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 5)

turbo noob

on Jul 21, 2004

while i wholeheartedly agree that pc games should be released virtually bug free, there seems to be a sentiment here that consoles are miraculously bug free. This is not in any way the case. Almost every launch version of every gaming console has had some type of bug in it. There was a signifigant amount of ps2s that actually scratched games making them unplayable. Many 1st generation xbox s had problems with the dvd drive and would not read game disks some of the time. There have been games released with substantial bugs. The character Realm in US Final Fantasy 3 had a bugged "sketch" ability that would not only freak out the game, could also damage your game as well, losing your save files and possibly requiring you to send the game in to get it repaired/replaced. And although a lot of the time, many games could have been released in a much better state, sometimes things just slip past. Think of any complex game and how many different possible ways you can do things and try to visualize if you could try every possibility imaginable. So some bugs are going to slip by, because it's not cost effective to beta test a game for 2 years to iron every last thing out. And i know it comes down to this: companies are in business to make money, and unfortunately for the end user that means we get a beta product because the ceo wanted 4 yachts this year instead of 3. But all in all, if we keep buying the games, are the pc publishers really gonna say, "hey they keep handing us buttloads of cash, let's delay the next release a little and do it right" No, you can hardly expect any business that has a staple form of income, to jeopardize that with changing the way things are. The only way to get them to change is to not buy the product, not continue to spend money and complain about things that bother us.

In terms of piracy, just because the publishers release beta products with annoying cd keys and such, that doesn't give anyone the right to steal the game. That's what piracy is, theft. yes perhaps some piracy would go away if publishers enacted some of the changes recomended here, but perhaps nothing would change at all. Wrongdoing, can't be excused because the publishers inconvienienced us. You can't blame them for trying to protect their product.

I'm not trying to badmouth what was said up above i just think that people need to realize that there are 2 sides to every story, and that even though i'm in the boat that publishers need to give us games in a better state and not snake out on us, They do have reasons for doing some of the things they do.

Jeff Whitehouse

on Jul 22, 2004

There are So Many reasons to wait a couple months before buying a game or console nowadays, sad but true.

Oh, and a shrinking market won't force quality out of the developers (ref: Nightlong for the Amiga, Bad CDs).

Jeff Whitehouse (Jeffimix)

Trevor De La Rosa

on Jul 22, 2004

A method I use to avoid getting murdered: don't give anyone reason to murder me. I can talk of how someone doesn't have the right to kill me, that punishments for murderers should be less severe, but if someone wanted me dead bad enough, that would not stop them. Fear of punishment is not a strong enough motive to not do something. Remove the desire to pirate, don't make it a forbidden fruit.

Trevor De La Rosa

on Jul 22, 2004

That was meant as a response to turbo noob, but Whitehouse beat me to the punch. Also, "less severe" should be "more severe."

RGE

on Jul 22, 2004

I only buy games that I know are good. Usually I know this because I have researched them on the web, and/or because I have tried out illegal copies or borrowed legal versions from friends. The PC gaming market may be a bad one, but no one forces me to buy and play crappy games. Or even mediocre ones.

The next game I'm looking forward to is Metalheart: Replicants Rampage by Akella, but I'm not sure that game is going to be as good as it looks. Judging by the constantly slipping release date they're either having trouble with the game itself, or they're having trouble finding a publisher. Maybe *they* should give direct publishing over the internet a shot? But I suppose there's always a chance that the release date is slipping because they're finding new bugs and doing something about them before actually selling the game.

Raz

on Jul 22, 2004

For those who think it's a problem that games arr not published on time I have to disagree.

If a developer says they are going to release a game in 2 months, I'll say great I can't wait.
When that 2 months is up they say "Sorry it's not quite finished yet. We're gonna work on it for another 6 months to make sure it's perfect.", then I'll say "Okay, take your time. I want to see this done right."

If the development is rushed then the game will be buggy.

As a comparison, JRR Tolkien started working on the story that would ultimately be The Lord Of The Rings, (Considered on of the greatest literary achievements of modern times by me), during the World War I, 1914 or sometime like that. It wasn't published as The Lord Of The Rings until the 70's.

If it takes time to do something right then, damn it, take the time.

I want quality.

Hellsau

on Jul 22, 2004

Turbo noob: Wow, i thought the only people who used Relm were people who WANTED the bug, since it randomly gave you many, many items. I'd just rather use my 8-attack Celes, Terra-Gogo-Mog on magic team....wait a second, this isn't the ff3 forum! Crap!

