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 4)

tru blu

on Jul 21, 2004

another example of how big companies are pushing he workload of
testing onto the consumer, wouldn't be so bad if the money they save
was reflected onto the price ..

boohoo

Phileosophos

on Jul 21, 2004

After reading your post, I went back and finished an essay that I had written earlier in the year. What the industry needs, I think, is some kind of basic Software Bill of Rights (SBoR). That's not to suggest that government regulation is necessarily the answer, for the government screws up virtually everything it does. Rather, it's to suggest that until software vendors are held to the same standards as those who provide other products/services, this awful situation will continue. If interested, I've posted the essay at the following URL:

http://www.geocities.com/phileosophos/other/sbor.html

And, of course, I loved your post!

Hellsau

on Jul 21, 2004

PC games are just NOT being played through these days. There's no way they could have hired a playtester that just 'happened' to not get effected by all these bugs in recent games:

Painkiller: Well, when you buy a game, you don't expect to have to download a pirated version to play it. The publishers, Dreamcatcher, released a patch, but that's just stupid to be forced out due to pirating issues, when pirates can play the game.

Temple of Elemental Evil: "Wow, this is fu---what the fuck? How'd I get all this gold? SHIT, Why did it crash?!" This game is loaded with so many bugs...like the following: Okay, so you can get certain npcs to join your group, many of them VERY powerful, like the troll and hill giant. But, they work for bits of the treasure monsters have, which they get first dibs on. They make bad choices, but that is besides the point. If you go to a store, and force them to sell something, it tells you that they can't. But if the have multiples of the items in a stack, such as gems, they keep the items, but you get money equal to the total value of all the stack, minus one. Infinate money, easy. Too bad it crashes randomly. There are also less hidden gems, such as if you rest, monsters may spawn behind a wall, and if you start combat, bam, end of game, since you can't attack them, and there's no way to retreat from the area. Word 'round the campfire is that Atari rushed the game out. No clue if patch works, I said "fuck it" since it did some such, like deletes save games or somethin'.

Breed: Wow, that could have been an awesome game, except: you can't go up any slanted objects without a LOT of jumping or waiting; the cutscenes are unskippable, and if there's an enemy near, he can KEEP SHOOTING YOU WHILE THE CUTSCENE IS PLAYING!; teammates will shoot through you; teammates are retarded. When a game is easier when

Sacred: Ummm...well, great game, only thing I can think of is the night and wood elf classes are overpowered, dunno if they fixed it, America's army takes up all my online gaming time.

Farcry: Auto saves are not fun. I played the game starting on normal and having auto-adjust skill, then went through the first few bits getting headshots on everything for the fun of it, then everything went totally BERSERK! Kind of hard to play, when everything kills you in very few shots, and you accidentally cross an auto save when you need to do many, many things before the next one. Otherwise, superb game, okay story, good controls and fun weapons.

Tron 2.0: Wow, i fall 4 blocks, not a scratch. I fall 4.1 blocks, I'm dead instantly? (a block is one standard data cube size, lots of jumping puzzles, its between level 2 and 3 jump heights I think?)

Now, the finale: The Spider-man 2 port for the pc is AWFUL! We got literally fucked in the ass there. The thought process had to be, "Okay, pc gamers HATE controllers. So no gamepad support. Now, I want you all to strip ALL of the replay value from the game. Okay? Now, I want as many of the secondary objectives as possible to be impossible to complete." Seriously, they removed the radar(I was trying to find the store to purchase power-ups, so I hit up gamefaqs, went to the xbox faq, and one of the question's answers was "Try to find the green thing on the radar." Hellsau was confused!), removed the power-ups, and just kind of screwed us over.

There are certain containers, such as mailboxes (mailboxen?) that contain red coins you need to collect. Some make the coins not go to where they are supposed to. You can watch, they'll rarely go where they should, but mostly they'll just be gone. I know this because i only could get 6 of 8 of one, then i watched the directions of the coins as they shoot out, but some trails just lead to nothing, or if you look away from one, it'll be gone when you look back. There isn't any reason for it though. Why would they go through the trouble of removing everything from the pc version?

I heard so many good things about Spider-man 2, but I learned "praise = lies" a long time ago. I decided pirating would be a good way to test, so i downloaded it, finished the game EASILY, and was amazed that there's nothing else to do.

The best thing we can do is follow Myth's slogan(I think): If you like this software, buy it. Support the developers. If it's awful, you only downloaded it and wasted time, not given greedy publishers money for rushing an incomplete game.

Incomprehensible Moaner

on Jul 21, 2004

Your article is gloriously bitter.

