Brad Wardell's views about technology, politics, religion, world affairs, and all sorts of politically incorrect topics.
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 6)
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on Jul 22, 2004
CD keys like SECU-ROM are not secure now, nor have they ever been. Online CD keys are not secure now nor have they ever been. These are simple facts of life.

We have long tried to convince sales executives of that fact, but EVERY TIME some jerkoff salesman from one of these "secure cd key" places comes and convinces these executives that typically have the technical knowledge of a bowl of cheese otherwise. No matter HOW much we would insist that the best they would get out of a CDkey would be 2 days after the game hit the streets, they insisted on believing what they wanted to believe.

And we would email links of where they could download our game's executable 1-3 days after release. We would link FTP sites to them with the full unlocked versions, and etc etc etc.

But see, sales executives get convinced by people SMARTER than they are with fancy words about how "our encryption was created by a flux capacitor and is totally unbreakable". They BUY that crap because they are clueless. Sales execs have about as much common sense when it comes to the realities of technology as a mentally deficient sperm whale.

BUT HERE IS THE GOOD NEWS! Spending unnecessary money on worthless CDkey encryption keeps the cost of your product high so publishers don't have to eat that cost.... YOU do. Oh and not only YOU, but it comes out of the COGs (cost of goods) and costs developers money too! Oh, and it can slow your game down by up to 30% since products like SECU-ROM check the CD so often. THIRTY PERCENT. That is why a compay like Epic removes their CD key, they patch their game and improve the hell out of their game's performance, and look like heroes (I don't blame them one bit byt the way, it's a genius idea). So who wins with CD keys? Only the CDkey manufacturing people and the publishers. EVERYONE else gets the shaft.
on Jul 22, 2004
I'm a 37 year old professional. I own 5 consoles and buy $1000 worth of games each year. I've bought one PC game in the past 3 years. I would buy more PC games if they worked. The last one that I bought was Neverwinter Nights. It was a very good game, but it forced me to become a pirate in order to play it with my wife over my home network. After reading this article I bookmarked TotalGaming.net, I don't know if they will bring me back to the PC gaming market, but I think we need to reward developers who are trying to serve their customers well.

E
on Jul 22, 2004
Everyone here who loves Brad's post so much, go and put your money where your mouth is. Buy a Drengin (now Total Gaming.net) subscription and stick it to those publishers. I did.
on Jul 22, 2004
This guy is a complete idiot. That's all there is to it.
on Jul 22, 2004
Yeah he is pretty misguided. It has, and always will be, more difficult to develop for the PC because of the myriad of hardware/software configurations you need to account for. Plus, there are plenty of other reason why PC gaming is on the decline including the high cost in keeping hardware up-to-date for comps, the massive userbase for console games (far greater than PC games), and the shift in the industry as a whole to bring in new consumers (more women, more mass-market, etc...). They're no longer catering to the hardcore anymore guys - that's a fact. The margin on most games is crap - it's a hit driven industry and the only thing keeping game publishers afloat are the top few titles that sell tons of units. Everything else is a losing investment. Work on the publishing side, crunch the numbers like I have and you'll see. It's true.
on Jul 22, 2004
I poopie on games. I do.
on Jul 22, 2004
When it comes to innovation, I definitely agree that it is in short supply. But we have to ask ourselves what degree of innovation are we demanding of developers. Sure there haven't been any kind of genre defining innovations like we had with the advent of the FPS, but if that's what you're expecting then more often than not, you'll be disappointed. If you just want a solid game that's fun to play, and offers you a few weeks worth of gameplay(or more given multiplayer capabilities), then you'll be far more satisfied. Perhaps these titles don't come along as often as they used to, but let's face it, our standards have been driven ever higher by those very innovations. Back in the days of the NES, Metroid was quite possibly my most satisfying experience with video gaming. Now, if we were to get a game which offered us no direction or instruction of any kind, which had no story to speak of, and relied on a combination of horrible confusion and outstanding ignorance of purpose to enhance its difficulty, it would likely recieve very little recommendation, save from Tommy Tallarico and his ilk.
If you want a unique and singular gaming experience, I wouldn't hold your breath. But if you're willing to take enjoyment where it's available, look around a little bit, go with developer's you can rely on whose games you've enjoyed in the past.
Case in point, Halo 2 is due to come out in the coming months, and from what I've seen, the only thing that could ruin that game is a failed attempt at innovation. The Halo was a great game. Yes I want improvement, but not when it affects the core of the game.
on Jul 22, 2004
Awesome insights. Amazing to hear someone else say EXACTLY what my friend and I have been saying to each other for YEARS!
on Jul 23, 2004
I agree completely. And as far as pirating goes (for the music and regular software industry as well) if given the choice between having to pay for something, and not having it, many people would simply not have it. For instance, I *own* most every Need for Speed game. They are great games, but I, and many other "pirates" dont have the games budget to pay for all of them. If the only way to have them was to pay for it, I simply would not have them.
on Jul 23, 2004
So true...
on Jul 23, 2004
Well I don't agree that much. I think there are great games out there and great innovation by smaller and larger companies. When I was 18 and working at McDonalds I had about $20 of spending money each month which I usually bought a music cd with. Napster wasn't around back then. That left me nothing to buy games with and a lot of free time so I pirated them all. Then when I got a job as a computer programmer (making web games no less) I was making enough money that it wasn't worth the time and effort to pirate anything so I just bought it instead.

I still suspect most of the pirating that goes on is done by kids with no money. $60 is too much for anybody to spend on entertainment unless you are making decent coin. I think games need to be the same price as DVD's to offset piracy because then college students don't go into sticker shock and have unrealistic expectations of quality because of it.

And don't give me any crap about pirating ethics. It's wrong and always will be wrong. I did it too and I was wrong then as well. There are plenty of review sites out there if you want to know if it's good or not.
on Jul 23, 2004
You are a moron. It's obvious you don't know anything about business.

Ubi Soft? Are you kidding? Their Montreal QA department are incompetent. Their managers in both the USA and Paris are complete fools. Their marketing VP in the USA, Tony Kee is a punk.

You discount the piracy issue so I know for a fact that you are complete sod.

Of course console products work better, there is only one hardware standard that the developers need to code to whereas the PC had plenty of combinations and permutations.

It's obvious from your lineage of games and experiences that you are a complete moron.

on Jul 23, 2004
"You are a moron. It's obvious you don't know anything about business."

Oh yeah, Brad just magically built a multi-million dollar company without having a clue.

Don't any intelligent people ever follow the link to RTFA? Sod off, trolls--go back to first-posting and flame-baiting on slashdot where you belong.
on Jul 23, 2004
Wow, really well written, and explained points across this article, one of the best in this genre of topic.. After working with and playing a ton of games, mods, even doing some of my own for games in the past, you have it dead on the head.
Seems so many people look at the initial cost, and previous software releases from the same company to define how they have developed the game, and its code, updates and all. Much like the pizza, ( i was a pizza driver so this was perfect )
if you suck and cant deliver, you lost customers. If you Rock, have it on time, in a reasonable manner, at least, and arent too non-user-friendly, you can have clients for life.. Very few of the companies really have the best reputation all the time, so I hope and forsee your idea/concept of delivery works out for the best, for both client, and developer, as well as that ever pressing dollar count.
on Jul 23, 2004
Brad,

While we don't always agree in our politics, I must say that you have really enlightened me about the gaming industry, and I was especially interested by your experience with Strategy First, as it puts some of the other stories that I've read/heard about them in the past 2 years into perspective.
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