PC Games need to deliver the goods to compete!

Don't blame pirates for PC game sales decline

Published on July 20, 2004 By Draginol In PC Gaming

This article from "Elf-Inside" about his experiences with games and with Stardock really underscores where the PC game industry needs to go. He has a really good analogy:

When I buy a pizza, I expect to get a pizza. I expect it with the toppings I order, and I expect it to be delivered promptly. By calling Domino's or Papa John's, I've contractually agreed to pay for a pizza when it arrives. But if the deliverman shows up 2 hours late, with cold pizza, with Anchovies instead of Peperoni, then, no, I'm not going to pay for that. The problem with typical game publishers, is they expect you to eat that pizza, and be happy for it. You paid for hot pepperoni, and got cold anchovies, but you have no recourse.

Which is so true. It is also one of the reasons why I think the console market is really starting to eat the PC's lunch. I've been outright hostile to consoles for years but even I find myself starting to buy console games. Why? Because they work out of the box. I don't have to "Wait for the first patch" to play the games.

And PC games have a perfect storm of bad habits:

First, I am expected to devote hundreds of megabytes to them. Okay, I can live with that.
But then they expect me to keep the CD in the drive.
And then I usually have to keep track of a little tiny paper serial number (usually taped to the back of the CD jacket).
And all that so that I can play a game that needs a couple of patches to play.

And when the PC sales go down, what's the reported reason? Piracy of course. Yea, it's piracy. Sure. In my experience of writing games, it's not pirates ripping us off of our hard earned money, it's been publishers. The tale of Galactic Civilizations is very similar to the tale of Swamp Castle from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

The other developers told me I was daft to write a space based strategy game for OS/2! So I wrote Galactic Civilizations for OS/2. I was a college student back then so I couldn't afford to get it into the stores. So a publisher called Advanced Idea Machines "published" it. They never paid us royalties and disappeared soon after. Since I had no money, I couldn't afford a lawyer at the time.

So I got smart. Stardock would publish the OS/2 sequel Galactic Civilizations II. So we made the game, manufactured the boxes, took care of all the marketing and getting it into the stores. And just to be safe, we had two distributors. One called Micro Central and the other one called Blue Orchards. Both went went out of business owing us hundreds of thousands of dollars.

That particular incident nearly wiped out Stardock.

But no matter, we recovered. We clawed our way back up and made it into the Windows market. We decided to make a Windows version and we decided to work with a well known publisher on it (Strategy First). This time everything would go perfectly...

Well, that was a year and a half ago and we're still waiting for royalty payments on most of their sales. But this time, we had an out -- direct electronic sales. People were able to buy the game directly from us and download the game.

So don't talk to me about piracy. It's not the pirates that have ripped us off of hundreds of thousands in lost royalties. It's been "Real businesses" doing that thank you very much. The position of royalty eating parasite has already been taken.

It's the demographic of people who allegedly do all this pirating that's been paying our bills. People with Internet connections who download games. They pay my salary. They are my overlord now. So I hope you can excuse me if I don't lose sleep at night that some 15 year old might have downloaded my game while some executive at a company (or former company) is sailing on their boat paid for by my hard work. The software pirate can go to jail on a felony, the business executive who doesn't pay royalties gets off the hook.

So yea, tell me again how I need to put some dongle or whatever on my game to keep 15 year olds from pirating? When our contract with publishers forces them to wear a shock collar that I can press a button to shock them if royalties aren't paid on time then we'll talk about forcing customers to deal with massive copy protection. But it's not the pirates I worry about.

I'm sure that Galactic Civilizations is pirated somewhere. But I highly doubt it's pirated in significant quantities. I know it sold over 100,000 copies out there. But people didn't pirate it much. Why? Because we didn't force them to pirate it. We didn't make someone have to create a CD crack so that they could play it on their laptop on the plane where the CD drive is replaced with an extra battery. We didn't make them have to download "patches" to get the game working. The version of Galactic Civilizations that won Editor's Choice Awards from most of the major PC game publications was the 1.0 version out of the box. And we encouraged people to pay their hard earned dollars for the game by giving them value by putting out updates after release. We put out a bunch of free updates that added tons of features. A BonusPak, a free expansion pack. Heck, GalCiv 1.21 is due out this week! You want to fight piracy, don't give people a reason to pirate.