I started on a console, the Mega Drive, but I remember there being plenty of bugs in those games. When your character suddenly flies through three layers of land, or the screen becomes a pile of funny colours, or your armies of troopers just don't respond to any commands at all, you know something isn't quite right. Still, they didn't always stop me from playing the game. I probably used some to my advantage.
I moved to the PC, and having to set autoexecs and stuff appealed to me, usually more than actually playing the game. Getting it to run with as many settings as possible was generally more fun.
Now to the present day, and I think the article covers a lot of good points.

However, I recently bought a playstation 2. I don't have a TV, so it goes into my computer via my expensive graphics card. Having become used to resolutions like 1280x1024, low-res TV graphics really HURT. Why is there no CRT-out on this thing? Back to topic though, the games I've played so far have been stable and solid, much better than some recent PC games I've played, but the lack of complexity is rather boring. It probably means less bugs though.

The no-CD patch thing, and related gripes. are interesting. My PC has 1 CD writer, and region 1 and 2 DVD drives, so I can store 3 CDs, but I still end up changing them, and some games don't even allow me to use arbitrary CD-drives! what is that about? It's bad enough that I have to put it in there in the first place, but I have to remember which drive I installed it from as well? Far Cry came on a DVD though, which was a welcome change, except that it still installed n gigs of crap on my drive, and doesn't seem to use the disk at all. In fact, the existence of no-CD patches clearly indicates that it doesn't.

I'd like games to come with actual decent manuals (you know, like for any good software...even in electronic form is fine) for their capabilities, bugs, and command line options, so that I don't have to connect to the internet and trawl some forum I have to spend ten minutes signing up for, when I could have used my reasonable technical knowledge to try ten reasonable-seeming configurations by then. Those readme files are often hard to navigate, or are just filled with 'update your drivers', as if its really someone else's problem, which is especially annoying when it doesn't work.

Patches do annoy me...they seem to be getting bigger. I downloaded a massive (25MB?) patch for something the other day, and it actually removed some options from the graphics menu that I was using so that it displays properly on my TFT monitor.

]{aliban

on Jul 21, 2004

It's all about value...

I have to say, the big problem that faces a lot of gaming (both PC and console) is the value per dollar purchase. Since I graduated college, I haven't had as much time as I would like to game. I have even less time to keep up on the development of games that I find interesting. Buying games nowadays becomes a gamble, and aside from certain developers (*cough*Bioware*cough*) I'm never sure if the game is gonna bite. When I first began considering GalCiv, I saw their drengin.net option and thought this was the best idea in the universe... For the price of a game and a half, I get all the games this developer puts out in the next couple of years, plus all the games that have already been released...

A year and a half later, it has turned out to be the best value in gaming for me. I have gotten perhaps twice the value I would have gotten by purchasing other games. I'm also content in the knowledge that the entire amount I paid went to the developer, who no longer had a portion of its profits eaten by a publisher. The entire purpose of our copyright system is to reward the authors. The technology now exists to put the author and the customer in contact with each other. The removal of a parasitic middleman (parasitic because publishers add no value whatsoever to the final product) results in a greater value for both the developer and the customer. I hope other developers see the writing on the wall and implement similar systems.

cento

on Jul 21, 2004

You blog rants about the failings of pc game makers vs console game makers and implies that this is why PC games get pirated?

As one other commenter posted, this is obvious a "grass is greener" view. I have been in the game industry for years. I have made both PC and Console games. My first love of gaming is on the PC, though I recognize that both consoles have their strengths depending on genre (racing on a pc just sucks). One thing you seem to miss though is that console games get pirated to. On a massive scale. It's not that you don't have many good points, but the piracy example is a poor one. As a developer, I expect a certain amount of piracy. My goal is to ensure there is enough quality content and replayability to compell gamers to want to buy a real copy. As the old adage goes, locks are to keep honest people out.

What I am more sick of, and this is more of a console issue, are games with no real multiplayer support and a single player campaign that only last 8-10 hours. Even a quality game like Prince of Persia Sands of Time makes me angry to waste $50+ on it when I finish it in a single day. That's why, even as a developer, I harbor no ill will towards rental services. If your game bombs because everyone rents it instead of buys it, make sure the game has enough content that rental isn't cost effective...

Oh, and content upgrades and patches are finally becoming available to consoles, and will just be more common in the future...

Razor Boy

on Jul 21, 2004

Wonderfully written article which so succintly summarized the frustration of tons of PC gamers out there. However, I feel that there are a few minor points that the article and succeeding comments failed to capture.

