Quote:Original post by Nytegard
you're looking at over a million people who tried to pirate it.

Isn't the keyword tried? I don't see how anyone could pirate UT3 with online cd keys without running their own closed servers which severely limits who you can play against (which as you said is how some people pirate MMOs). I wonder how many people are playing online now as compared to the number they sold. I would say the numbers would be very close, which if compared to the rampant piracy of the days of Quake or Doom, it would be near non existent.

I’m certainly not denying piracy is an issue, I just don’t think that with all the online verification that goes on today the problem is ‘out of control’, I think its actually killed off piracy being main stream. What annoys me about it is when developers use it as the whipping boy for anything that goes wrong with their company. I held my sides with laughter when the makers of Titan Quest went out of business and blamed piracy as the sole reason. It wasn’t the fact the game wasn’t that good, it wasn’t the fact it had no marketing, it wasn’t the fact it was based on gameplay that was getting stale when Diablo 2 came out, it wasn’t the fact that it was buggy as hell, it was all piracy.

With all the online verification that goes on today, I would be very interested to see the stats of piracy on the PC compared to piracy on modded 360s. [edit disclaimer - I don't mean by that I think the two would be the same, I just mean I would be interested to see how many games are pirated today as compared to 6 years ago, and how that stacks up to consoles…if such a magical list existed)

Quote:Original post by Nytegard
My solution to curb piracy? Stop marketing games to males between the ages of 14-25.

Now that's an interesting idea... but how would you do that?
I suppose the games would have to be pick up & play (aka not oblivion), yet would not be completely dumbed down click and shoot either (aka not ut3) which gets tired quickly imho.

I wonder where you could get demographic information about video game players' age groups etc.

[Edited by - LogicalError on May 1, 2008 10:57:21 AM]

Quote:Original post by boolean
I don't see how anyone could pirate UT3 with online cd keys without running their own closed servers which severely limits who you can play against

It does limit it, but certain games such as CoD4, anyone can see the pirated servers because of how they work. You have to give credit to EPIC for making a fairly pirate free version (at least online) of a game, but lack of piracy in this case actually hurts those of us who bought the game (I did).

Quote:
I wonder how many people are playing online now as compared to the number they sold. I would say the numbers would be very close, which if compared to the rampant piracy of the days of Quake or Doom, it would be near non existent.

According to GameSpy, about 331 people atm. Honestly, it's typically not that much better than when I actually try to log on, and find a grand total of 2 servers I can play on which have sub 100 ping and more than 3 people playing. Back during the Quake and UT days (of when there were many pirated versions), finding a server was no problem at all.

Quote:
I’m certainly not denying piracy is an issue, I just don’t think that with all the online verification that goes on today the problem is ‘out of control’, I think its actually killed off piracy being main stream.

I think what people mean about out of control is not that millions of people are downloading the game, rather, they're trying too. Piracy though is definately out of control in the countries these games aren't marketed for (where many game stores are almost all pirated copies).

Quote:
With all the online verification that goes on today, I would be very interested to see the stats of piracy on the PC compared to piracy on modded 360s. [edit disclaimer - I don't mean by that I think the two would be the same, I just mean I would be interested to see how many games are pirated today as compared to 6 years ago, and how that stacks up to consoles…if such a magical list existed)

Sorry for going out of order, but as you stated, such a list probably just does not exist to us mere mortals.

Quote:
What annoys me about it is when developers use it as the whipping boy for anything that goes wrong with their company. I held my sides with laughter when the makers of Titan Quest went out of business and blamed piracy as the sole reason. It wasn’t the fact the game wasn’t that good, it wasn’t the fact it had no marketing, it wasn’t the fact it was based on gameplay that was getting stale when Diablo 2 came out, it wasn’t the fact that it was buggy as hell, it was all piracy.

This is where I disagree with you mainly. I don't think it was meant to be interpretted as it was only piracy. From the post by Michael Fitch:

Quote:
So, ILE shut down. This is tangentially related to that, not why they shut down, but part of why it was such a difficult freaking slog trying not to. It's a rough, rough world out there for independent studios who want to make big games, even worse if you're single-team and don't have a successful franchise to ride or a wealthy benefactor. Trying to make it on PC product is even tougher, and here's why.

While I agree with the Stardock post, I also agree with this. (I don't see them as being mutually exclusive). As _asp stated, just go to Digg, or HardForums, or any GameSpot System Wars and read the posts about piracy to see the general feeling. The thing is, I can't agree with them. I'm not accusing you of pirating, but lack of demos, stale gameplay, buggy, etc, are typical excuses people make of pirating a game. To me, they're fine excuses of why you didn't buy a game, but the excuses are not applicable to stealing it. And even when demos are released, they never seem good enough. People don't want an hour long demo, they want a gamelength demo. It just doesn't work that way. And then they complain about stale gameplay, or a buggy game, etc to justify why they stole the game. Honestly, I just think they're looking for any excuse. "The game was bad because the orc was red instead of olive! That's why I pirated the game!".

