Second Take: Did Piracy Kill Iron Lore?

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Piracy has always existed in PC gaming, both the for-profit piracy and the freeloading.

The main difference from before is the costs involved in creating the games. Ten years ago a game might cost $M1 to develop, now it costs $M20 or more.

While, some years ago, piracy and freeloading were hurting the profit of gaming companies now its hurting the survival of the company, by not being able to recover the investments made, or not having enough resources to develop the next game.
It also doesnt help the developers that game prices have frozen, for PC games the price has been $50 for at least a decade.
 
I agree that the cost to make a game has grown too high. The same can be said of the movie industry. I just find it ironic when both industries blame piracy for poor products, lack of marketing or just accepting that it has a limited appeal.

It also doesn't help that the marketing/selling model of games has changed where the publisher has to rent space to sell. If nothing else the move to direct distribution to the buyer instead of brick and mortar is a positive for the publisher.
 
I don't think that piracy is responsible for the downfall of Iron Lore....

The problem as I see it is that the hardware required to play pc games is
so expensive plus the cost of the actual games, that people can only afford to bay so many games.
That means at least for me, that people tend to only buy the major titles of the year.

I used to spend loots of money on games but in most cases i didn't think
i got a fair amount of entertainment for my money. therefore i now only buy two
or max tree games per year and these tend to be the major titles.

Don't get me wrong i do understand that developing a game i costly, but if they stop trying to push the limit of what the hardware can take in every single game and focus on the nicer game play, story, control and foremost stability you didn't have to buy new hardware so often and could spend your hard earned money on more games.

 


This is ultimately my point about Iron Lore. I don't think the average gamer understands how difficult it is to make a game in this day and age (I certainly didn't until I became a member of the "gaming media"). It's extremely expensive to design a top shelf game these days. So when you have a young developer like Iron Lore come along, they're basically putting every dollar and resource into that first game. And let's be honest -- do we honestly expect a new game company to hit it out of the park on their first swing? Titan Quest obviously wasn't a great game, but do we expect a small indie developer to make an A+ game for its first title? I just think that's a little unfair. So even if the piracy rate for Titan Quest was lower, 40-50 percent, than what THQ suggested, my point is that ever dollar counts for a game developer, especially one that is making such a huge investment with its first title.
 
another problem with pc games is that a lot of the most resent games i bout
really wasn't play able until patch two or even tree. Things like that really pisses me off. If a spend a $50+ on a game i expect it to work. It feel like there are selling work prints an expect you to wait a month or two if ever until you can expect things to work.

One good example was Oblivion witch i bout for pc and an friend bout for 360. The PC version was full of bugs that annoyed me wheres the 360 worked like a charm. I checked the net and found a bug list and only one of 50+ bugs on the pc version had been reported on the 360 version....

I really believe that the developer shift from PC to console is a reflection of the consumer change of preferences.
I believe more and more gamers are moving from pc to console, plus more new gamers start playing on a console instead of a pc. The reason for this is as i stated above the cost of pc hardware that constantly needs upgrade, all the bugs and the fact that it is much easyer to operate a console than a pc.

Another thing that most be taking into consideration is that we are at the beginning of a shift in the console world from xbox, ps2 and GC to the new generation with ps3, xbox 360 and wii. People ho have recently bought a new console or are planing to are less likly to spend money on new pc games. I think that in a few year when the gap in performance between pc and console widens again, more people are going to buy pc games till the next gen of consoles are released.
 
This is a really interesting forum post from Stardock. Basically, a Stardock employee outlines the company's view on piracy and why they decided to go with no copy protection, and also writes that piracy is a big issue but not the biggest reason PC gaming is suffering right now. Good read (though I don't agree with everything this guy writes, especially the stuff about the gaming media not paying attention to Sins of a Solar Empire -- Tom's Games reviewed it not once but twice!). Anyway, here's the post:

http://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/post.aspx?postid=303512
 
It's easy...
If everyone pirated the commercial games out there... At the end, there would be no more games left to pirate. Do we want this to happen?

The only reason there are good games out there, is because people are hoping to get their investments back. I you don't stop pirating, who will? Are you hoping that your neighbors will buy enough legal games so the companies can survive still while you use pirate copies? Who will pay for your pirated copy in the future, if you don't?
 



Maybe you neglected looking at the issue close enough since you disagree with the statement about gaming media. It's easy to see it. Really.

Crysis failed to sell 100.000 copies during the first month. (source, google easily finds more)
Sins of a solar empire sold more than 100.000 copies during the first month. (source)

Crysis was sold during the chrismas season. I somewhat doubt there is a better time to sell games than that.
Sins of a Solar Empire was sold when? yep, right.

Now how many gaming magazines had Crysis on their cover during the last 2 years and how many had Sins of a Solar Empire on their Cover?

