Talking to Pirates

Cliff Harris of Positech Games recently posed an open question to pirates: “Why do people pirate my games?” He got a ton of responses and summed them up on his blog.

The results are somewhat surprising, but not wholly unexpected. I’m drawn in particular to the argument that games are too expensive:

A LOT of people cited the cost of games as a major reason for pirating… People talked a lot about impulse buying games if they were much cheaper.

I’ve gone over this before, and I’m not the only one. At $50-$60, games are currently an investment, and too often you’re not provided enough information to make an educated purchasing decision. (Ironically, the market with the best-developed demo program, Xbox Live Arcade, also hosts many of the industry’s lowest-priced titles.)

Read Cliff’s full writeup here.

Piracy & PC Gaming (Stardock)

This post popped up on the Sins of a Solar Empire forums last night. It’s an extremely well-reasoned argument for why piracy is not the primary reason for declining PC game sales.

Blaming piracy is easy. But it hides other underlying causes. When Sins popped up as the #1 best selling game at retail a couple weeks ago, a game that has no copy protect whatsoever, that should tell you that piracy is not the primary issue.

Fair enough. He goes on to discuss making games for customers, not users:

Our customers make the rules, not the pirates. Pirates don’t count.

Making games for customers means targeting an audience that is highly likely to pay for your game. Sound logic, I’d say.

So the question is, what do customers want? Well, obviously they want a quality product. The game has to be fun. It has to look good: not necessarily like Crysis, but better than an unpolished mess. And, perhaps most importantly, it has to work… and this is where things get sticky:

Anyone who keeps track of how many PCs the “Gamer PC” vendors sell each year could tell you that it’s insane to develop a game explicitly for hard core gamers. Insane. I think people would be shocked to find out how few hard core gamers there really are out there… So why are companies making games that require them to sell to 15% of a given market to be profitable? In what other market do companies do that? In other software markets, getting 1% of the target market is considered good.

This is a very important point. I’ve been confused for years about the PC gaming industry’s narrow focus on hardcore gamers with high-end systems. The average PC owner, who is also interested in PC gaming but is not “hardcore”, represents a huge demographic. Who doesn’t have a PC these days? But you know, most people bought a computer-in-a-box from Best Buy, and it’s got integrated video and doesn’t have a prayer of running Crysis. Hell, you’re probably not even going to get much luck with Half Life 2, a three-and-a-half-year-old game, on such a system.

Companies like Stardock, Ironclad, and Blizzard have the right idea: build fun, good-looking games that work on a wide range of common hardware.

If only more PC game developers would take a page from that book.

Read the full post here. It’s much more detailed and an all-around great read.

Copy Protection Done Right

Validation is such a wonderful sensation!

Stardock Games, developers of the excellent Galactic Civilizations franchise and publishers of the soon-to-be-released Sins of a Solar Empire, are really on-point with their attitude toward copy protection for PC games, which is pretty much… don’t copy-protect PC games:

“The bottom line on copy protection is that if you create a greater incentive for someone to buy your game than to steal it, those who might possibly buy your game will make the choice to buy it.”

I weep with joy. I’ve been saying this for years!

From the Stardock Games blog via IGN.