Epic: Piracy Drove Us From PC Focus

Well done freetards. It's not the games companies killing PC gaming it's YOU. You bunch of selfish assh*les. Congratz.

meh... stop whining... half of the people on this world pirated MW2 and look how it became the fastest sellig game. Everybody was complaining about the servers thing, but still a lot of those people bought the game All the others simply pirated it, cause the singleplayer was worth it.

I don't think you saw the "impact of piracy". You are just too greedy (just as everyone else, including myself, cause i pirate some things too, to save money). People are happy with 1 mill $ but they are happier with 2 mill $. It's all about this, about money. I totally understand...

I'm a big UT fan. I hope this doesn't mean, there will be no UT4 and Unreal Engine 4 for PC in 2012.

Have these people never heard of the word "modchip"? Piracy is ubiquitous, because it's 2010 and we have the technology to do it with ease. My download quota is huge, and I can buy one hundred DVDs for quids - resources that were not remotely affordable until a few years ago. Jeez, even a DVD burner costs $30 in Australia. Maybe if they made PC games that took up two BluRay discs, then people wouldn't waste their download quotas, and decide it was worthwhile buying the game. Such little goes into new games, we all have over 500GBs of HDD space, and not even one inch is taken up with Crysis. In the old days, you would have to compromise - perhaps even deleting one game to play another. Technology is the reason why piracy is happening everywhere, however, it has the potential to occur as much on the console as on the PC.

Piracy will hit the consoles, too, as soon the 7-10 year old Xbox kids know what a *.torrent file is I'm pretty sure everybody knows that, and the developers just take advantage of it until time runs out.

i pose this question reagarding piracy in general as the entertainment industry keeps quoting loss of revenue.. What loss of revenue?. If someone has pirated a game, music etc, chances are they would not have purchased it anyway, so there is no loss of revenue. I know I am very selective on what I purchase as they charge a lot of money for game titles, and to many of them just do not deliver a satisfactory immersive experience.

Already there is piracy going on in Xbox people modd their consoles and make pirated games run on them..
Sony cleverly adopted Blue ray disc hence pirating is not worth it..
People buy pirated games coz they aren't intrested in the stupid multiplayer content most games offer.
Just look at the Left 4 Dead and left 4 dead 2 sales it was fun playing them I bought it original..
Look what Ubi has made the Splinter Cell game it hardly has 6 rating due to its DRM, Hell yeah I would like to have a pirated copy of that..
But if its not available, I would simply not buy the game coz its just not worth it..
They never lean to make business..
Mass Effect 2?
I bought it pirated but then I liked the game, I bought it original..
I loved the game..
I own originals but only if they are worth the money...
Ubisoft was my first choice for their stories but I dumped them due to their DRM..
Quality I say is worth the originals..

They also made UT for the Dreamcast... shame they forgot about it...

Anybody who knows how to download, install and crack a game with modern copy protection methods is more than capable of modifying an xbox/wii and downloading/burning console games too, a chimpanzee could do it.

This is just rubbish spewed forth by a company that's more concerned with money than quality these days..

Oh, one more thing, Piracy MADE Valve, The reason everybody knows the name half life is because it became one of the most pirated games ever and everybody and their dog had a copy legal or not. You cant buy that kinda publicity and it propelled them to the heights of iD and Apogee.

In my school back in the 90's one person had a legit copy of half-life, quake 3 and UT and everybody else had a copy and everybody knew how great they were and told people, if those copies were not available then 0 people in that school would have gone out and bought them so £0 in lost revenue

There are some people who follow that, e.g. effectively having long demos of a game before choosing whether or not to buy it, but I think it's a little simplistic to say that noone who pirates and doesn't somehow pay for the title would otherwise not have purchased it.
If there's a "free" option and a "pay for it" option, of course the "free" is going to take demand away from the "pay for it".

If you'd probably only undertake a hugely risky venture if you expected to have a chance at least to make a whopping great profit on it. Does that make it less morally wrong to pirate sequels where there's little effort and a sure-fire hit? I doubt it, but either way piracy hits all games.

but xbox 360 titles are pirated all the time, in huge numbers...

launch it on linux, make it open-source, and pray for donation
thats how its done.

