Good article. Though unlike Botswana I shiver at the mere though of gaming going to console. Don't get me wrong I love my consoles... for console games. I would cry if 90% of all FPS or RTS games went to console. Yea I can eat peas with a knife, but why would I when I have a spoon right here.

I really don't think its a shot in foot problem. Pirating is something that the industry is wrapping its head around to defeat, and all he is saying is that they might think of going around the problem instead of through it. This will have to play out to really see what come of it.

As for the usual crying you get from people 'wahhhh it costs me three times as much as my Xbox to play games on the PC'. Well yea. The PC is a game platform, it also happens to be a web browser, a word processor, a DVD player/burner. Some people might watch TV on it, or record shows or movies on it. Some people even make movies or art on their PC. The PC is a TOOL. Yes it costs more, because it is more.

Does everyone need to pay $1600 - $3000 to play a rousing game of watch my frame rate drop... oops I mean Crysis. No. It doesn't take that to play WoW, or the Orange Box , or a myriad of other titles you can get and play for right around the cost of a PS3. Oh yea, by the way in addition you also get some of the stuff I mentioned above, all without having to use/pay for Home or Live.

That's kinda what's he's saying though - Blizzard and Valve are doing it the right way, making games that people can play without spending much more than they would anyway (a mid to low range card on top of an average system will do).

Some additional thoughts from Blair Fraser at Ironclad, from an interview I did with him a while back:

Then don't respond to it. /rolleyes

#1 - I think the number of "legitimate" pirates is still a very small percentage of overall piracy. Also, rabbit mentioned something about not treating customers like criminals. I think if we had less ridiculous copy protection schemes then we'd avoid this issue. I don't think a lack of copy protection will decrease piracy either as pirates will still find ways around it. Copy protection seems to be a great way to decrease sales and block legitimate customers. That said, I think it's a safe bet that most pirates are not legitimate customers. Stealing a game because you can't find a demo doesn't mean a theft didn't occur BTW.

#2 - This was addressed in the original article. I don't like the idea of completely ignoring hardcore gamers, but I do think PC game developers should be more cognizant of how many sales those people really represent. It's a bad idea to only target a small segment of your potential user base.

#3 - Once upon a time PC games were a major contender and there is nothing that says they cannot be once again. There was a time when a game would be available on a console or a PC, I'd chose the PC version everytime. Now, that almost never happens and I know I am not alone. I think it's a bad assumption, especially on the part of marketing departments or planning staff to just assume "Oh well, it's a PC game so it's not going to sell that well anyway". Installing a glass ceiling is just another way to make sure PC gaming does go the way of the dino.

EDIT - Removed my wild speculations about the future. Not really relevant to the topic at hand.

I for one have done this, I semi-regularly frequent "pirate" sites to find copies of games that I have previously purchased and have lost disks to, no longer have serials for, etc. Anyone remember the SSI code-wheels, or those ridiculous "what's the fourth word in the third sentence of the fifth paragraph of page 254 of your manual?" schemes? Abandonware is a huge example of this, where games that were often, for lack of a better description, "broken", are now available fixed, with serial generators and crackers to remove their outlandish and stupid protection schemes. I found my codewheel to one of my old SSI games, but it was so damaged by disuse and storage that it was basically unusable. And (apologies to Botswana) I can still dig out my old NES/SNES/PS1 and cartridges and give them a spin a hell of a lot easier than my old games on PC. Hell, I've lost hundreds of dollars in serial codes to software, because they were only stored in my email box, and when the site that had all my email from that era went down, thy are unsalvageable. I have purchased ZMud (a MUD client) three times in the last 15 years because of this. Did I ever think about finding a cracked copy? Not really, I simply made do with other things until i could afford to repurchase it.

I'm probably in the minority (at least according to people like the RIAA or the Titan Quest guys,) as a software pirate, but as I said, I really do go purchase things that I believe in, after I give them a "trial run." Possibly it comes from being old enough to have grown up during the heydays of shareware.

And THAT is why I buy Stardock products. I didn't even like Sins very much, but I'd never ask for a refund. They treat me like a customer, not a thief, and I so, so appreciate it.

This is an interesting discussion. I think we need a term to differentiate between theft of intellectual property and theft of tangible property. This is not to make light of what pirates take away from developers, but simply points to the reality that someone who shoplifts an Xbox 360 game from Best Buy has taken a piece of inventory that the store paid for. The store lost something and the thief gained something. When a pirate cracks a game, he does take something without paying for it, but the owner doesn't lose any physical property. This is a key distinction. With piracy, there is taking, but not loss. (Theoretical lost revenue will be addressed later.)