If these games are so bad, then why do they do so much better on a console? UT3 for the PS3, and only the first week European sales, outsold the total to-date worldwide sales of UT3 on the PC. Are console gamers just that gullible? A bad game is a bad game regardless of what platform it's on. Well, only console players play FPS's then? I keep hearing how a mkb is the only way to go, and FPS's are so much better on the PC. Well, the user base must be stronger on the consoles then, and the PC fans deluded. Honestly, I don't see it that way. As Draginol has stated, I don't the user base on the PC is that much smaller than on the PC, rather, it's the customer base. The people and companies who have stated that piracy is a major factor all share the issue that they're targetting the wrong group of people on the PC (males between 14-25). And while piracy is still an issue on the console, this same demographic is more likely to pay, hence why moving these games to console only is a smarter idea.

"Make games for customers, not for users."

Quote:Original post by LogicalError

Quote:Original post by Nytegard
My solution to curb piracy? Stop marketing games to males between the ages of 14-25.

Now that's an interesting idea... but how would you do that?
I suppose the games would have to be pick up & play (aka not oblivion), yet would not be completely dumbed down click and shoot either (aka not ut3) which gets tired quickly imho.

Many companies are doing it. Casual games, that's the future of PC gaming imho.

OK, now I'm going off into a sexist rant, and go ahead if you want to correct me, this is only a conjecture from people I know, and I could be entirely wrong.

For some reason, most of the women I know, have something against gaming. It just doesn't seem sociably acceptable for them to play games. Yet many of them play casual games (Yahoo Games, The Sims, Nintendogs, etc). For some reason, casual games don't seem to be considered games by casual gamers, hardcore gamers, NPD, etc. It use to be this way for everyone (men, women, etc). Video games use to be seen as a child's toy, and sociably unacceptable for everyone. But fortunately for us, the Nintendo Generation grew up, and accepted that video games could be played into adulthood.

Piracy isn't all lost sales, but a few are, and much of that imho has to come to the fact that some people don't have disposible income. And typically these people are young adults, or people still in school. Besides disposible income, what separates these people from those of us above the age of 25? Free time. Many of us over 25 have significant others, have children, have a full time job (which can last longer than 8 hours a day), have chores and other errands to accomplish, etc, and leave us with very little free time for ourselves. Casual games are also the solution for us.

Casual games are pick up and play, with very little learning curve, and also allow for a gaming session that can last a few minutes, such as between a TV commercial. The hardcore games, the ones that require long playing sessions, or have a huge learning curve, etc., don't really do well for those of us who don't have disposible time. Not that we wouldn't like to play many of those games, and often we do, but we're much more limited in the quantity of games by a lack of time, and thus really aren't the audience for the hardcore games.

And casual games, typically being short, have one other advantage. They're inexpensive. 40 hour games typically run $50+. But a game that has 5 hours of gametime (we're not talking replayability, but once through), is typically going to be a lot less money. Thus, when we see a $5 or $10 game, we're a lot more likely to buy it than spend our precious time searching for it online to pirate it.

Quote:Original post by Nytegard
UT3 for the PS3, and only the first week European sales, outsold the total to-date worldwide sales of UT3 on the PC.

Where are you getting that from?

Quote:Original post by AndreTheGiant

Quote:Original post by Promit
Here's a hint: nobody wants to play on a 19" LCD monitor when there's a 52" HDTV in the next room.

Thats your opinion. I do.

*raises hand* so do I.

Yeah I think I agree, while people have been saying that the PC game market is dying for a long time we had never had so many options before. Nowadays consoles are pretty much PCs and most people hate installing software that takes huge amount of space, not to mention that you need a good machine to play most of the latest AAA games. With a console you just pay once and you'll have an entertainment system for years. I used to play a LOT of PC games with friends and family back then when you didn't need the latest expensive rig to be able to play a game at an acceptable framerate but nowadays I just exclusively play console games. Also consoles have the advantage of allowing more than 1 people enjoy the game whether it's just watching the person play or joining in to play co-op (gears of wars and even the latest GTA IV come to my mind among many others) or online using the same console.

The truth is that the PC game market is not profitable for big studios that need to sell millions of copies to break even anymore, so I think as many have said that in the future the PC game market will be dominated almost exclusively by AAA online games (WOW for example), high quality independent games and lots of free browser based games :).

Quote:Original post by boolean

Quote:Original post by Nytegard
UT3 for the PS3, and only the first week European sales, outsold the total to-date worldwide sales of UT3 on the PC.

Where are you getting that from?

Sorry, I was wrong. I was basing it off of sales figures before Feb. for total sales, which didn't take into account Euro sales, which began on Feb. 22. (So, only US sales). Anyways, to give you an idea, from Voodoo Extreme:

Quote:
I'd also like to point out that the sales numbers posted in the 'UT3 Monthly Sales Suck' story are completely inaccurate. Planet Unreal acquired the information from SimExchange, who claim that they use the official NPD data, as released by the company to clients. Having compared their data with the data we were previously able to post, I can reveal that approximately 95.6% of their November chart is inaccurate. In the particular case of Unreal Tournament 3, the SimExchange data states that 33,995 copies were sold, when in fact, 5,000 fewer units were actually sold. Sorry Epic.

(Although the above number was only the first month. By Feb, they had apparently sold about 42000 copies).

Now, according to VGChartz, being that outside of North America, only Korea and Europe got UT3 for the PS3, and Korea isn't counted in these figures, 46,061 copies of UT3 were sold in the first week alone.

Now, while I wouldn't say UT3 is a blockbuster seller on the PS3, it is significantly stronger on the PS3 than the PC.

Considering the amount of games available on PS3, it's not that big surprise.