Company's claiming piracy is killing them are, lets face it, full of shit. Piracy is just as rampant on the Xbox360, take a look at torrent sites, but have all developers come out and said, were only supporting the PS3? No they haven't, even though the PS3 is the only machine not hacked to hell (no doubt that will change in the future)

The dropping of support is about greed, pure and simple, the PC develops and advances, for example now you have multi core CPU's, SLI/Crossfire graphics, a new API with DirectX 11, it takes investment to continually program to cater to this increasing hardware. The console by contrast is old tech, 5 years old and never changes, you don't have to invest, there are no boundaries to push it is all plain sailing in development.

They would rather invest 10 million in a game that was safe, and easy to do, and get back 200 million in revenue than risk developing for the PC breaking new ground (such as Crytech did originally) and only make 50 million profit

It's much the same in the entertainment (movie) industry, they scream and cry how much piracy is killing them, yet last year the turn over was up some 20% they took more money than they ever have, made more profit than they ever have, yet still claim piracy is killing their business, bullshit I say...

Its all just greed, I WANT MOREEEEEEEEEEEEE, GIVE ME EVERYTHING, fuck em

Piracy is only lost revenue if they would of bought the game if they couldn't get it free. In most cases this simply isn't the case, and the flip side is also true, there are people who buy the game because they pirated it.

But at least the Epic guy admitted the truth, the main reason to move to the console was the money. I got no real problem with the developers getting rich, what gets me is the fact they want to consider games as an art form, but artist normally aim put the art above the money.

As for the comment about it killing independent developers thats just rubbish, independent developers is the best example of my last point. They can't generate the hype around a crap game that Epic could, they have to rely on the game being good and people telling other people they should buy it.

"Anonym123 18/05/2010
meh... stop whining... half of the people on this world pirated MW2 and look how it became the fastest sellig game. "

Can you explain the difference between correlation and causation? I'm guessing you can't.

Hmmm.There I was thinking that it was a groundbreaking game with a decent plot that made Valve.

As to your school example, are you genuinely saying that one person buying it and everyone else copying it was of benefit to Valve? How? Is it because they sold only one copy, instead of dozens? How did that benefit Valve? Surely extra sales would have given them more money to spend on development?

This sort of magical, self-justifing claptrap is rife here- "Companies only exist to make money, so I am morally entitled to steal their product", "I wouldn't have bought it anyway, so I saved money by copying it", "Piracy increases sales" and my all-time favourite "I'm entitled to copy software as I don't have enough money to get all the stuff I want".

This article shows exactly the effect piracy is having on PC gaming. You can shoot the messenger if you want, but the message remains the same.

Anybody here trying to defend piracy should be ashamed of themselves.

I work in the games industry, and our current title is going 360 exclusive for this exact reason. The PC sector is just chock-full of freeloaders and pirates to the extent that it simply isn't worth our while anymore, even loaded with DRM. Not least because of the damage already done to the PC gaming industry anyway.

I'm not angry for my studio - we'll take it to 360 and PS3. I'm angry as a PC gaming fan. Congratulations, you bunch of cheapskates.

You'd think that piracy would be more prevalent than it currently is on consoles due to the higher cost of titles.

The best games (RDR - I'm looking at you here), cost in excess of $50m to make. The developers need to make this back just to cover the cost of development. In order to fund the development of the next project they need a profit margin on top of this $50m. While its true that I have downloaded some games that I have not bought, and would not otherwise have bought, I firmly believe that video game piracy has killed PC gaming. Thank god consoles are harder to modify, or we may not have a gaming industry at all. If you download and play a game, then you should pay for it, or at the very least, admit that what you are doing is harming future game development.

Video games are not a basic human right, and therefore, you should only own them if you choose to spend your money on them.

Pay-to-play may become more widespread if piracy continues to get worse. The developers should still get money for subs to offset the cost from piracy.

Uhm... the more DRM you "load" it with the more people are going to pirate it.

Piracy kills the bottom rung of games. Those tiny, shitty games that games companies used to spew out. Then, suddenly, piracy meant people wouldn't buy these games, knowing they weren't worth it. Killing the income for them. But on consoles, there are still plenty of dumb parents and grandmothers who will just pick a game at random, giving them more revenue.

At least, that's what I think. Piracy is rampant on both, but consoles are easier to buy for, and a lot easier for dumb adults to buy their children something crap without worrying about compatibility.