That's what it is all about. Nothing more, nothing less.
 
Piracy killed Iron lord? :heink: Thats a bunch Of ***** :fou:

If you scored poorly on a test, do you blame yourself (since you didn't study as hard as you should of have) or do you blame the teacher who did a poor job at educating you (or the test was too hard)

Now, I haven't played the game or even heard of it and to hear of a company that is blaming privacy for the failure of a game was either, one, horribly canned by piracy to the point that there was no profit in sight or, second, did a horrific job at marketing, producing, bug fixing and things that make a good game worth buying.

Though, after reading most of the post, it seems the latter has won. :lol:

Also, piracy isn't just with PC games since consoles have it as well, though, I don't know of any Xbox 360 and ps3 piracy but I do recall of the original Xbox mod (and what a mod 😀 ). And furthermore, don't forget about the people who copy movies from DVDs or even worst, sit in the movie theaters and video tape the stupid movie (and then sell it on the streets). However, with all these other forms of piracy, ya don't hear other companies crying over spilt milk. ( company crying over spilt milk -----> :cry:)

Though,

To fix piracy or in other words, shrink piracy (imo) would be to give out better demos. Since, albeit at least for the people who (are pirates, argh me matey!!) download only to "try out" the game, give that audience a demo that truly gives the player a preview of what to expect.

However, the old way of making a demo by limiting the game in some way is really boring. Thus, a new approach would be to make a game that was an off shoot of the original with all the features of the original. For example, Half life 2, the demo should have all of the half-life 2 eye catchers while only giving some of the story (Cliff hangers are good in a Demo! Lol). Or, maybe make a demo with an off shoot of the original just to give gamers the feel of what to expect since some developers don't want to give away the story or let's face it, not all games have stories 😗 .

In other words, it could be a type of advertisement for the developer.

For example, developer says "we make such and such games, thus, try out this awesome "out in second base" demo", you then magically download it and play it, then at end of demo, this displays, coming soon similar game just like this demo but with (new or same) story, features, weapons, pretty women or handsome men, W/e Floats your Boat!!!....Or Sinks it!!!
 


Yes an interesting read. For your information Rob, I do not consider Tom's Hardware a source of gaming reviews and I haven't for 10+ years. Although I do read the reviews, this site is not my primary source. So i dont think Stardock is knocking on TH's pride.

One thing I am definitely changing, and I notice this from my friends as well, is buying less and less games per year. Maximum of 1 every couple months. At the rate of this year, probably 4 more games on my buy list. Thats a maybe too.

The point the Stardock article mentioned about target audience is quite valid. Even though I have a bleeding edge machine, I am not necessarily going to buy Crysis in the future. Not to even mention those that have mid to low end gaming machines.

Also i used to live in asia, and all my friends pirate console games way more than PC games.
I remember the UFO machine attachment for the SNES. My friend had like 400+ console games in the form of diskettes. Recently, one of my friends modded their Wii and Xbox 360 for umm $20 :) Works like a charm. Give it a couple years and we will see a rise of console piracy.
 
That would be great if developers start abandoning pc gamers. They would be relying on the conole, and then when piracy got bad there, they would come crawling back to us for more revenue :lol:
 


Thanks Sezboy....I think. Though it would be great if you could, you know, at some point in the future consider Tom's Games a source of quality game reviews. 😉

In any event, the comments on this thread have been a lot nice than the ones I've seen on other forums. I just got done reading a thread from an RPG forum that picked up our BioWare interview, and a few of the forum members called me some naughty names because I asked BioWare if they were concerned at all about piracy and has it affected how they develop games, i.e. making Mass Effect for the 360 first and then the PC. They assumed that I was trying to scare off BioWare from the PC gaming market and called me a stupid C-bomb. Good times.

Tom's Games...making friends across the Interwebs!!!!
 
I tested and played titan quest on an old machine for about 10 minutes or so. Didn't work well on that rig at the time. It's on my list of games to buy after I get my new system. I build and sell systems... and I see a lot of PROFESSIONALS in the hardware side forking over cracked software to keep their customers to entice them to buy their products. It's sad really. I know that I don't show up to demo a product with unofficial software riddled all over it. Kind of makes it hard to sell though when they see another seller around town charging more for lesser or equal hardware but loading it up with things like acid and photoshop and a butt load of games. At the same time it kills their ability to sell newer hardware faster. all I'm saying is it's killing more than one industry. If I did that I could sell so many pc's I'd have to hire illegal immigrants or start a sweat shop to keep up with demand... Nobody ever mentions that though... imo this is a good example of buying products that are made via overseas child labor or from under paying employers. Think about it next time you go to some place where minimum wage is the standard like mc'donalds or wendy's or you don't tip a service person.... or you go to buy that shiny new pair of nike shoes.... either way you're killing income for someone and making a crappier product for yourself. Only it's illegal for food service workers to form a union and demand more money.... So what else can we rant about and keep electing morons into our political offices that have no good proactive idea's on how to fix them? Neh, lets just keep electing people who want to make unions illegal all together. I really don't understand it... but you know it could just be everyone being a giant hypocrite... Even the people that get screwed over by these practices still tend to use and support them.
 