1) Yes, it's the publishers that are responsible for declining sales, not piracy, but, stop and look at the business side of releasing games without raving for a moment. Making a game available for sale online is a great idea but we all know that to reach a wider audience (i.e. ppl without broadband), the game must also be available in stores. Heck, thanks to my ISP (screw you Rogers!), i have a cap on how much i can download like many other people, meaning that i have to go to a store to buy my game. Now, for a publisher, to put out a game in stores and expect it to sell entails advertisement, purchasing shelf space, making umpteenth hard copies of the game, the manual and the box, not to mention paying all the employees responsible for taking care of these. The publisher is taking a pretty huge financial risk here, just look at Interplay - they gambled all they got on FO: BOS (a.k.a. Barrel of Sh*t) and DA2, and when they did poorly (admittedly because the former game sucked and the latter game couldn't compete with Everquest's brand name recognition) they went under. So, if a game does poorly, it isn't just the developer and the fans that take the hit, publisher catches financial flak as well.

2) patches. I hate 'em, you hate 'em, i'm sure the game publisher/developer hates 'em because of broadband fees. Yeah, patches are a big reason why I'm purchasing more console games nowadays; however... Patches happen because: a) the publisher's marketing department is composed of idiots who want to rush the game in unfinished state to Christmas Market glut come hell, or high water, or Cthulhu, or 1.000.000 angry e-mails from consumers, or

the developer didn't do their job and didn't properly test the game. So when you get angry at the patches, don't get angry at just the publisher, get angry at the programmers or testers who didn't catch the bug in the first place as well, when they are paid to do so (unless it's an Interplay employee - then he'd get paid as much as a Russian coal miner - nothing).

3) Okay, time out on complaining about innovation here. Sure, i'm kinda tired of Battlefield clones, other FPS clones (an online frag in Doom3 might look prettier than a frag in an original doom, but the exhiliration is still the same), YABMOMRPG (Yet Another Bloody Massively Online Multiplayer Role-Playing Game), but I think that sometimes, a return to a good game formula is best. My case in point - Divine Divinity and Beyond Divinity. First of all - no multiplayer, so ppl without broadband and/or credit card can enjoy it. Secondly - fairly low hardware reqs. Thirdly - relatively few bugs. Fourthly - tried and true Diablo-style gameplay only with an actual story, incredibly well written dialogue, well-thought out game world with plenty of background, better character creation system and amazing music. The game isn't original by any stretch of imagination, but somehow by refining the original, doing everything right, and then making the game available for fairly cheap (heck, i bought the outstanding Divine Divinity/Beyond Divinity bundle for only 45 canadian bucks, and it provided more than 150 hours of entertainment) it became a huge success with gamers and critics alike. The moral: the game doesn't sell just on originality, or graphics, or hype; the game sells on how well all of its components are brought together - polish polish and more polish. Second moral - consoles don't have a monopoly on releasing a complete and polished product.

4) Very brief point now. I totally agreed with an already stated comment that switching to consoles is a "grass greener on the other side" phenomenon. In today's console market, only a few select Nintendo titles show any original thought, and even then are passed by the consumers who dismiss these titled as "kiddy-ish". I mean, look at the glut of Resident Evil games, multitude of shooters with poor controls, Final fantasy games and their clones (*cough*Disgaia*cough*), endless Tony hawk and other sport games, etc. If you think that only PC gamers are dumb enough and gullible enough to keep shelling out bucks for same old tired gameplay, think again - nobody has monopoly on gullibility and near-sightedness.

colintheriot

on Jul 21, 2004

Amen to that. That pizza analogy is golden. I've heard a car analogy too. YOu can buy this car now, but it won't go in reverse. We'll have that gear ready in a month. I don't want that. If I want "updates" for my car, I want tail-fins and rims. I want to make it BETTER. Not make it WORK.

Draginol

on Jul 21, 2004

You blog rants about the failings of pc game makers vs console game makers and implies that this is why PC games get pirated?

No. On the contrary. I don't think PC piracy is that significant. Or more to the point, I don't think it's what is causing the decline in PC sales. I thought the article was pretty clear on that.

Hellsau

on Jul 21, 2004

Razor boy: It isn't that they aren't testing the games properly. It's that they aren't testing the games. At all.

Razor Boy

on Jul 21, 2004

. Good point Hellsau.

Ironic point, i initially pirated Galactic Civs (the newest one), and after playing it i went out and bought it in the store. I don't know about all gamers out there, but this to me is what marks a great game. The only other games i pirated and then bought are a sadly short list: Fallout 1 and 2, Planescape Torment, Half-Life, Baldur's Gate 2, Divine Divinity, Heroes of Might and Magic 3, and Arcanum. I don't even bother with the new games - you can pirate them but it's pointless because every new release out there is multiplayer-oriented and so a pirate copy won't work (i.e. Battlefield and Battlefield Vietnam, and UT2004).

