Changing fortunes for PC gaming..??

orderoftheflame said:
When a game I'm interested in comes out, one of the first things I want to know is will it be SteamWorks. It's more than just a tool, it's almost a gaming platform in itself.

You could also stop harping on about piracy, it's not the cause of developers choosing to go cross platform rather than exclusive. :rolleyes:
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Well, if the topic is " Changing fortunes for PC gaming..??" one can not stop harping on about piracy because piracy is by very-very far the biggest problem of PC gaming compared to all other platforms.

And Steam is a non contributor as far as solving this MASSIVE problem goes. Checking releases, mates, patches is all well, but does that really change fortunes? I doubt it.

Why do we see even cross platform releases lagging more than a year behind consoles? Piracy. Why do we see few PC exclusives that could truly take advantage of the superior hardware? Piracy. Why more developers concentrate on multi-platforms with PC platform being at the bottom of priorities? Piracy. Why arcades dominate the market - because consoles are priority; why consoles are higher priority for devs? -PC piracy.

The only change in fortunes has happened in multiplayer, where piracy has little effect. Hence we see Starcraft, WoW and BF3 pouring big money into PC platform. Non multiplayer focused games are near impossible to develop for PC - as was always the case for the past 10 or so years. No change in fortunes there.
 
Dumping piracy as a solely PC endeavour is a bit of a foolish argument. Why do you think MS made such a big thing about chipping on the 360? It's a massive problem there as much as it is for PCs.
It's slightly easier on PCs yes, but to say there aren't big piracy on the consoles is simply stupid. Since games moved from Cartridges, to CDs with the PS, there has always been chipping and the likes.
 
Cliffy B, lead creator at Epic Games, makers of the Unreal Tournament and Gears of Wars series, has been quite outspoken on this topic:
Here's the problem right now; the person who is savvy enough to want to have a good PC to upgrade their video card, is a person who is savvy enough to know bit torrent to know all the elements so they can pirate software. Therefore, high-end videogames are suffering very much on the PC. Right now, it makes sense for us to focus on Xbox 360 for a number of reasons. Not least PCs with multiple configurations and piracy.
 
Borsch said:
Well, if the topic is " Changing fortunes for PC gaming..??" one can not stop harping on about piracy because piracy is by very-very far the biggest problem of PC gaming compared to all other platforms.

And Steam is a non contributor as far as solving this MASSIVE problem goes. Checking releases, mates, patches is all well, but does that really change fortunes? I doubt it.
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What a backwards way of viewing PC gaming. :rolleyes: You think all developers should put effort into producing DRM systems that punish legitimate customers, in order to maximise their profits? Developers that act like that drive more people to pirate than they stop!

I hate piracy as much as anyone, but your arguments are ridiculous (and unfounded). Piracy is not an issue that any developer will beat, no matter how much time, effort or money they waste on it.

Steam combats piracy by providing the one thing that all these ridiculous DRM systems take away that pirates are trying to claw back. Freedom and quality of service. Gabe Newell from Valve has talked at length about the problems in the games industry, especially the causes and solutions of piracy. To say that Valve and Steam are non-contributors to preventing people from piracy is retarded.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/114391-Valves-Gabe-Newell-Says-Piracy-Is-a-Service-Problem

The SteamWorks system is especially good at preventing day 1 piracy as well. You'll get a copy of any major title on the Xbox long before release. No chance if it's SteamWorks.
 
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Compare Console piracy vs PC

For 2010, the most pirated PC game as reported in this article was Call of Duty: Black Ops, at 4,270,000 downloads via torrents, compared with 930,000 downloads for the XBox 360 version of the same game. It's not surprising then to see that the PC version of Black Ops is estimated to have only made up only 6% of the total sales for the game in the UK for example, while the XBox 360 version accounted for 54% of sales, and the PS3 at 40%.

Quite a big difference, yes? And it is this difference that makes devs choose consoles as pirority.

I do think, yes, that a good DRM system is the only way forwards for PC gaming (single player). Not DRM that punishes legitimate users compared to one who use pirate versions, but one that actually works - lets say like one in Rise of Flight. Steam just doesnt, day one release or not - ALL steam games are hacked and very quickly.
 
orderoftheflame said:
The SteamWorks system is especially good at preventing day 1 piracy as well. You'll get a copy of any major title on the Xbox long before release. No chance if it's SteamWorks.
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Not true at all as Alan Wake was out the day before release & fully playable & that uses Steamworks. Its one of the easiest DRM to bypass apparently :eek:
 
You must get off every time ubisoft announces a new title.. :rolleyes:

Draconian DRM does as much damage to the PC industry than piracy. You see it on here all the time. People get put off buying a title that can only be activated three times, or requires a permanent connection to some server (like Rise of Flight at launch). These are people that would genuinely have bought the game, and are then a lost sale.

How many people that pirate a game would actually have guaranteed purchased it? An uncalculatable number. The Xbox and Wii get pirated massively compared to the PS3 as well, why have all of the developers not abandoned those platforms and all moved over to Sony then? Consoles are more popular because they hit a bigger market, are easier to develop for, easier to port from, and a whole host other reasons.

Piracy is not the be all and end all shaping force of current PC gaming. There are many issues surrounding the future, and piracy is just one teeny tiny part of it.