But the list of buggy console games is quite short, average is a couple mis-translated lines. Or a horribly named main character (Butz? Wha???).

Still, Can't explain SC:PT. That's prolly some kind of conspiracy. They want our toast...

Marticus

on Jul 22, 2004

I think game sales for consoles will always beat out game sales for Computers. Why? Because thats all you CAN do with consoles, buy games. With computers you can do so much more. Computer games come with better resolution, and overall just a little better.

So please don't argue that you buy more games for consoles than you do computers. If you want, say that computer games cost to much.

Later,

Marticus (@thebluetree.net)

VaMage

on Jul 22, 2004

The only bet this post misses is the part about the no return policy now in force in, as near as I can tell, 100% of all retail outlets.

So, not only do I get cold pizza, but I have no choice to swallow it because I'm out my money in any case.

No business, well none except the RIAA's, gets away with this. Hmmm, what's the other business group that complains about Pirates? Oh yeah! The RIAA.

So, let me see, 2 groups, the Software Publishers Assoc. and the RIAA sue their customers, 2 groups use copy protection to protect themselves from their customers, and 2 groups consistently publish TRASH, and then do not allow any refund when the customer they have just robbed, not "ripped off" or "screwed" but robbed, as in theft, as in stealing your money, try to return said trash. Also note, both groups contiune to see their profits fall.

Add to that both of these groups also exploit the people who produce the product, so it's pretty easy to understand why those people so often produce trash, they aren't actually getting paid any way.

on Jul 22, 2004

Spot on, in my opinion. Excellently written and insightful. Shame that publishers don't think the way he does.

TheOx129

on Jul 22, 2004

I completely agree with everything stated in the article...it's almost always the little developers that put out quality games consistently because of aforementioned freedoms, particularly with electronic download of the game.

Curious thing about this is that it mimics what is happening in the RIAA (as one person stated earlier). They blame piracy for lack of sales, when it clearly isn't (several studies have been done on this since the whole "crusade" things started a while ago). Then again, people do have good reason to pirate a song or two....why pay almost $20 for a CD when you only want one or two songs from the CD? That was the beauty of vinyl, my friends....the 45 RPM records only had two songs each on one 45...but it was less than a dollar for most of the time when vinyl was still predominant over other forms of musical recordings. This is especially obvious as a good 99.9% of artists today put out nothing but crap. Kinda got off subject there, but it's very similar situations...and I'm a classic rock junkie...so I needed to spread the word

Brion

on Jul 22, 2004

VaMage: Electronics Boutique (in the Northeast US anyway) will take opened PC games. They used to have a 100% refund policy, but after some pretty heavy abuse, it turned into store credit only. But last time I checked, EB still will take back your opened PC game for store credit. There was even a story in the local news about an EB store that purchased a "used" game from a guy who turned out to have stolen it from another person. When the police determined the theif's identity and where the game was sold, EB refused to release the game back to the woman who legally owned it without her repurchasing it at the used price.

JFresh

on Jul 22, 2004

"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. "

I agree with your sentiment on this. I've actually heard several people talk about music CD's in this fashion. That those who download the mp3's are directly responsible for the outrageous prices. Well guess what? Anyone who's old enough to remember the 80's knows that CD's have always been that outrageous.

To me "it's the Pirate's fault!" is nothing more than a way to herd the sheep that is the average customer.

Sanachan

on Jul 22, 2004

I agree with Nosmirc and Warsamer; I remember running SC on the sys req's and it ran fine with no slowdown

. I also agree with Warsamer about 2d not being put to good use today. A key example of this can be seen in the latest console Sonic games. I'm sorry but Sonic was not made to be 3d, it should really go back to its 2D roots.

I find it incredible to hear about companies not willing to invest in an original game concept/design when history has shown that the innovator is the one who makes the most money. Look at Wolfenstein 3d and Doom, both can be seen as innovators and originals at the time and look at how much money they raked in. Look at Street Fighter 2. Yet another originator in its own right and look at how much money it's made. The same can be said for games like DDR, Baldur's Gate, and Warcraft. All of these games were created by people and companies willing to take a risk. And all of these are some of the biggest $$$ making games in the history of video games today.

Awesome article Draginol

RekLaw XeRo

on Jul 22, 2004

Damn, this guy just hit the nail on the head. I've been saying and feeling the same way for awhile now and couldn't quite nail the fine points. I give credit to You Draginol, and hope that the game developing community will take heed (I too am an avid Gamer) Thanks for writing that awsome article

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