Changing fortunes for PC gaming..??

Borsch said:
I would hate for EU to ban/filter internet sites, I love the free internet, but what games need is good DRM that publishers can trust enough to start investing into PC as their primary platform. Then we'll get some alternatives to console arcades.
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Alan Wake was number 1 in Steam sales over the weekend and it has no DRM apart from Steamworks. It was also on all the usual piracy sites even before retail release. Remedy even stated they broke even on development in the first 48 hours of release. Publishers need to stop penalising customers with intrusive DRM if they want to increase sales. I am not a fan of Assassins Creed but if I was I would pirate it because I don't feel I should have to connect to their servers to play. What if my internet is down? DRM (at least in its current form) does more harm then good and only effects legitimate users.
 
If we are comparing piracy between consoles and pc, then in my opinion you also have to factor in used game sales on consoles. I aren't saying buying used games is piracy but it still creates the exact same problem as piracy to the developers. They see no money from them which is why they are trying all this tosh with online passes and the like to try to deter people from buying used.
 
Borsch said:
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.
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However, a lot of people who chip their XBoxes do not do it themselves. Likewise, one download of an xbox game will be burned to a disk, and that disk will be copied to several chipped xbox users. Whereas pc downloaders will tend to be using it themselves.
So number of torrent downloaders does not give a reliable view of the full picture.
 
Amnesia said:
Can you prove that more secure drm = more sales ?

before you attempt it i'l remind you of some stats you posted earlier and lets be fair and compare a gaming console to a gaming console.

54% of sales for xbox and heavily pirated
40% of sales for ps3 with pretty much zero piracy if any

the console with zero piracy has less sales.
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Xbox has bigger customer base than PS3. I cant remember the exact numbers, but its about 20millino PS3, about 30 million Xbox360s and about 200 million gaming PCs worldwide. PC has the biggest custome base by far and generated only 6% in those ratings.
 
ThunderLicker said:
If we are comparing piracy between consoles and pc, then in my opinion you also have to factor in used game sales on consoles. I aren't saying buying used games is piracy but it still creates the exact same problem as piracy to the developers. They see no money from them which is why they are trying all this tosh with online passes and the like to try to deter people from buying used.
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This is a smaller issue, compared to piracy and is combated by publishers dropping prices with time- like two days ago I bought a game for £4 from Origin, or I could have bought it for the smae amount used from ebay. So this is supply and demand - separate from piracy.
 
orderoftheflame said:
While it's clearly more than the Xbox and PS3 that number sounds completely plucked out of nowhere. What makes a PC a gaming PC exactly? Who's keeping track of all the PCs sold from different vendors?

Besides 200 million gaming capable PCs doesn't translate to 200 million gaming users.
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Quote from Tweekguides article:

PC vs. Console Install Base

Estimates of the total number of gaming consoles sold to date worldwide can be gathered from a range places including VGChartz, Wikipedia articles, NPD, as well as by those who compile their own data from various sources. Taking all these into consideration, the breakdown of 'next-gen' gaming consoles sold to date around the world is approximately:

Wii: 36 million
XBox 360: 23 million
PlayStation 3: 17 million

That's a total of around 76 million 'next-gen' consoles currently in use globally.

In the other corner, while the total number of PCs can only be approximated, Gartner Inc. places the figure at just over 1 billion PCs currently in use globally.


... we can state with a reasonable degree of confidence that at least 80 million, possibly as many as almost 200 million of them are capable of gaming with the latest titles.

We can ignore Wii I think for the purposes of our discussion.
 
MeMeMeMe said:
one download of an xbox game will be burned to a disk, and that disk will be copied to several chipped xbox users. Whereas pc downloaders will tend to be using it themselves.
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Do xbox users burn games for their friends - is that what you are saying? And Pc gamers do not do that? Bootleg copies are sold for both platforms, with PC vastly outseling xbox in developing countries like Russia (Ukraine, India, etc as well I am sure).
 
Borsch said:
... we can state with a reasonable degree of confidence that at least 80 million, possibly as many as almost 200 million of them are capable of gaming with the latest titles.
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Based on what? What you think? Conjecture? Aztec writings? :confused: Is there actually a source behind this number that you're producing? Or is it a complete guess made just by you?

