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There’s a heck of a discussion going around these days about how the PC as a gaming platform is dying. Some people – foul heretics, no doubt – have gone so far as to even suggest that PC Gaming is “dead” or that its future is “bleak” at best thanks to rampant piracy. One might tend to believe such people – until you realize that almost all of them are, or are deeply associated with, the major game publishers in some form or the other; or alternatively, are rabid console fan boys.
I honestly don’t know where these people are pulling their numbers from or getting the feeling of PC Gaming being dead. If these figures are coming from traditional market sales at Walmart and the gaming stores, maybe one could understand. This of course fails to recognize the not-insignificant number of sales that are going online these days. With services like Steam, Stardock, or even Amazon and Ebay, there’s really little incentive to go to the games store or to deal with annoying stupid staff that always manages to screw up your experience somehow and thus might result in the low numbers that people are claiming to see.
Or maybe, it could be as Valve says: There’s nobody to jump on the bullhorn for the PC. The Xbox 360 has Microsoft, the Playstation 3 has Sony and the Wii has Nintendo. All three companies literally dominate their consoles, controlling it with an iron fist and engaging in constant trench warfare with its rivals. All of them look like ants to the PC gamers that are hanging around in their personal Zepplins far above the trench lines, sipping Earl Grey Tea going monocle on all the console gamers. Even though they loom above like a cloud of Soviet Kirovs, they are fractured and divided into bunches and clumps. There is no one company that can claim to be dominant in this sphere of combat or even very influential. Not even Microsoft, which builds the engines upon which these aircraft float, has a significant amount of influence over the clear open skies.
But that also means that there’s nobody here to pour millions or billions of dollars into marketing the PC as a gaming platform to the masses. The only way to get off the ground and into the sky is to have money and build an airship yourself. If you’re lucky, you’ll have people come down to help lift you off the ground. Otherwise though the task of slowly building something that is airworthy enough to float can be arduous. The pain of seeing so much money needed (and just FYI, it does cost a lot of money to build a PC, at least a lot more than any console)…the horrors of re-installing windows only to have a hard drive fail or a power supply shorting out… the sheer terror-ridden nightmare that is a graphics driver conflict staring at you in the face… only the strong can truly face such things and come back sane.
But what does not kill you only makes you stronger, as many a father used to say. The average PC Gamer probably has a far higher knowledge of how to modify and change his platform to suit his own personal needs than the average console gamer might. This is for a good reason as well - the PC only emerged as a viable gaming platform as a secondary purpose to that of word processing, data entry, programming, graphics, etc. The PC is first and foremost a versatile and flexible tool. PC Games are, at their basic nature, just a very fun use for that tool.
This unfortunately, leads us to the problem of Piracy. The internet’s reach is vast to say the least and wherever it touches, it spreads information, knowledge and -much to the publisher’s dismay – a means to gain access to the product freely and easily. All any person needs to pirate a game these days is a good internet connection, the ability to use Google and read English.
It’s probably why you see so many games flocking to the consoles these days. It’s not about reaching the gamer; it’s not about delivering better games or an easier pipeline: it’s all about the money. Unlike the PC, where copy protection can be bypassed by anyone and the solution spread virally through the internet, the console’s protection is hardware-based and requires a great degree of skill to actually crack.
The console is essentially a giant, effective DRM platform. Sure, Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo may eat a share of the profits – but releasing a game onto a console generally means that you’re going to get money flowing in despite how crappy it may or may not be.
But what most people fail to realize that this is really only treating the symptoms of a problem and not its inherent cause: the overriding desire for profits, aka simple greed.
Before continuing, let me make this absolutely clear: A company has every single right to make money and do business – hell, my dad was a business man and I really don’t object to the basic practice, principle and right of the capitalist world. But the way many of the companies are acting and treating piracy these days… well, maybe its best explained in an analogy.
Let’s say that a company offered a service to deliver fruits to your home, and in exchange you paid a set rate for it. It’s a basic business model that has served to move mankind forwards huge leaps and bounds and is the basis of most business today. Now let’s say that one day the fruits they bring you are of less than decent quality, but the company doesn’t change the price. Since the service thus far has been good it’s reasonable enough to assume that something might’ve gone wrong – maybe the neighbor likes his fruits a little more aged and they got the orders mixed up once. No big deal, life goes on and there’s always tomorrow.
But what if the next day they did the same thing; the fruits were just as bad while the rates remained the same. The day after that, the service began a slow decline. Maybe they focused on delivering fruits quicker but in such shitty conditions that it made you sick to the core. The worse part is that they absolutely refuse to reduce their rates to compensate for the shitty service, saying that it would eat into their profits too much and that competition was fierce.
After a while, there’s only so much you can stand. In fact, for the same amount of money you’re paying them you could probably pay for the gas needed to go to straight to the farmer’s market on your way back, buy the fruits far, far cheaper and enjoy them fresh. But the Company doesn’t like this, and the next time you try to use their services for something else, they treat you like a criminal and make things difficult. At the end of the day, the company looses out on a customer and money, its reputation is tarnished no matter how good it may become later on.
