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PCGA President: Real Innovation Comes from PC Gaming, Piracy "Ridiculous" Reason to Leave Market

Posted 12/12/08 at 11:06:04 PM  by Nathan Grayson

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With pirates closing in on all sides, many publishers abandoned PC gaming's ship as though it were already a potential set for Little Mermaid 9: I Don't Want to Be A Mermaid; I Want to Be A Boat. PC Gaming Alliance president Randy Stude obviously wasn't one of those naysayers, but he does have a few choice words for them.

"If someone wants to leave the PC market [because of piracy], we’ll miss you," he told Gamepolitics. "We’ll watch with admiration as your titles ship in a diluted fashion without a whole lot of game play innovation, at least until you copy the innovation that occurs on the PC. We'll find the great games on PC and we’ll play those."

On top of that, Stude believes PCs and consoles aren't so different from each another, and thinks the two walks of life will end up meeting somewhere down the road.

"The guts of every console should tell you that the capability is there for the PC to act as the central point for all the consoles," he said. "If you bought a PC and as part of that equation you said, Okay, when you’re on the phone with Dell, 'Hey, Dell, on this PC, this new notebook I’m buying, can you make sure it has the PlayStation 4 option built into it?'"

"Well, why not? Why shouldn’t that be the case? [Sony is] certainly not making any money on the hardware. I mean, can’t they create a stable enough environment to specify  that if Dell’s going to sell that notebook and say that it’s PlayStation 4 [compatible] that it must have certain ingredients and it must meet certain criteria? Absolutely they could do that."

Four more years! Four more years!

COMMENTS:5
TAGS: gaming, news, sony, Playstation 3, PC Gaming Alliance, Speaking my language
COMMENTS
avatarHate to say it....

Submitted by ApoX-911 on Sat, 12/13/2008 - 12:52pm

In part I agree with PCGA, piracy does have a major impact on sales. BUT! I don't think it's as remotely as bad as they say.

 Sit back and take a look of what's dominating the PC game market today:

The new SecuROM invading honest game buyer's machines like a virus,almost to where the real challenge is getting the drm off your machine rather than completing the game.

High profile MMOs that you pay 50 or 60 bucks just for the software, then another 10 to 15 a month to play.

And more advanced games that you need a machine capable of running NASA launches on it's own.

 On the other hand......

With a console it's easy. No pesky DRMs, CD keys, or online activations. Just plug and play. No need to worry bout whether your hardware specs are up to par. And in most cases you can play somewhere that's possibly much more comfortable. And you can even play multiplayer without a whole other machine to set up!

So in my mind, piracy wont be what kills pc games.  Ease of use and plain convenience will be the deciding factor.

 I know this article isnt exactly about PC vs. Console, but it's in my opinion that piracy shouldn't exactly be pegged as the biggest problem.

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avatarWith the rise in games that

Submitted by Antilogic81 on Sat, 12/13/2008 - 11:31am

With the rise in games that run badly and are scaled badly for the various platforms that are PCs it should be a no brainer that a game company release a demo...especially with how video cards are constantly updating their drivers.

 

But they don't do anything of the sort...take Crysis for instance...they played it up how it would melt your computer...even on this magazine they said that. Crytek played up that hype in spades...the most common thread concerning Crysis was "Will my PC run this game?" Crytek should have thrown us a bone and released a demo prior to the game so that everyone could see if it would run...

 

Instead we are forced to get creative and pirate the game...I'm not going to spend $50 on something that may not run well on my computer...except herein lies the flaw...The game scaled badly, it was bad. So when someone got a pirated copy and found this out...you think they are going to spend the cash to play the game legitimately? Hell no! We have to save the money to upgrade the computer first, and not everyone has the money to drop in a new mobo/graphics card/cpu into their machine...especially when other games run just fine.  Why bother?

 

Crytek doesn't learn their lesson, and then admonishes their consumers. That's pretty damn stupid. A demo would have brought to their attention how badly their product was performing for the average consumer.  If I recall Crytek released a demo for Far Cry before it came out...didn't that game sell really well? I didn't hear any klaxons screaming about piracy of Far Cry.

Give us a demo and take away one of the reasons why people pirate a game in the first place.

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avatarAll I can do is pray and

Submitted by I Jedi on Sat, 12/13/2008 - 12:23am

All I can do is pray and hope that the PC gaming industry doesn't entirely topple over in the next few years. I don't know, but I just think that gaming companies in general need to reevaluate how they sell and market their games to the PC.

I always buy my PC games in full and by that I mean I don't download them illegally. I either buy them from Steam or from the store. I do believe that gaming publishers have a right to protect their material, but I just hope that they realize that the way they’re doing it isn’t going to help them at all and will hurt them in the long run overall. 

Should they topple, though. Well, at least I can turn to open-source, right???

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avatarFor PC Gaming to survive:

Submitted by QUINTIX256 on Sat, 12/13/2008 - 7:17am

  • Games need to be playable on Intel's Graphics Media Decelerator.

    • Gamemakers should not use piracy as a scapegoat for the fact that their games are unplayable on 90% of computers on the market. All games should have a short instructional video demonstating how easy it is to install a modest video card (like my Radeon 2600XT, which continues to impress me.)

  • Berid of EULA's and CD Keys

    • Both are lengthy, obnoxious placebos that do nothing to prevent piracy. I can understand the "no liability" stuff for the P.C., but why would any publication, let alone a computer game, need a waranty, or disclaim away the existance of any such thing? Why can't we just have the standard and simple "Protected by Copyright Law" that we get on movies and video games, maybe with a simple "no liability" clause tacked on?

  • Games need to be playable directly from the optical media

    • or streamed to the hard-drive during gameplay. I understand that a hard drive has greater throughput and much better seek time than any optical drive, but consoles have been able to get away with it just fine since before the original playstation, and it is difficult to compete with that kind of convenience on the P.C. with the insistance that not only does the whole game need to be copied to the hard disk, but the optical disc must be present to play the game.

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avatarActually

Submitted by nmanguy on Sat, 12/13/2008 - 11:25am

I think Steam has a way to play the game while you stream it, once you download the first part of it, but it might make your game crash if you try to access a file that isn't there yet. Once cheaply-priced broadband speeds get to the 20Mb/s range, it'll be good though.

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