Regardless, 200 million "gaming" PCs does not equal a market of 200 million gamers.

My grand mother's PC could probably run most the latest games, I don't think her rank on Battlefield is very high though...
 
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orderoftheflame said:
What makes a PC a gaming PC exactly? Who's keeping track of all the PCs sold from different vendors?
.
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Publicly available data from reports by Jon Peddie Research published in articles such as this one (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2307180,00.asp) and this one (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2329191,00.asp) provides us with sufficient information to deduce that sales of add-in graphics cards made by Nvidia and ATI total around 20-24 million units per quarter in 2008. Extrapolating the quarterly figure to an annual one equates to roughly 80-100 million graphics cards sold each year. This is the figure for only one year of sales, so it's a very conservative estimate of the base number of PCs with modern graphics cards. Of course some of these cards will be low-end, however since the data pertains to add-in graphics cards sold by Nvidia and ATI in the past year, not onboard graphics solutions such as Intel chipsets, then virtually all of them would be capable of some level of gaming. For example even low-end and two year-old cards can pump out over 30FPS or more in Call of Duty 4. Furthermore, since even cards released two years ago, such as the 8800GTS/GTX, can still game very effectively, it's still a low-end estimate of the total number of 'gaming' PCs in total. To add to the rough calculations above, this study claims that approximately 196 million gaming PCs were shipped between the third quarter of 2005 and the third quarter of 2008. One last piece of valuable information comes from Roy Taylor of Nvidia who recently stated that: "...there is a very large installed base of GeForce gamers. We estimate that we have over 180 million active GeForce users. That's a much bigger installed base than PS3 or Xbox 360."
 
Borsch said:
This is a smaller issue, compared to piracy and is combated by publishers dropping prices with time- like two days ago I bought a game for £4 from Origin, or I could have bought it for the smae amount used from ebay. So this is supply and demand - separate from piracy.
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I disagree, used game sales on consoles are just as big of an issue as piracy on pc for publishers and developers, if it wasn't a problem all the fuss over online passes wouldn't be happening.

I remember reading an interview with the developers who made Heavy Rain on ps3 say they had sold 2 million copies of the game but their online user base was 3 million players. Thats a third of their player base that bought the game used and the developers/publishers saw no money from it.

Then add in the people that pirate the console games on top of the used sales and its an even bigger problem.

Also the whole results of console vs. pc piracy torrent downloads is a figure that is basically worthless. A hell of a lot of console owners that play pirated games won't download the game themselves. They will buy them off somebody for a few quid because they don't have the know how or equipment to torrent the game in the first place. I know two people where I work that do this and i bet a lot of others do it too.

Piracy on the pc is just a nice excuse developers like to use to explain their poor sales, it sounds a lot better than saying "our port was junk so nobody bought it."

I'm not saying pc piracy isn't a problem but its also a nice excuse when a game fails to sell through bad mismanagement on a developer/publishers side (ubisoft.)
 
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ThunderLicker said:
I disagree, used game sales on consoles are just as big of an issue as piracy on pc for publishers and developers, if it wasn't a problem all the fuss over online passes wouldn't be happening.

I remember reading an interview with the developers who made Heavy Rain on ps3 say they had sold 2 million copies of the game but their online user base was 3 million players. Thats a third of their player base that bought the game used and the developers/publishers saw no money from it.
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There are many problems that affect gaming industry - financial crisis (nearly wrote crysis:D) etc etc Second hand market is one of them. What I am arguing here is that the biggest problem for PC gaming development is piracy full stop.

Second hand market bothers console developers who want to squeeze more profit - but in PC gaming land this issue is negligible. 2millinon sales to 17 million user base - if PC had similar convertion rates, we'd have awesome PC exclusives queing up all year long. But what we have is 20mln xbox users bringing 10 times more profit to developers than 80-200mln PC gamers, on just one game. That is why PC has only arcade left overs from console table;) :(
 
Borsch said:
What I am arguing here is that the biggest problem for PC gaming development is piracy full stop.

