Draginol/frogboy understands the issue very well.

PC gamings decline (seriously though is it really that much different than it was in 1995?) is in a way similar to music cd decline. The business model has to adapt to changing times.

It's hard to sell a product to people if:

-It's a pain to get working.

-It requires additional monetary investment to enjoy properly or simply use.

-It contains buggy draconian drm that screws up your pc when you attempt to finish up your multimedia presentation for work in the morning.

-It refuses to work due to draconian drm intended to stop pirating because they decided that your dvd-rom/usb drive/random hardware thingy etc... isn't worthy.

-Company decides to stop supporting product after one patch (I'm looking at you Vivendi)



Other problems include:

-Developers/Publisher treats it customers like criminals and or trash. Looks at customers as consumers, one shot monetary gains rather than long term supporters.

-Company fails to provide ongoing interest and value to their product. (there are more companies than stardock that overcome this but it's still an epidemic in the industry).This is a good way to diminish piracy of a product.

-Foolish belief that all games must be made with huge teams. Development must cost tens of millions of dollars and profitable return must be like the sims and World of Warcraft. (funny, not all movie makers believe they have to one up lord of the rings). Look at the nintendo DS, people get filthy rich off making games for that thing and invest little. It's also has an insane amount of piracy. Yet it still brings in millions. Explain how that works.

-Belief that console games don't get pirated, Pirating can be stopped and zero day pirating can be stopped. (perhaps instead focus on the people who actually give you money instead of pissing them off in your ridiculous quest against piracy) Why is it that games from Stardock, Relic, and others that have NO drm other than maybe a cd key still were very successful despite piracy. They made a lot of money. Maybe they look at their supposed piracy numbers (and what does that mean really. It doesn't necessarily mean you lost sales.) and think oh noes we could have had so much more money if it weren't for those nasty pirates. Focus on those that are going to give you money and don't obsess over those who won't, because ultimately it isn't worth it. You can't stop people pirating your product but you can invest in your customer base, and make your product more tempting to buy then tempting to pirate.

-The odd belief that a game must cost $60 to make money. Here is a crazy idea. Sell the game for $40 or even $20. Overall you will sell more games and gamers can spread their game purchases out more. Over all helping the industry and creating more jobs.

-Oh, yeah...try to have some standards. Making a game that will only work on less than 2% of your gaming market and saying silly things like "we were thinking of the future", then being pissed when sales are poor... well you've got no one to blame but yourself chris er I mean... developers. Look at Valves hardware survey. It gives you a pretty good idea what realistic requirements should be. Notice how about 2% of people have top of the line rigs. Why the hell would you spend 20-50 million or more to make a game that can only be used by that group of people? WHY!? If your CTO thought that was a good idea, fire him immediately.

-The game industry has some of the smartest people around working in it yet the industry has the most business stupid people on the planet. Bad business decisions(which can be a lot of things) kill most game companies. Believe it or not plenty of shovel-ware companies manage to survive so game quality is not the primary factor for failure. Most pc developers are considered enthusiast. Enthusiast don't always equate to good business people, but they can make a great product. (stardock has the fortune of being business savy and enthusiast).

I'm sure there's a ton more I could put on here but I'll leave it at that.

Meh, console gaming will always be the more popular choice, always has and always will (how many people played Mario 3 as compared to how many have played the original MOO?).

In the last eight years the three best PC games I've played haven't been major studio productions (vanilla GalCiv2, Darwinia, and Defcon), all of which have very minimal copy protection, yet managed to turn a tidy sum for their respective developers despite their modest price.

Unless he intends on making the next Halo or World of Warcraft, he must make a choice. Makes games to make money, or make games that people will keep playing for years to come (and probably make a little less money doing so). I don't know of many console players that keep playing games for years on end, but I know plenty of PC gamers who still love to play Fallout, Warcraft, Uplink, or any number of the 4X games (Civ, MOO, GalCiv, etc).

