Piracy and Small Game Developers

[chimaera]

Saw an interesting article on Kotaku today, linking to a forum post by a THQ head honcho regarding the death of Iron Lore (publisher of Titan Quest).

Kotaku - http://kotaku.com/362516/thq-creative-director-rants-on-piracy-death-of-iron-lore

Original Post - http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?t=42663

Even if some of his figures could be debated it's quite depressing to see how difficult it is for smaller developers. From someone who grew up on games during the Speccy and Commodore days when anyone could make a fun and original game, it makes me wonder whether PC gaming has a strong future.

I really enjoyed Titan Quest, it was a Diablo clone yes but it was still a good accomplished game.

I'm sure there are people here who played a pirate version of TQ and if so i hope it gives them the opportunity to 're-evaluate' their perspective, however i doubt it will make a difference.

 

[chimaera]

Maybe i focused on the piracy issue too much, i thought the comments about hardware vendors was particularly enlightening, sometimes it's easy to forget just how many pieces of hardware/software can make up a single PC, the possibilities are endless and to get a game that runs well must be mighty tough.

I remember back in the days of Elite 3 and Sensi Soccer you had to randomly type in a word from the game manual, admitedly all the crackers need to do is pdf the manual and supply it with the crack but surely there's some method out there thats simple yet moderately effective.

However i'm firmly of the belief that the hackers are more inventive than the developers, in which case i'd like to think that consumer education would be better, especially if they realise that in cases like this people and families are losing their incomes.

 

[chimaera]

If a game is tosh then to me it doesn't matter if the developer is big or small, they won't get my support. If they make a quality game then they will and it's that simple.

But what if the game is not a AAA title but rather pretty good fun for a couple of weeks, the sort of game that gets 80% in reviews.

You might play a pirate copy for a while, decide it was fun while it lasted and decide not to buy a retail copy. I believe that was the issue with Iron Lore, Titan Quest was a reasonably good game that sold moderate numbers yet was damaged by ill judged reviews and peer comments who played the pirate game.

A game like Bioshock was always going to sell with or without piracy, but for less prominent games the margins are much smaller. I guess i just don't see it in black and white, some games arn't tosh nor are they high quality, they're the ones who rely on sales margins more than anyone and are hurt the most.

 

[chimaera]

So what your saying is its OK to release an average clone run of the mill game and we should all be falling over ourselfs to buy it?

No one is forcing you to buy anything, if you don't like the look of it or you don't think the demo is any good then don't buy it, pure and simple. It just seems to be an excuse, "oh but i was just testing it out", and to be honest it's not a very good one at that.

I've bought plenty of games (some you mentioned actually) that i thought i'd enjoy but didn't, but thats the decision i made. When i'm not sure about a game i leave it a year and then pick it up on the cheap, then if it's tosh i haven't wasted much money. Thats what i did with TQ and i found it to be a good game, it's definitely not a cheap diablo clone, yes it's the same genre but it deserves more credit than that.

At the end of the day it wasn't that bad a game for the developers to lose their jobs, if they say piracy was partly to blame i can easily believe it.