Honestly, I don't remember the last time I bought a PC game and regretted it. Unless it was a part of some larger bundle.

Browser-based gaming may help the PC, but not if it becomes platform agnostic. Technology like OnLive certainly won't if all it requires is hardware capable of merely playing the video stream along with the relevant peripheral(s).

In any case, content delivery packages (for want of a better term) such as Steam surely reduce piracy and raise revenues for developers due to lower distribution costs. I'm probably simplifying it, but with "over 1,100 games" (Wikipedia), Steam is a success story - hardly indicative of the apparent state of the PC gaming industry as a whole.

I know for a fact of ten people who bought legit copies of C&C Generals and the Zero Hour expansion only after playing a pirated copy

The main problem is that thanks to consoles catching up with PC's and games now being multi platform PC games cost alot more than they used to

£39.99 game = download it, not worth the cash
£19.99 game = buy it, not worth the bandwidth

I'm against DRM - so you're clearly missing the point entirely.

On a platform as open as the PC, it requires very little effort to both make a copy of a game and to get a downloaded copy working - regardless of how much DRM the developer shoves into it.

Yes, games are pirated in droves on consoles too (as mentioned), but the proportion of pirated copies to legitimate copies on console compared to PC is significantly less because the average consumer isn't willing to put in the effort to cracking the tighter, more regulated platform.

It's a question of trust. When a developer releases games for the PC, they either fill it with DRM and piss everybody off in the process, or they trust that people will purchase it legally without DRM. Sadly, and according to the massive decline in PC gaming, this trust is misplaced nowadays. You cannot suggest that developers should use less DRM to sell games - this has already failed. DRM arrived as a solution to piracy, not the other way round.

Theft is inexcusable - no matter how evil you think the big bad companies are. Wages need paying, investors in the IP need results, research/development funds are needed. Money does not grow on trees.

Back in the old times most of the games didn't have ANY kind of protection. Not only that... sharing was supported by developers!!!! Example: 1 of the 2 Red Alert 2 CD's were sharable in order you can play it with your friend trough LAN!!!

I still see a lot of people playing the first UT, cause anybody can play online, without a crack or anything... This wide sharing made their name!!! without it people wouldn't even know who or what Epic is!!!

In UT2004 you needed a legit copy only if you wish to play online. That's pretty acceptable I think. Wth happened with UT3?! The guys who bought the game don't have internet connection are screwed, cause they cant even play the singleplayer normally!!! so yes... almost like DRM

The best solution I ever heard so far was Diablo 3's... IF POSSIBLE, the game checks 1 time on the internet, to see if it is a legit copy, after that you can do whatever the f*ck you want...

"£39.99 game = download it, not worth the cash
£19.99 game = buy it, not worth the bandwidth"

Hell yeah... i will never pay more than 35EUR for game... I pirate it, and if i like it, i wait for the price to go down.

No, you're missing my point. It's counterproductive to put DRM in your product period, because it there's going exactly the same result on the scene and then the torrents sites as if you had put no DRM on it at all - the average consumer/potential pirate/pirate doesn't need to know how to crack the DRM, or even know there's DRM on it at all, they just get the torrent, apply the crack and that's it. All DRM does it irrititate a proportion of the potential legitimate userbase (I've refused to buy games and instead pirated them purely because of DRM - in fact that's the only reason I'll pirate a game rather than buy it on Steam) whilst having absolutely zero effect on reducing the inevitable piracy that is going to happen regardless.

As the next few waves of consoles get more and more PC-like, piracy will be just as straightforward and rampant on them anyway. Developers using shortsighted tactics like absurd DRM schemes and openly insulting PC users are just going to pay the price later on.

Like I've said, I'm against DRM. You're not saying anything that I disagree with, but at the same time your argument does nothing to justify piracy or attempt to mask its responsibility for the decline in the PC gaming market.

Yeah your first mistake seems to be thinking that's what I was suggesting in the first place.

Interesting that every single one of my comments condemning piracy as the crime it is (however petty to a large corporation) has been shot down with negative ratings.

Says a lot about the readership of this article, if you ask me. The consensus seems to be that just because a publisher has billions of dollars, it's cool to pirate from them.

Do your worst, shoot this one down too. I'm only a pawn in the games industry - ultimately, I'm just upset for my once favored platform (PC).