In fairness, the retail version of The Political Machine will have a CD check. However, the electronic version from TotalGaming.net will not and users of the boxed version will be able to forgo the CD check after January 1, 2005 as part of our compromise with our publisher. A win-win since the main problem with CD checks is losing the CD or damaging it in the long term and it satisfies the publisher's concern over "0 day warez" sites (though it'll still get pirated I'm sure).

I think that's a major reason consoles are starting to really crush the PC game market. People are getting fed up. They're getting a cold pizza and being told to lump it. It doesn't have to bet that way.

For example, The Political Machine comes out in August. We plan to have a free update available for it on the first week that adds some new features and extra goodies. There will be "bug" fixes but they'll likely be bugs no one would run into. And we'll put out updates as regularly as Ubi Soft will let us (unlike with GalCiv, The Political Machine updates have to go through Ubi Soft's outstanding QA department).

We don't do this because we're nice. We do it because it is good business. If the competing technology (consoles) can't be updated with new stuff after release, then you should exploit that advantage. And that means add new features, not use the Internet to supply updates that finish the game!

I'm not against copy protection schemes on the PC because I'm some sort of flower child developer. I'm against them because they're bad business. They discourage people from buying PC games in the first place. Once you make someone have to hunt down a CD crack, you've set them on the path of pirating the whole game and future games.

That's what I hope to see TotalGaming.net prevent. Make it a no-brainer for someone to purchase games electronically by keeping costs reasonable and make using the games they've purchased easy and convenient. After all, it's their pizza, deliver it to them as they want and they'll support you with future orders.

Comments (Page 2)

EvilTeletubby

on Jul 21, 2004

Incredibly excellent, well-written, insightful article. As a PC gamer (the most recent console I own is a PS1), I'm disappointed with the crap that has been coming out. In fact, in the past couple years, the only games I've bought that I was happy with have been the MoH series, though they have limited replayability. Moreover though, like Nosmirc said, the only company that I still love and have been an avid fanboy of has been Blizzard. They produced the best RTS game in existance in Starcraft (which I, and hundreds of thousands of others, still play nearly every single day, despite it being 6-7 years old), as well as the very addictive and fun Diablo 2 (with D1 being an all-time classic), and the popular Warcraft series (WC3 is not quite as good an RTS as SC, but it features some different ideas than a standard RTS).

Anyhow, Blizzard supports their games years after they've been released. SC's most recent patch was only a few months ago, not too bad for a 6-7 year old game, and Diablo 2, 4 years old, was updated recently with a massive patch that changed a lot of the game around and renewed interest. And of course, you have the free battle.net servers to use as well; I can certainly say I've gotten my money's worth from Blizzard products.

mr. papercuts

on Jul 21, 2004

well thought out (we'll excuse the poor grammar and spelling) and i couldn't agree more. i have pirated games, and it has never cut into my video gaming budget - i download when i'm out of money. when i can afford the things i want, i still buy them, even if i have a pirated version. i've been following this policy since high school - download what i want to experience, and buy what i can, when i can. i'll purchase and even pre-order a game i know i want, but i'll always download or rent a shot-in-the-dark title before i buy. and you can't rent pc games anywhere up here... if i hadn't downloaded knights of the old republic i would have wasted fifty bucks on a game i don't like based on a million good reviews. instead, that fifty went and bought far cry, a game i had already downloaded and enjoyed.

mr. papercuts

on Jul 21, 2004

not to get sidetracked, but...

"Here's the *real* reason people are leaving gaming: The games can't keep germers excited long enough. 99% of today's games are rehashes of older ones + Better graphics and expanded multiplayer support.

Half Life 2 = Half-Life 1 + nicer graphics
DOOM 3 = DOOM 1 + nicer graphics"

you forgot the major innovation today - physics. the physics engine in the half life 2 demo made me crap my pants, and the demo movie of doom 3 looks about as far from the static doom i loved as you can get. way to hate shit just because people are looking forward to it - or am i mistaken, and you're actually some sort of bungie-id double agent who has already played both titles?

real physics mean a hundred times more to me than graphics, i'd play a wire frame fighter or shooter and love it, as long as every inch of everything interacted with everything else. and half life 2 certainly seems to have that going. i saw severed legs affected by centrifical force and you say pc games aren't holding gamers attention? sloppy game design can happen anywhere.