There are a lot of legitimate examples of people being able to enjoy a piece of media without paying the creator anything. If you check a book out from a public library, borrow from a friend, purchase a game used, swap w/ a friend etc. Before software EULAs, this was all handled under the rights of first sale. (Cliff note definition, if I buy a thing then I can sell, loan, or rent it as a please.) If you pay attention, you will see that content owners tend to treat all of these uses, legitimate or not, the same. Thus when you sign a EULA to install software, or purchase iTunes, or an Audible book, you'll see that you are agreeing that you have not purchased anything beyond permission to enjoy the media under certain limited conditions. You can't resell your iTunes music, Steam Games, Windows license key except under rare, limited conditions. The content owners are not really concerned about stealing they are concerned about building new revenue streams.

Now, this is not to say that piracy is OK since the content owners tend to be greedy and unethical scoundrels. Taking something, whether an idea, a song, or a thing without paying is still wrong and usually illegal. But there is a very large difference between taking something away from someone and denying them theoretical lost revenues. Media owners who claim a 1 to 1 relationship between pirated songs and lost sales are out of touch with reality. They expect us to assume that some kid who downloads every cracked game he can find would buy them all if pirating were impossible. Other examples also show the flaws in that logic: example A: is the sales of Sins, which were at one point top of the charts w/ no DRM. Example 2 is the data from Big Champagne, which in the Napster days, at least, generally showed a direct relationship between sales and illegal downloads. I.e., the most stolen songs are the most sold songs. Perhaps pirating serves as just really effective advertising? I'm not convinced that is the case, but it is more plausible that trying to swallow that every pirated copy is a lost sale.

Not to go too far afield here, but the author is on to a point that most seem to miss. While piracy is a problem, an equally large if not larger problem may be found in the business model of the content distributors. They are using an business model built around scarce access to media duplication to sell a product that anyone with access to a computer internet appliance can make unlimited perfect copies of. The old rules (based on supply and demand) say that unlimited copies necessarily lead to a drop in value and price.

I don't necessarily know what the new model is. Apparently it has something to do with long tails and 1000 fans. But the world is full of examples of people making money off of free stuff. (Exhibit A: water from municipal supplies selling for $1 per 12oz bottle. Exhibit B: The Grateful Dead making more money than almost any other band in history without top selling records and allowing fans to tape and distribute shows.) Pirating isn't right, but blaming kids for moving ahead of business models and regulations isn't quite right either. We need better explanations of why pirating is wrong. The genie is out of the bottle, the world has changed. Moral condemnation can't bring back the analog era or make yesterday's business practices profitable in tomorrow's marketplace.

Stardock seems to get that. Jonathan Coulton, Kristen Hersh, and other music folks seem to get that. People heavily invested in media distribution tend not to get it.

That's a pretty bold statement. I don't believe that PC gaming is struggling. The most widely quoted sales numbers fail to recognize some fairly important sales channels. Genre matters, too. I think part of the point of Wardell's missive is that if sales are drooping among the hardest of the hardcore, so what?

No, no we can't. I can't read email on my Xbox. I can't surf the web (though I realize other consoles can do that). I don't have a software library of thousands of productivity titles to choose to run on my console. I can't electronically purchase movies and music from dozens of different sources. So no, you can't throw that argument away. Consoles are still strictly entertainment devices, and limited ones at that.

The answer to this question is the whole thesis of Wardell's message: people don't buy games they can't play.

Ask the movie and music industry on how they calculate how much they lose through piracy. I'm still guessing the "type random numbers in, until it sounds right" method.

I am guilty of downloading the No-CD cracks for the damned things that want the discs in all the time. Bioshock was a prime example of this (I have the PC collector's edition btw, I could not live without the big daddy on my shelf!). I stopped buying at retail as much when steam came into it's own. That seems to do the trick grand, there is DRM but it doesn't stop me from playing the game without having to have the DVD in the drive. Then there are the shoddy games which run like a dog like Guitar Hero 3 which really disappointed me. I so looked forward to it then played on XP it was hopeless. I guess, had I pirated it, I would have seen how bad it was, and then never spent £50 on the bloody thing.

Seems Valve and these chaps behind sins have it right to me. Must be why I have a sizable collection of games from Steam instead.

But what else annoys me, is that (on a tangent here but related) pirated material bypasses all sorts of extra gumph we don't want, like those DVD Piracy adverts on legitimate DVDs. What the hell is that about? Those adverts disappear from the dodgy DVDs you get elsewhere, but I have sit bored through 5 minutes of crap telling me to buy the DVD when I already did before I can watch what I wanted? How does that make sense?

One thing, Sins of a Solar empire doesn't have a european distrobutor, why is this?