Thats not hard to see, look at the sales of camera based games on the XBLA and PSN in comparison to those that don`t require the camera. Some of it may be due to quality yes but the sales are absolutely abysmal in comparison to even crappy games.

I remember Bill Gates once complaint (before the release of Xbox 1), that it is hard to play pc games for many people because consumers require to install the game after the purchased. So he thinks playing pc games should be as simple as playing console games, pop the thing into your cd/dvd rom and then you can start playing.

The thing is that why has not anyone come out with software that does just exactly that, i mean, the software program will turn a pc into some sort of console. What would happen is that before putting the game disc in, have the software run, than the disc pops into the cd drive, and your pc automatically starts the game for you with out any kind of installation. all the software requires are that you have to have certain range hardware system requirement. Every few years, there will be a new version of the software that comes out.

Edit: i just want to add, that is what emulators do in a sense. turn a pc into a console.

I am surprised why there is no emulator as soon as any new console systems comes out. Better yet, there should be better emulators where one can just pop in an actual console game cd/dvd into your cd drive and allow it to play straight. No need to pirate or rip any console game cds. This way, pc gamers can just buy the console games without buying the consoles, which is kind of sweet. Less things to keep around the house.

Piracy has nothing to do with Crysis not selling more; Crysis was a game which essentially was aimed at very, very high performance PCs. I have such a PC and at least the first half of the game is great and it truly does look amazing on a top end rig like mine…but even on my machine which is cutting edge I get about 20 – 30 FPS at 1024 x 768 on Very High settings.

So Crytek essentially produced a game which was too demanding for 90% of PC gamers, it will sell more as people upgrade and better hardware hits the market it’s simply too far ahead of it’s time, oh and the later half of the game is not much fun. Crytek do great open game play but as soon as it gets more linear they prove unable to do proper pacing.

Crysis is a flawed master piece that’s also well ahead of it’s time hardware will catch up one day though.

As for Piracy generally I’ve heard plenty of people talking about console games they’ve pirated so that’s just not true.

One thing that may be generating a lot more piracy on the PC is the various and much hated by gamers protection systems companies like EA use, e.g. Starforce, etc. These punish legitimate customers and reward pirates, since no game has ever failed to be pirated because of this software and the pirate copies don’t require dodge virus ware on you PC or the disk in the drive.

I actually know people who buy a game then download a pirate crack for it just so they don’t have to have starforce on their machine or put the disk in every time they want to play.

Anyway this is an extremely poor piece of journalism probably sponsored by Starforce or EA.

yeah he's a gamer. Said he had an Xbox with 200-300 games on. Buys 1-2 PS3 games a month now.
Checked "sexism" on wikipedia and I don't opress them and such so that accusation is invalid (wouldn't care either way since I believe I'm right).

I didn't ask the torrentsite members. I just remember seeing that some games have been downloaded alot. In my DC++ hub the people there download instead of buy. Or you could just check around on f.e Nforce and see for yourself that games with strong protections got bought if the person wanted them (was a thread where you told or showed which games you had bought). And I'm from Europe. Sweden more precisely

Sure, piracy is a convinient scapegoat but it's common to pirate.
If every gamecompany had the same philosophy as Stardock about giving free updates then great! But today gamecompanies doesn't work that way....




like Counterstrike then. But isn't there other games with low system requirements that have sold well? The Sims isn't something that guys appreciate....I can certainly NOT see a UT, TF or Bioshock fan buy the Sims and it's ten expansions. The guy in the gamestore said that the Sims have a different target market then "normal" games.
Now I don't see him as truth almighty but he sells the games so he should have a good idea of who buys them.

People just need more technical expertise or ask somebody who got that to assemble their new PC or install their new graphics card.
Yeah, the computer stores should do it for free if you buy the card from them but it is peoples ignorance that's the problem here (though it's good for me who have good chances of getting a job in that area if I wanted it).
The final issue is about selling your old card but that's just something people have to put up with....

Ladies, just because we say you don't pirate, trying to uphold your honor... that doesn't mean we think you couldn't pirate if you were less honorable!