Zoomba

on Jul 21, 2004

Looks like JoeUser is going to get a real test today... seems you've been linked from PennyArcade

A mini-slashdotting if you will

-Z

EvilTeletubby

on Jul 21, 2004

That's how I got here Zoomba.

on Jul 21, 2004

A very insightful article, definitely putting to words what I've been trying to tell developers around the world for the last year or so. There's an imbalance between publishers and developers these days that need to be restored to allow for true innovation.
To make my point, some examples of games which were cancelled because of publisher ineptness:
Full Throttle II (LucasArts) cancelled because management wanted a fighting game and then realized it wouldn't sell since the fans were adventure gamers.
Sam & Max II (LucasArts) cancelled out of the blue despite raving reviews in the press. And it was just months from RTM.
Minigolf Maniacs (Sierra) was 80% done but was cancelled when Sierra fired Dynamix and a bunch of other devteams in a downsizing spree.
Alien Breed 2004 (Team17) was cancelled because the publishers were too afraid to publish something from Team17 that didn't have a "Worms" label on it. Or something.

All those could have been wonderful games (Minigolf Maniacs will be completed through an open-source effort, I hear) if the publishers hadn't been reluctant to publish innovative or "oldschool" games. "Current marketplace realities" aside, I'd really have liked to see (and buy) those games!

Fernando

on Jul 21, 2004

The problem with the pizza is: after you eat the pizza, no one can eat it again. (Bah, maybe there is a way, but I don't want to know that! =P) So in my own opinion you can't compare buying a pizza to buying a game!

My 2 cents

oreth

on Jul 21, 2004

Very poignant article.

As a college student who is trying to break into said industry, the state of the industry saddens me.
I have always been a 100% kind of guy. If I'm going to do something, it's gonna get done all the way.

A question has been bothering me for a while now....
How does one NOT get screwed by his/her publishing company?

Ezekial

on Jul 21, 2004

Totally true. Most of the games i play, i pay for. Its only fair. But i also get to cracks for the games, especially the No-Cd cracks. I paid for the game, i just want to play it, i dont want it taking up my cd drive, and i dont want to have to go hunting through all my discs id i decide i want to play another game. Also, you right when you say that this is the reason consoles are taking over. I remember awhile back when I first got Kingdom Hearts, that was one of the best games i had played in a long time, and it worked right outta the box, not patches, no up-dates nothing. ITs been awhile since i could say that about any PC games.

ALso, totally sucks about what those publishers did to you.... how can people like that live with themselves...

ins11

on Jul 21, 2004

I agree fully with this article.

In fact, I purchased Galactic Civilization solely because of Stardocks stance on this issue. And then I came to like the game as well. (I just wanted to support with money first).
And now I'm going to buy a 1 year totalgaming.net subscription as well.

Having to find a patch to remove cd-checking in the game, and having to search forums to find out how to remove Starforce from your computer is not something that encourages people to purchase games. I've since 2004 decided not to purchase ANY game that requires me to have the cd-in-drive. Its hard because of many titles I want to buy, but luckily there are many titles I can buy available, without any need for a cd-in-drive or system-intrusive software that piggybacks on the game installer (like Starforce v3.3).

The only people who loose from this are the ones who demand cd-checking on titles - and personally, I'll be happy when they are run out of business.

Mike Larson

on Jul 21, 2004

1 Finish the game.
2 Stop coding out your user base! Games should be playable at 30-60 fps on last years hardware not some hardware comming out in 1 to 2 years
3 Remove the install process (stream the game for the cd). Remember Tomb Raider 1 did this. (52x cdroms should be able to handle this. Use the xbox hd model

Mike Larson

on Jul 21, 2004

I am sick of seeing and hearing about games that won't be out for years. Game development time must be reduced if the game industry is going to continue to grow.

SubjectStorm

on Jul 21, 2004

I'm a dedicated consoler now, though i occasionally still dabble in the PC market. This wasn't always the case. There was a time when i didn't even own a console, playing all my titles on my trusty puter.

So how did i get to where i am today? How did such a dramatic reversal occur????

I'm so glad you asked.