Which brings me to another point. This emphasis on multiplayer is very alarming. Why? Because there's less incentive for developers to polish the gameplay. They don't need to create awesome in-game cutscenes and scripted events (a la Half-Life) - the players supply the excitement (in theory, unless some 8 year old is camping the plane spawning grounds). Furthermore, they don't need to test it as much - player feedback (i.e. rants and threatening emails) will provide the feedback needed to release yet another patch. All recently RPGs on PC with exception of yet another Neverwinter Nights expansion are multiplayer only. All FPS released in last 3 months (except Painkiller) have very little single-player and massive multiplayer component. At this rate there will be no single player games left on computer at all. And I for one thnk that it's a BAD thing - i don't want to go play online with a bunch of assholes, campers, l33tists and whatnot - i just want to enjoy a good game by myself. When the dark day of single-player death comes to PC, it'll be consoles only for me. Sayonara PC.

Aldebaran

on Jul 21, 2004

I tend to think the impact of warez on the game market is overstated. Rightly or wrongly, the impression I'm always left with when a publisher screams about "pirated copies" is that they're trying to find a ready scapegoat to explain away low sales for a bad game. Now, I don't tend to buy many games (at least I don't think so) in the first place, so I'm not really in a position to say whether my impression for many often-cited games is correct or not. I have downloaded no-cd cracks in the past just to get rid of stupid cd checks for games, and on other occassions I have actually obtained a warez copy of a game to see if I liked it before actually putting any money on it. Matter of fact, that was how I happened upon Galactic Civilizations. I came across it one day and I'd never heard of it before. I did a little online research and decided to give it a go. I got hooked on GalCiv very quickly and heard about the free v1.1 expansion Stardock would be releasing. This (as well as numerous other things I had read about GalCiv and Stardock) convinced me to go out and buy a copy of GalCiv (though from what I've read about Stardock getting screwed on royalties, I'm kinda bummed that I didn't think to order it directly), since I wanted to support a company that was continuing to improve their product post-release with the input of users taken into account and didn't feel the need to burden customers with idiotic copy-protection schemes. Later, I heard about the possibility of a paid-for expansion, which I wasn't interested in at first. I changed my mind when I started hearing about some of the new goodies the expansion would bring and ordered a subscription to Drengin.net so that I could also get Corporate Machine (which I also enjoy thoroughly). I was very thrilled when I noticed the new games being made available when Drengin.net evolved into TotalGaming.net. So far my experience with Stardock has been exceptional and I plan to renew my TotalGaming.net subscription when the expiration date begins to loom close. And to think I had to be an "evil pirate" to find such a great experience with a game company. Heck, I've even gotten a friend of mine curious enough to buy a copy of GalCiv just from talking about it so often and he loved it.

And as others have pointed out, sometimes companies seem to just beg people to obtain warez copies of their games. I had to obtain a no-cd crack of the expansion for Sim City 4 just to get the damn thing to run since it couldn't seem to verify that the disc was actually in the drive. I'm still very bitter about that little experience and I'm certainly not going to be jumping up to buy anything from EA again for quite some time. Yes, I love the Sim City games, but I can manage without the next version/expansion if they want to be asses about it. I'll most likely give that extra gaming money to a company like Stardock, who I've had good experiences with and who hasn't given me a reason to pirate their stuff. No, EA, that doesn't automatically mean that I'm going to be getting warez copies of your games, regardless of what you may be led to believe. I'm just voting with my money, and I'm not using it to vote for you.

Steve

on Jul 21, 2004

Brad, I think you miss one major thing about your own games: they're not attractive to pirates.

People aren't trading GalCiv in high schools or dorm rooms like they do the latest 3D shooter, and they won't be doing it with Political Machine either. So you can do what you're doing; try making a 3D shooter and put it out there without any copy protection. It's a different market, a different target demographic.

Austin

on Jul 21, 2004

You sir, are a king among men.

chuckjustchuck

on Jul 21, 2004

I totally agree with the article and find it very insiteful. The only thing is that I was shocked and still find it very hard to understand how you said that ubisoft had a good QA department. Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow is riddled with bugs and connection problems on PC AND Xbox. And it looks as though they aren't going to work too much on patching it again. I'm figuring they pretty much gave up on the game. Another great tactic from a game publisher, anger the customers so they never buy your product again. Smooth.

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