (AMD Athlon X2 4400+, 2GiB RAM, GeForce 7900GT) which would run Doom III well. But after downloading the free demo and playing it, I decided against it. I just didn't find stumbling around in the dark to be terribly fun, and I'm not really into horror for its own sake.
Quake 4, on the other hand, seemed like it might be fun. However, every time I visited the shelf at Fry's, it either A) wasn't there, or B) was priced at $40.00. So I waited. And waited. Eventually, Fry's started selling them for $20.00 a copy, and that's when I bought it.
So there you have it: id Software "lost" money to me, but somehow it had nothing whatsoever to do with unsanctioned copying (imagine that!). The Executive Summary you should take away from this is, to make good sales, you should release games that are:
The importance of point #1 cannot be overstated. If you hit #1, you can kind of fudge on #2. I've grabbed all the Serious Sam games, despite their uneven game play, because they're reasonably priced. OTOH, there's absolutely no way I'm going to buy a copy of "Sonic and the Secret Rings" for the XBox 360 until it drops from the preposterously stratospheric $60.00 they're charging for it.
Schwab
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Schwab
Budgets and Sales (Score:3, Insightful)
Probably the largest factor is that, today, console games are where the sales are at. A "hit" game on the PC might sell 250k copies, where on the console it would be at least a million. Of course, there are examples like WOW, that have become massive enterprises unto themselves, but for the run-of-the-mill AAA PC title those kinds of numbers are only a dream. The PC simply does not touch the consoles in terms of sales potential. Sure there are more PCs in the world, but how many of those are used primarily for gaming, or even gaming at all (excluding casual games, which we're not talking about.)
As budgets for triple-A titles grow larger, you can only respond in so many ways without raising prices on the game itself: Opt to keep the budget small (lower development costs), increase your potential consumer base (more platforms), or charge for "extras" (expansions, subscriptions, micro-transactions.)
In the end it's all business and a simple investment-benefit calculation: They believe that targeting consoles will bring in more money than what the additional work will cost them. As game budgets continue to grow, while simultaneously tipping more and more towards the cost of developing the artistic assets and the code behind the game makes up less and less, it only makes sense to hit as many targets as possible if the art assets can be shared with minimal or no tweaking, even to the point that it will make sense even if little of the code is shared between platforms -- which we'll see more and more of with the architectural differences between the 360, PS3, Wii and PC.
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Maybe, but this presents a problem in its self. What of the people that don't have an internet connection or have such a slow connection that this one be a hassle (example: dial-up)? Not everyone is on broadband and always connected and online. What if I wanted to play my Wii in my car on an LCD? Or at Grandma's house who doesn't know what the internet is? Or at a friends house who lives so far out in town can't get a
Dial-up can still be workable (Score:2)
Not everyone is on broadband
Not every game design requires the low latency of broadband. Games that can be played on dial-up will outsell games that can be played on broadband in geographic areas where broadband is prohibitively expensive.
What if I wanted to play my Wii in my car on an LCD?
Then you would connect at home and your Wii would download an n-day ticket to play Animal Crossing 3. Or you would play a DS game instead.
Or at Grandma's house who doesn't know what the internet is?
Many residential broadband plans include 10 to 40 hours of roaming dial-up access per month.
Don't get my wrong I like surfing the net on my Wii but if before I bought it I knew I had to authenticate my copy before I could play it I wouldn't buy the system at all
Steam?
Re: (Score:2)