THE CHRONICLES OF HOMM4
(Adventures in Futility)

I was addicted to Heroes of Might and Magic 2 from the first time i played it on my friend's laptop. Maybe it was the constant looting that appealed to me, or the fact that when you played one of the XL single scenario games, most of the time you cared less about winning than you did about getting all the "Kewl Crap (tm)" that littered the landscape. Maybe it was the simple, colorful presentation or the opera that played when you entered your castle. I can't pick a particular feature of the game that made me love it so much, but it ate countless hours of my time. It had a simple, colorful presentation to it, and could run on damned near any hardware (as long as you were running windows 98 anyway). It also worked right out of the box. i heard that there were several patches available for it, but i never had need for them.

BUT

This was the first game i played that required a cd check to run - and there began my long descent into madness.

I remember moving to a new apartment. The cd got lost in that move somehow, rendering the game unplayable. I thought about getting a no-cd crack but decided against it. Instead, i went out and bought another copy of the game. BUT YOU COULDN'T just buy the original anymore. now you had to get the special gold version or what-the-crap-ever it was called. it had all of these swell new campaigns and bonus features. hurray for that. it also added a lot of really fantastic new bugs.

One bug, for example, made the game freeze at odd intervals. Another made it crash entirely out to the desktop. A third would crash the game if you attempted to change the sound settings too rapidly. A fourth made the mouse move sluggishly and leap randomly around the screen. A fifth - the opera, while still selectable, simply would not play. ever.

In addition to the bugs, the game itself had changed in ways i could not appreciate. The musical score for the castles had been "upgraded" to some of the most annoying crap i'd ever heard. instead of spending time on the castle screen, zoning out on the music just because i liked it, i found myself rapidly jumping in and out of the castle screen to avoid it.

At any rate, i eventually got the game patched up to the point that it was playable. ah . . . but it didn't last.

I changed operating systems to windows 2000. There was (is?) no version of the game that will work on that platform. With the final nail in the coffin, i just tossed the disk in the garbage.

Years go by, and HOMM4 is released. I can't resist giving the series one more shot, so i splurge and pick it up. IMAGINE MY SURPRISE when the game, while quite fun, was HIDEOUSLY BROKEN straight from the get go. any one of a hundred different actions would crash it, odd stat bugs plagued it, items would suddenly disappear or simply not work at all, damage calculations were considerably off, etc. There WERE patches available, thankfully, but each was enormous in size and they ALL had to be applied in order to get the latest stuff. no cumulative fixes here my friend. On 56k dial-up, getting my brand new game patched up to an acceptable level of functionality took me over 4 hours.

m.

and there was the inevitable hardware upgrade of course. a new video card had to be procured in order to experience the "lush 3D environment". meh. i was thinking of upgrading anyway.

Having learned from my past mistakes in the "oh i have a cd for that, oops no i don't" department, i wisely made a back-up copy of the cd. I played the game for a while, but found other, better things to do. Some months later, a friend of mine was digging through the games on my computer and found HOMM4. he liked it, so i let him borrow the cd for a while to check it out. that turned out to be a shitty idea because his little sister ended up breaking the thing before he even got it installed (she was only four, how mad could i get about it?).

anyway, i had my back up copy - no big deal right? wrong. maybe it was something in the way i burned the cd, but HOMM4 refused to recognize the legitimacy of my disk. i checked the disk, and all the files were there. i could even install from it. what . . the . . . hell?!?!?

finally i went searching for a no cd crack, and i FOUND ONE! however, this crack was for a higher version of the game than i currently possessed. again, no problem right? i'll just go patch it up and then use the crack and EVERYTHING WILL BE GREAT!

wrong again. the update software couldn't connect for some reason. this irritated me, but a manual update would work just as well i thought. i hit the interweb, searching out a patch.

but you know what? there were no patches. there were no patches because there was no site. there was no site because there was no COMPANY.

after all this crap, the company went out of business, leaving us all stuck with their broken product and their insane copy-protection nazi bullshit.

that was when i bought my xbox. i have halo, splinter cell PT, KOTOR, and a pre-order in for Halo2 . . . and you know what? i'm f@#king ecstatic.

PC games can catch up or kiss my behind. People will only put up with so much, no matter how devoted they are to PC gaming - especially when better, more functional games can be purchased more cheaply on a console with much, much less hassle.

That's my 15 and one quarters cents anyhow.