Now, this analogy so far has been significantly different from piracy. For one, piracy IS stealing – this is undeniable. It harms the companies and cuts into their profits. But the reaction here by most companies has been absolutely knee-jerk if not downright stupid. Right now, for a little bit of effort I can get any game on the market virtually free – both in terms of money and risk.
If I were to try to do it the legal way, there are a lot of hurdles to overcome: First of all is price: I only have a limited amount of money to spend while the products and services offered are ridiculously overpriced. Second is quality: I have no guarantee that the quality of the product I am purchasing is good unless I open it and play it at home for myself. Demos can be deceiving (Timeshift, I’m looking at you) as can most marketing campaigns so that is no indicator either. Directly related to quality is reputation: many of the previous products or services from the same company were sub-par and unsatisfactory and there is no guarantee that the company has lifted itself up to make a good product. The fourth is word of mouth: if the product is said to be good by most of my friends and with only a moderate degree of badmouthing by others, then it’s probably worth a shot at the least. But if all I’ve heard about the game are horror stories of hopeless customer support, bugs, DRM issues, etc then is it worth the trouble? The fifth, somewhat minor (yet vital) factor is pre-requisites: if a game has high system requirements that I have no hopes of supporting with my existing hardware, I’m not going to bother buying it.
Considering all the variables present, buying a game legally is an incredibly tough decision for any platform. With no guarantees of getting a service worth a damn from many of the companies today, the motivation to buy legit is slowly decreasing day by day.
The result from the companies to “fix” this is by making it harder and harder to pirate those products – and in the end the only thing they do is punish legitimate customers further with more and more restrictive policies that in turn drive more people away from their products. It’s a vicious cycle that only a few companies can really avoid. EA, Take 2, Bioware, Microsoft and to a slightly minor extent even Blizzard have all fallen prey to it one time or the other.
Until these companies realize that you can’t fight piracy though, their really aren’t going to make much headway. Piracy is going to be around as long as the internet or the ability of information to flow freely from one person to another exists. The only way to deal with it is by going around it. You offer what Piracy cannot: good customer service, help, patches, technical support, expansions, larger communities and an all-round good experience that you couldn’t get by taking the game on your own. Stardock did this with Sins of a Solar Empire, Galactic Civilizations II and most of their games in fact and their doing pretty decently despite having no copy protection whatsoever. Steam, while undoubtedly an effective anti-piracy measure is more of an effective distribution platform to the masses and the numbers of sales they generate probably prove that fact.
While there are el cheapo people out there – people who don’t want to (or in many cases who can’t) spend a dime on what they can get by other means, there are also people who would genuinely go out and pay for a good product and experience that they believe would be worth the price.
I know for a fact that I would if nobody else. It’s what I did with World in Conflict, The Orange Box and quite a few other games over the years and its what I intend to do for titles that I know would be worth the money as well. After all, while some games may be shit enough to be only worth pirating, others are more than worth their weight in gold (Portal, anyone?).
In this day and age, what determines whether people buy your game or pirates it is really how good it is or it appears to be. And if it’s a good game, the percentage that do pirate is probably small enough that punishing those that don’t with restrictive DRMs and copyright technology is probably going to hurt your profits and reputation more than helping it.
Let’s take for example, Crysis. It is at the most, a really shiny and awesome (if not awesomest) looking Tech Demo in the market. I say “tech demo” because it isn’t a full game or the experience that Portal, World in Conflict, Half-Life or even BioShock are – it was little more than an interactive graphics demo that you could control and that you needed a super-powered system to run – and this was how Crytek and EA marketed it. Of course, when it bombed on the market because nobody had the insanely stupid system to run it (counter-point: people can run it, but just not at the highest resolution –sadly, nobody at Crytek remembered to mention that) and thus no reason to actually buy what was little more than a tech demo, they went ahead and decided to blame the “Arr! Avast ye me harties!” folks for the poor lack of sales.
To quickly put this train back on it’s rails and conclude before I hit the brick wall: Piracy, while undeniably illegal and a detriment is surprisingly not killing PC Gaming. In fact, PC Gaming isn’t dying at all. The fact that we have RTS Genre, MMOs, a plethora of RPGs, FPSs and a huge backlog of old, awesome games bigger than anything the Xbox 360 or PS3 could dream about means that PC Gaming will always stay alive and it will always stay fresh. I mean, just look at all the awesome games coming for PC this year alone: Age of Conan, Left 4 Dead, Tiberium, the World in Conflict expansion (hopefully it’ll be this year), STALKER: Clear Skies, Red Alert 3, Starcraft 2, all the Team Fortress 2 updates, etc.
Years from now when the Xbox 360 and PS3 are put into the halls of console heaven, the PC will still be chugging games from yesteryear to that of tomorrow. When the next generation of consoles comes about, the PC will still be at the forefront of technology and still chugging games. And when those console descendants eventually die out, the PC will be there and singing “Still Alive” while dancing on their graves.
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| By N2H | |||||||||
June 19th, 2008 at 4:57 pm
Hey..
Can we have a Page by Page view? If this article was split in .. say 3 pages, with more images, more spacing, I would be MUCH easier to read.
-Tubby
July 14th, 2008 at 2:22 pm
[...] they dont even HAVE a game to cry about. Again, I can rant and rave about this. But I’ve already done it before on one of my articles over at TAP, so meh :p [...]