AWPC said:
Not true at all as Alan Wake was out the day before release & fully playable & that uses Steamworks. Its one of the easiest DRM to bypass apparently :eek:
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Wasn't that just the normal timezone stuff? :confused: It's been pretty solid for day one until now if that's the case.

I know the announcement of the PC version was leaked, as the registry was added to the client and that's available to anyone to see.
 
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orderoftheflame said:
What a backwards way of viewing PC gaming. :rolleyes: You think all developers should put effort into producing DRM systems that punish legitimate customers, in order to maximise their profits? Developers that act like that drive more people to pirate than they stop!

I hate piracy as much as anyone, but your arguments are ridiculous (and unfounded). Piracy is not an issue that any developer will beat, no matter how much time, effort or money they waste on it.

Steam combats piracy by providing the one thing that all these ridiculous DRM systems take away that pirates are trying to claw back. Freedom and quality of service. Gabe Newell from Valve has talked at length about the problems in the games industry, especially the causes and solutions of piracy. To say that Valve and Steam are non-contributors to preventing people from piracy is retarded.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/114391-Valves-Gabe-Newell-Says-Piracy-Is-a-Service-Problem

The SteamWorks system is especially good at preventing day 1 piracy as well. You'll get a copy of any major title on the Xbox long before release. No chance if it's SteamWorks.
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orderoftheflame said:
You must get off every time ubisoft announces a new title.. :rolleyes:

Draconian DRM does as much damage to the PC industry than piracy.
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Why Ubisoft, like I said Rise of Flight is the etalon. 200 000 users, released in 2009, still not been cracked.

I've already posted the numbers for Xbox vs PC piracy, its not enough just to say both have piracy problems because magnitude differ HUGELY.
 
orderoftheflame said:
Y
Piracy is not the be all and end all shaping force of current PC gaming. There are many issues surrounding the future, and piracy is just one teeny tiny part of it.
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Cliffy B, lead creator at Epic Games, makers of the Unreal Tournament and Gears of Wars series, has been quite outspoken on this topic:
Here's the problem right now; the person who is savvy enough to want to have a good PC to upgrade their video card, is a person who is savvy enough to know bit torrent to know all the elements so they can pirate software. Therefore, high-end videogames are suffering very much on the PC. Right now, it makes sense for us to focus on Xbox 360 for a number of reasons. Not least PCs with multiple configurations and piracy.
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But waht does he know:rolleyes:
 
Borsch said:
But waht does he know:rolleyes:
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You've posted that already.. And it still doesn't change the argument. :rolleyes:

Obviously I'd expect someone working for a company that's had a massive partnership with Microsoft and an exclusivity deal (which brings them big subsidies) on many of their franchises for the Xbox (including his beloved gears now) to not be so hot on the PC market.

The tufty haired hippy isn't the only person with an opinion on piracy. Many other high profile industry have come forward to say the war on piracy is futile and not the cause of sales decline. Anyway, if epic are so against the PC, how come Bulletstorm made it there?
 
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Tom Clancy's EndWar was deliberately delayed for PC, the creative director Michael Plater saying quite simply that:
To be honest, if PC wasn't pirated to hell and back, there'd probably be a PC version coming out the same day as the other two. The level of piracy that you get with the PC just cannibalizes the others, because people just steal that version, piracy's basically killing PC.
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Its not just, "who said it", but what they say makes sense, makes sense of the torrents numbers for example.
 
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If piracy is a reason for the discrepancy in sales, why would it affect the PC so much and not the consoles? This is a perfectly valid question, because a torrent search will show you that pirated versions of most any console game are also available. Consoles are definitely not exempt from piracy. However the data we examined in the Scale of Piracy section provides a clear answer to this question: the scale of piracy is far lower on consoles than it is on PCs. Looking at torrent data for the same games on PC vs. XBox 360 vs. PS3, we saw that the number of downloads of the PC version is often five or ten times higher than the console versions. The number of individual active torrents for the console versions were also noticeably lower; in some cases there were no PS3 torrents at all for certain games.

The most likely reason is that undertaking console piracy is not as straightforward an exercise as PC piracy for the average user. To successfully play a pirated game on a console, you need to modify the console in some way, whether by installing a 'mod chip', or flashing the console with custom firmware. Indeed on some consoles, even these steps are not enough - on the PS3 not only the complexity of the hardware, but also the use of Blu-Ray media for games has significantly deterred piracy. Furthermore hacking a console to allow piracy carries risks which the user may not consider worth bearing, including being banned from popular online services such as XBox Live, or being denied warranty repairs

So we cant just bunch up all piracy together - on pc its far worse, to get PC gaming bakc to its former glory, this HAS to be solved to a larger extent than is now.
 
The billion dollar question is how DID Rise of Flight pull it off - 2009 release, has single player, 200.000 users and no cracked versions ever appeared anywhere, ever?!
 
Off topic but, in regards to pc gaming it still has a long way to "die" sure its not what it used to be, but consoles and TVs are not what they used to be.

Anyway 4.7 Million people have been logged onto steam today, 75000 people have played Counterstrike today. Whilst there are still these kinds of numbers (steam users are increasing I believe) PC gaming is going to stay very much alive.
 
Multiplayer games are OK on PC, we are talking about single player focused PC esclusives like we had in the past and liek consoles have now.
 
Someone need to make a game designed to run on current PC hadware that destroys all console current games. Oh wait, didnt Crytech do that with Crysis, 5 years ago!?
 
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