I don't think he's referring to something hypothetical. I think it's actually written somerwhere in US law. Something about majority rules... It deserves more research seeing as how many people have been charged and how many companies have been run out of the US or shut down (now they're bringing money into aother countries)... I don't know. This is something I will try and look into if/when I get time. I was good at poly sci... but that was several hundred cases of beer ago. haha.

and just another side note based on pc gaming piracy... With virtual machines becoming better and better and the fact that pc hardware is ridiculously more powerful than any given console.... what's to stop people from going that route if pc gaming does go into a serious slump and developers stop building games for pc?

Either way, I don't want to see pc gaming go downhill, I really want to see it thrive, because It's one of my favorite past times... The most simple answer is go out and buy a few great games, but there really isn't any SIMPLE answer here, I think we're all going to have to be a little more proactive and start doing more than complaining about it and start brainstorming on how to fix the problem...Anyway, buying games is cheaper than golf or most hobbies like that if you look at it as time vs. money.
 
I went back to re-read some of the posts. And a new business model is needed as I mentioned above in so many more words. An Idea on how to help the situation is possibly more or less of an on site demo model... I havn't seen a pc game demo in store for god knows how many years. Just some random shop with a computer for people to play with running a decent game... kind of like they do with consoles... only it woulnd't be so lame... There are places like howies game shack... having a place like THAT all over the US would DEFINITELY increase sales... it in some terms is kind of like a modern day arcade... anyway, you get to go there.. play their games on their pc's, stuff your face full of food, and for a light fistfull of cash... Like I said, modern day arcade. Look at what arcades did for consoles... Granted it's definitely not the same industry situation, but I know I'd spend a few days a month at a place like that. anyway... i'm going to go find something else to do now... like sleep
 
Sorry to dig up an old topic but just watched this episode and wanted to comment. I'm against piracy in general but I do believe the game industry needs to change some of its policies first. What is with this "no refund on games" policy? I've purchased games based on excellent reviews and solid demo but had compatibility issues and just didn't work. Also games that are just plain buggy and makes the game virtually unplayable. Now, shouldn't these be considered as defective products and are we not entitled for a refund in these situations? In situations like these, I frankly do wish I should've downloaded the game instead of purchasing first.

They can argue that offering refunds may increase piracy but I believe that's another excuse. Just make it a requirement for you to open a case with the tech support and if they can't solve the issue, then allow the refund. If someone would go through that trouble just to play the game for free, they would've downloaded the pirated version instead.

Game, movie, and recording industries complain about piracy but is it really hurting the industry that much? Movie industry uses piracy as an excuse to increase ticket price and now, box office records are being broken every year. Is it "because of" or "thanks to" piracy? It's been a while so I'm a bit vague on the exact figure but I read an article in 2006 which said that EA grossed more than top 10 movies of that year combined. That's also more than all the movies Pixar has released for 15 years since Toy Story... in just one year. Gamestop and EBGames locations are popping up everywhere in my area. Yet they maintain this no refund policy on defective products to take advantage of consumers. I'm not sure if we need a class action suit but until that policy is changed, their argument on piracy isn't justified.
 
I just installed Titan Quest and the exp. pack via Steam for very short money.

I like TQ's perfect combination of Diablo 2 and Dungeon Siege 2, it's a click-fest with more loot than I can shake a stick at and a neat level up system, more flexible and varied than I thought.

I had no idea Titan Quest was the type of game it was, and only vaguely remember that is was 'slow to perform' and 'not inspired' when first released.

Based on what I've played and what I know, I say TQ failed because of:

1) Lack of a top notch sound-track
2) Lack of proper marketing
3) Not ready for prime-time at launch (it took a patch to get FSAA working right)

So, blame pirates, but Valve got at least some of my money cuz they offered me the game at the price I wanted to pay!
 
update/nudge... i just bought the game off of steam. So nobody can bitch at me for not supporting them. 😛. I love the genre, and when I demo'd it i liked it, i just didn't have the money or the pc power to run it right... but now, i'm the proud owner of the gold edition. EAT THAT IRON LORE! i mean.. wait... they just got 20 bucks... well, i guess they could spend it on food and EAT THAT IRON LORE! 😛 I know it doesn't help much, but I hope a few bucks still went to the developers.
 
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