There's a great discussion on one of my favorite websites, Quarter To Three about why PC sales are in decline which I wrote about here.
Brett Todd and I are taking different approaches. He makes a good argument that basically boils down to this: It's so easy to download games illegally that increasing numbers of people are doing so and that is now showing a real impact on the bottom line.
Here's our discussion.
| Brett writes: |
| Brad, this assumes that everyone shares your taste. Personally, I think there have been a lot of great PC games released this year already, with some blockbusters still to come. We've had UT2004, Thief III, Far Cry, Painkiller, City of Heroes, and Silent Storm. I've found this year to be better than 2003 overall. But I do admit that the year so far has lacked a big splash title to get people excited about PC gaming. That's why I'm not too worried about the numbers so far. After Doom III and Half-Life 2 hit, PC gamers will head to the stores and numbers overall will go up as these two games get people buying more. |
Most of the games I mentioned as mega-games aren't ones that I personally get into. I'm talking purely in terms of gross revenue. If we're talking about overall sales, then it's all about the numbers. If 2003 had "Titanic" and "Phantom Menace" (for instance) and 2004 didn't have Spiderman II or Harry Pottery released yet, we might have people discussing why movies have declined too.
I like UT and think City of Heroes is a cool game and so forth. But they're not the mega sellers (well UT2004 probably sells well). Maybe when they get a couple of sequels under their belts. 
(Though UT 2004 is obviously a sequel but it's only one game! It has a heavy load! <g>).
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Also, do you really think that PC gamers would be turned off the entire format because of issues like the one you mentioned with MOO3? Personally, I think MOO3 was simply a terrible game and not at all an example of what's going on industry-wide. But even if it were some hallmark of modern crap design, it couldn't push PC gamers to consoles because the game styles are dramatically different. You can't get anything like MOO3 or GalCiv on a console system. Why would someone frustrated with MOO3 turn to the PS2? This makes as much sense as someone frustrated with the cost of car repairs turning to a skateboard for the morning commute.
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I was just using MOO3 to illustrate the point. It doesn't take too many bad experiences to turn someone off if the competition (consoles in this case) don't have those same problems to the same degree.
Let's use a different example: Knights of the Old Republic. That was a great game. Right?
And yet when it shipped, it had serious problems with ATI Radeon cards. Whereas if you both it for the XBox, no problem of course. So quite a few people who played it had to wait for a patch. This wasn't some obscure thing either, it affected a lot of people (myself included).
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I think that if PC gamers are getting turned off by substandard design and all the me-too stuff, they're more likely to leave gaming altogether. Which is happening to an extent. But I think a lot of these disaffected people are still gaming, only they've now decided that the games aren't worth paying for. Combine that with the number of people who take advantage of sites like Suprnova just because they can, and you have a serious piracy problem with PC gaming.
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I think there's always been a piracy issue but I don't think it's anywhere near enough to cause the kinds of losses we're seeing.
Let me use the Object Desktop example - we sells millions of dollars of this stuff on-line. If anything is vulnerable to piracy it's that -- it's small in file size and it's in that area that people could rationalize it as "something that should be free with the OS!!!" Yet we still sells tens of thousans of copies of it per year.
Piracy only matters when it is costing sales. And the what we don't know is whether that is happening to a significant degree. I am asserting that while piracy may be high, it is not costing significant actual sales.
That's one of the oldest arguments in the books of course.
But now that PC revenue is actually declining, some are asserting that it's piracy doing it. I just don't buy that. There are so many other reasons that I think are much bigger which I and others have already described.
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I really don't understand what we're arguing about. I'm not saying that piracy is the only reason why PC game sales are declining, but it seems awfully obvious that it's a major factor.
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Hence our debate. I don't think it's obvious that it's a major factor. I don't think it's a significant cause of overall sales declining.
I see piracy has being a "leech" factor on PC game sales. I.e. X% of sales are lost to it. And I don't see X% having grown significantly in the past year or two.
Instead I believe:
a) Mega titles havne't been released this year.
More and more PC gaming time is spent playing MMORPGs which is taking away from # of games purchased.
c) The PC gamer demographic has gotten somewhat older and lacks the patience to mess around with obnoxious copy protection, buggy games, unrealistic hardware requirements, and incompatibilities. Alienated, these potential buyers become much more picky.
I would assert that fewer PC games are pirated OR purchased right now.
I'll even provide an example: Supernova's Alexa ranking is stale or declining. I suspect eventhe warez people are being alienated too!
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It has never been easier to download a PC game. That alone should indicate that piracy is up, because if you give people a chance to steal anonymously and without consequences, they'll take it nine times out of ten. |
I'm not so sure about that. But let's say for the sake of argument that you're right.
How would you solve it?
Here's what I would do:
1) Make it even easier to purchase/download games.
2) Provide additional updates to the software after release that add features based on player feedback that can only be obtained first/early by verified customers.
3) Make sure the games work right out of the box/download/whatever. Make updates available of course but make sure they're not required just to get the game to work right.
4) Price it competitively so that the person sees the value in it.
That doesn't seem like it would be that hard.