I think I remember reading something from Stardock to the effect that no European publisher thought that a space-based RTS would sell in Germany. And of course only Germans buy computer games. ?! (Funny thing is, the German Sins community is alive and well and has even completed a translation of the game.)

Even if you're not German, you should be able to purchase and play the direct download version with no problems. You can even get a game box w/ DVD & Manual shipped to you if you want one.

Also, keep in mind that every console game you buy $8 or $10 goes to the platform holder. I believe if a PC game sells 300,000 (around that) a console game must sell 1,000,000 to equal the revenue. So, when we see that PC game X only does 150,000 units, revenue wise that ain't bad.

I think the copy protection issue is particularly relevant. In my younger days I used to steal a lot of software and I know lots of people who do. None of them EVER bought a game because of copy protection.

Unless you count needing a CD key to play online, and thats only occasionally.

The crackers remove it all so the pirate's don't see it anyway. I'll say it again, Pirate's are not bothered by copy protection

Only real customers are.

Also I think gaming on the PC will never die, it just might lose mainstream status. Even then unless some major players screw up royally (Valve, Stardock, Popcap) games will continue to be made commercially.

One last thing:

The idea that PC's are expensive I think come about because of places like Best Buy. They try to up sell you very hard no matter what you look at and a lot of those boxes are garbage. If you had a company sell mid range gamming PC's they could do it for the comparable cost of a xbox elite or PS3 and it would be good for something approaching the life cycle of a console. Perhaps longer with minor upgrades.

My PC is 3 or four years old, cost less than 1000(Canadian, three years ago!) when I bought it and I have only bought one video card in all that time. You can keep the case, monitor and other stuff when you upgrade. My next upgrade will cost less than 400 bucks. Most consoles even make you buy new controllers. I really think the divide is not materials its service. No one is helping the technologically less savvy.

EDIT: What are the chances we could get this guy on the conference call? I'd kill someone to hear this guy on a round table with ken Levine and Chris Taylor.

There is a point in there, and I agree that there is a problem with IP theft. On the other hand, investments have been and always will be risks. They are not guaranteed. Granted my example has more to do with record companies than game developers, but the advent of unlimited perfect digital copies has made owning record distribution deals much less valuable than they were before cds could be burned in the home and broadband connections become widespread.

Maybe the future revenue model will be based more on WoW and subscriptions. Maybe it will be microtransactions. Maybe something else. I am sick and tired of companies who have speculated heavily in content distribution deals blaming everybody but themselves when the market conditions change and distribution rights aren't worth what they were 10 years ago. Record company executives today are like livery stable magnates at the turn of the century or scriptorium barons back in Gutenburg's day.

As for video games, the market is there. People are paying for what they want to buy. I sure as hell spend more on computer games than I budget for, nearly every single month.

This math only works if there indeed was a market for 1 million copies of your product in the first place. It relies on the extremely dubious assumption that everyone who pirate a copy would have paid for it if the pirate option wasn't available. I don't doubt that some sales are lost from piracy, but a competent business forecast would not over-produce so badly. The real market for a game can only be as large as the number of people willing to pay for your product. If people who would never pay for it in the first place get it for free, the owners haven't lost a cent.

I do keep wondering why more PC developers don't follow the Valve & Blizzard example of playing down the spec requirements. Nobody wants to buy a game they can't play properly. One that's happened a couple of times, you probably give up. And even if your specs are up to it, there are quite likely some other issues you need to solve before playing, and even if there are none, you still need to tune the options to get it running optimally, typically having to restart the game numerous times and running a benchmark of some sort, and then again spending the first couple of hours in-game wondering if there was some effect you should still turn on or off. All of this is crap a normal person will not bother with. (I did have to solve a stuttering sound issue with The Orange Box, but that was it.)

While it's said that PC gamers actually enjoy the tinkering and the technical wizardry is just something that comes with the territory, being a PC gamer, I can't see this being true for the mass market.

Case in point: me. I'm reasonably technically proficient, having grown up with PCs, but I don't have the time to spend on getting my PC games to run properly any longer. I'm not using my PC gaming rig at all because of all the hassle. Counting installation time, solving a technical problem with the game (there's always something) and tweaking the options, I can easily spend a whole evening with a new game without actually getting to play. I wonder who has that kind of time. Sure, if I was a hardcore PC gamer, I'd probably be better in all this stuff, but that's just it: I'm a normal gamer with a gaming PC, and I can't be bothered anymore with the specs heavy games. Thankfully the more interesting games are often very low-key indie stuff, which tends to Just Work.

I really hope the new "PC gaming alliance" or whatever it was called comes up with some magic solution, but I remain skeptical. Anyways, this Sins guy is making so much sense that I guess I'm buying their game after all.