Second hand market bothers console developers who want to squeeze more profit - but in PC gaming land this issue is negligible. 2millinon sales to 17 million user base - if PC had similar convertion rates, we'd have awesome PC exclusives queing up all year long. But what we have is 20mln xbox users bringing 10 times more profit to developers than 80-200mln PC gamers, on just one game. That is why PC has only arcade left overs from console table;) :(
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80 to 200 million pc gamers? Where the hell have you pulled that nonsense from? 90% - 95% of them are probably facebook game players :p with the final 5% - 10% actually having rigs capable of playing ported console games/ high end pc games.

Facebook and indie games sell by the bucket load because poeple with low end machines can still play them, high end games are a different story.

Pc sales aren't low because of piracy, they are low because its a niche market and the people who have the hardware to actually play these games are the minority. Average joe gamer isn't going to spend £600+ on a gaming pc to play the odd fifa or modern warfare game when he can get an xbox for £120. He doesn't care how much better a pc version can be, he probably doesn't even know it exists.

Fact is pc only development isn't a viable option anymore because the userbase simply isn't there compared to the consoles. Hardware prices are the reason not piracy. You can make a decent profit on the pc platform but the industry revolves around money, why develop a game for pc where only a tiny minority can potentially play it when everyone with a console is a potential sale?
 
Borsch said:
Xbox has bigger customer base than PS3. I cant remember the exact numbers, but its about 20millino PS3, about 30 million Xbox360s and about 200 million gaming PCs worldwide. PC has the biggest custome base by far and generated only 6% in those ratings.
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That's like saying that Sky has only 10 million customers even though there are hundreds of millions TVs in the world.
 
Borsch said:
Xbox has bigger customer base than PS3. I cant remember the exact numbers, but its about 20millino PS3, about 30 million Xbox360s and about 200 million gaming PCs worldwide. PC has the biggest custome base by far and generated only 6% in those ratings.
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i want you to prove less piracy = more sales and to use consoles for comparison.

you have needlessly brought pc's into the discussion, we know when people buy an xbox its pretty much for gaming, with pc's that isnt the case. my oldest brother has a pc capable of playing games yet he has never bought one in his life or ever played one on his pc.
 
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ThunderLicker said:
80 to 200 million pc gamers? Where the hell have you pulled that nonsense from? 90% - 95% of them are probably facebook game players :p with the final 5% - 10% actually having rigs capable of playing ported console games/ high end pc games.
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Did you even read the previous posts? I've quoted the source articles/official research that came up with these numbers- 1 billion PCs world wide, of them 80-200 million can be classed as gaming PCs. 180 million were classed by nvidia as "active geforce users", 195 million gaming pcs sold. Read previous posts.
 
Amnesia said:
i asked you to prove better drm = more sales and to use consoles for comparison.
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Consoles have better DRM than PCs, consoles have higher customer base into game sales conversion rate. The numbers like 94% profit coming from consoles and only 6% coming from PC for MW3 are convincing.
Xbox vs PS3 - PS3 has smaller user base, so its smaller share of profits (40 vs 54) is reflective of that, regardless of DRM. Xbox piracy is much more involved than on PC this is fact, Xbox profit share for developers is much higher than on PC- fact.


Amnesia said:
you have needlessly brought pc's into the discussion, we know when people buy an xbox its pretty much for gaming, with pc's that isnt the case. my oldest brother has a pc capable of playing games yet he has never bought one in his life or ever played one on his pc.
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This is why this is an estimate, but it was given by a pro research group. All such issues are taken into account when number of gaming PCs was given as much lower than the 1billion of all PCs.
 
Borsch said:
Consoles have better DRM than PCs, consoles have higher customer base into game sales conversion rate. The numbers like 94% profit coming from consoles and only 6% coming from PC for MW3 are convincing.
Xbox vs PS3 - PS3 has smaller user base, so its smaller share of profits (40 vs 54) is reflective of that, regardless of DRM. Xbox piracy is much more involved than on PC this is fact, Xbox profit share for developers is much higher than on PC- fact.
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so if the xbox had over 1 million downloads and the ps3 had none what actual difference has the piracy made ?
you still havent proven that the piracy has lessened the sales

also whilst you're at it....prove that strict working drm = better sales on pc(compare pc titles)
 
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