-rus

Valkyrie_44

on Jul 21, 2004

Good job on telling how it is.

There is nothing I hate more than when something is done up half-arsed, and you are told this will be the next best game since Quake 3, or Battlefield 1942...ect ...ect...ect.

There are soo many games that I could name off that were such a disappointment. But, I will name off a few and see if some of you guys agre or disagree.

Terminator 3: War of the Machines - Now that game is a prime example for a publisher trying to make a fast buck, I also have to blame the publishers for this travisty of a game.

Starfleet Command 3: What is it? Out over 18 months no official patches even though the game buggier than hell. Another prime example of a Devloper trying to make a fast buck, Just so happend this game was released around the movie Star Trek: Nemisis. But, at least the devlopers of that game did release a couple of "Beta patches".

Soldner: Thats one game that looks good on paper, but ends up completely screwed up when put to action. Now this one gets the double blame ,one on the devlopers and one on the Publishers. I'm sorry I did not spend $40 (Correction $50) for a single copy to be told the isnt completed in its retail format, but we will patch the game up to the way it really supposed to be. Think of this game as a "work in progress".

Work in progress? You got to be kidding me. Im sorry nowhere on the box was there anything stated a work in progress.... If I could only get away with that line at work.

" Oh boss I didn't get the report done, but here Sir, is some of it, consider it a work in progress. " Valkyrie Says

"You're Fired, Dirtbag!" The boss replies...

Its all a matter of ethics, the consumer now matter what it is a game, a car, a pizza, you name it, all want the product that is explictly advertised for. If a game states it can handle 32 players! Then it pretty much better do it. If it supposed to a a gazillion different weapons then they better damn well have a gazillion distinctive weapons with thier own different sounds. If they say the game's graphics is smooth as butta, Then damnit it better be.

My kids get into trouble for lying to me.. Why do companies like Jowood, Wings, and Activision think they are above that? I pay for my games, usually I have to pay for double with kids and owning more than one computer. So I think its a matter above priacy and more about laziness.

Thank you,
Val

GreenLinkLag

on Jul 21, 2004

For the most part, I agree with the article and some of the comments made. I would also like to add that a big turn-off, at least for me, in ANY game market is non-replayability. Be it console games or PC games, I just don't really enjoy a game that has little replay value. Mabye it's just me, but I just don't see any point in paying $59.99 for a game that you play once and then never again.

When multiplayer FPS games first hit the market, the replayability of games certainly benefited. You could play online with or against other people. But even that only goes so far. You are still playing the same old game, again and again and again. The same old stuff spawned in the same spot, each and every time, you knew...well everybody knew what everybody else was going to do after a few times through your online slaughterfest experience with the game. Eventually your human counterparts became as predictable as the AI.

There isn't really any game out there that gives you a feeling of newness and randomness each time you play it. Whatever happened to the idea of random map generation? And yes, while certain game makers do put out tools for making your own map often they are overly complex and unsupported with no documentation. Thank god there are a few out there that can figure them out and they put up new maps to play on from time to time which does help aleviate some of the replayability syndrome but eventually these people get tired of doing it and quit. Which I honestly don't blame them because I'm sure they enjoy playing the game and when they spend hours and hours making maps they can't play the game they are making a map for. And a lot of them quit because they are truly unable to create the map or game features they REALLY want. Either the tools they have are incapable of doing it or they don't have the knowledge needed to manipulate the complex editor. Or the game engine is just incapable of performing what was desired in the first place without extra coding and work put into the engine.

If you haven't figured it out by now, I like mods. I enjoy an open ended game where users can create their own modifications and then share them with the rest of the community. For the most part I don't see a lot of publishers that support this. Sure, a lot of games have had "editors" pushed out for them, but they are usually very buggy, have no documentation and are too complex for 99% of the gaming population to even make a simple mod with. They throw you this editor, if you can call it an editor, that likens itself to your pizza analogy. The game publisher/creators say, "yea, we support the mod community, here's some new tools. Aren't we great?"

You know why games like Starcraft are still going strong? Look at the editor. Simple to use. You can make a great map in a short amount of time and then share it with the community. And look at games like Diablo, and X-com (oldie but goodie) and why does it maintain good replayability? The maps are never the same. They are always a challange.

Sorry for my incoherent rant...I am tired. But I hope I at least made some sense.

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