Quite Lengthy And Yet Still Not Finished
Good grief, this post got long.I was going to have one more section about content and what we're paying for versus what we paid for twenty years ago, but this is already so freaking long and I'm going to hold the last section until tomorrow.
I saw two long posts recently by people in the gaming industry that intertwine in strange and interesting ways.
Brad Wardell had some interesting comments recently about the PC gaming market, which you can read here. Wardell is CEO of Stardock, developers of the Galactic Civilizations series as well as publishers of Sins of a Solar Empire.
Brad's comments tend to get a lot of run now because Stardock definitely has scoreboard--both Gal Civ II and Sins of a Solar Empire have done extremely well, and they both have absolutely zero copy protection.
I'd like to discuss a few things that Wardell wrote in his recent post, but I encourage you to follow the link and read the full text first.
Here are a few excerpts:
So here is the deal: When you develop for a market, you don't go by the user base. You go by the potential customer base. That's what most software companies do. They base what they want to create on the size of the market they're developing for. But not PC game developers.
PC game developers seem to focus more on the "cool" factor. What game can they make that will get them glory with the game magazines and gaming websites and hard core gamers? These days, it seems like game developers want to be like rock stars more than businessmen. I've never considered myself a real game developer. I'm a gamer who happens to know how to code and also happens to be reasonably good at business.
They do? I know there are developers that have certainly taken this approach, but I don't know many rock star developers. I think the reason that developers want "glory" with gaming magazines and websites is that publicity draws attention to their product, and that attention is likely to result in higher sales. Any effort to front a developer or producer as a "rock star" (you could argue that Ubisoft did this with Jade Raymond) is a business decision designed to increase interest in the game.
In other words, it's not a non-business approach--it's just a different approach. Wardell's implication, though, is that "other" game developers are ego-driven, which I think is both unfair and patronizing.
Wardell's lynchpin is generally copy-protection, and he discusses it here:
The problem with blaming piracy
I don't want anyone to walk away from this article thinking I am poo-pooing the effect of piracy. I'm not. I definitely feel for game developers who want to make kick ass PC games who see their efforts diminished by a bunch of greedy pirates. I just don't count pirates in the first place. If you're a pirate, you don't get a vote on what gets made -- or you shouldn't if the company in question is trying to make a profit.
The reason why we don't put copy protection on our games isn't because we're nice guys. We do it because the people who actually buy games don't like to mess with it. Our customers make the rules, not the pirates. Pirates don't count. We know our customers could pirate our games if they want but choose to support our efforts. So we return the favor - we make the games they want and deliver them how they want it. This is also known as operating like every other industry outside the PC game industry.
...When you blame piracy for disappointing sales, you tend to tar the entire market with a broad brush. Piracy isn't evenly distributed in the PC gaming market.
Blaming piracy is easy. But it hides other underlying causes. When Sins popped up as the #1 best selling game at retail a couple weeks ago, a game that has no copy protect whatsoever, that should tell you that piracy is not the primary issue.
In the end, the pirates hurt themselves. PC game developers will either slowly migrate to making games that cater to the people who buy PC games or they'll move to platforms where people are more inclined to buy games.
In the meantime, if you want to make profitable PC games, I'd recommend focusing more effort on satisfying the people willing to spend money on your product and less effort on making what others perceive as hot. But then again, I don't romanticize PC game development. I just want to play cool games and make a profit on games that I work on.
I think that sometimes Brad hurts his own cause because he comes off as lecturing and snotty, and I think he does here. That's not what I think is interesting, though. What I think he's describing is a business model that works extremely well for Stardock, but let me play devil's advocate for a minute.
Who plays those "hot" games that he describes so derisively? A wide demographic, and one that, most importantly, includes younger gamers. Would these younger gamers ever get exposed to PC gaming if all they had to play were games like Gal Civ and Sins?
I doubt it.
Making games for a generally older audience that is less inclined to piracy is absolutey a sound business decision for Stardock, and DRM-free games are wonderful, but I think it would be ruinous for PC gaming if everyone adopted the Stardock model. Yes, the so-called hot games get pirated at a much, much higher rated, but they're still attracting more people to PC gaming in general. I think it's fair to say that piracy generally skews younger, so as they get older, they're likely to buy more and steal less.
Let's say that a bowling alley is really having trouble with its teenage customers. They're loud, they're rude, and they're generally disruptive. There are a lot of them, but they seem to spend much less per hour than older customers. So the bowling alley decides to stop having promotional nights for teenagers. Instead, they focus on their senior citizens, because they spend more money per hour and cause none of the problems that teenagers do.
Now if every bowling alley did this, the customer base would continue to shrink as bowlers retired or died, because there would be no one at the front end to replace them. Eventually, the bowling alley would be forced to close. If other bowling alleys, though, continued to market heavily to younger people, then that bowling alley could do really, really well.
Like I said, that's a devil's advocate position, but I think it's worth thinking about.
The other post was by Michael Fitch, Director of Creative Management at THQ, after Iron Lore Entertainment (Titan Quest) announced that it was closing. Fitch posted in the Quarter to Three forums, and what he says is an interesting counterpoint to Wardell. Again, I encourage you to read his full post, but here are a few excerpts:
It's a rough, rough world out there for independent studios who want to make big games, even worse if you're single-team and don't have a successful franchise to ride or a wealthy benefactor. Trying to make it on PC product is even tougher, and here's why.
Piracy. Yeah, that's right, I said it. No, I don't want to re-hash the endless "piracy spreads awareness", "I only pirate because there's no demo", "people who pirate wouldn't buy the game anyway" round-robin. Been there, done that. I do want to point to a couple of things, though.
One, there are other costs to piracy than just lost sales. For example, with TQ, the game was pirated and released on the nets before it hit stores. It was a fairly quick-and-dirty crack job, and in fact, it missed a lot of the copy-protection that was in the game. One of the copy-protection routines was keyed off the quest system, for example. You could start the game just fine, but when the quest triggered, it would do a security check, and dump you out if you had a pirated copy. There was another one in the streaming routine. So, it's a couple of days before release, and I start seeing people on the forums complaining about how buggy the game is, how it crashes all the time. A lot of people are talking about how it crashes right when you come out of the first cave. Yeah, that's right. There was a security check there.
So, before the game even comes out, we've got people bad-mouthing it because their pirated copies crash, even though a legitimate copy won't. We took a lot of shit on this, completely undeserved mind you. How many people decided to pick up the pirated version because it had this reputation and they didn't want to risk buying something that didn't work? Talk about your self-fulfilling prophecy.
...Two, the numbers on piracy are really astonishing. The research I've seen pegs the piracy rate at between 70-85% on PC in the US, 90%+ in Europe, off the charts in Asia. I didn't believe it at first. It seemed way too high. Then I saw that Bioshock was selling 5 to 1 on console vs. PC. And Call of Duty 4 was selling 10 to 1. These are hardcore games, shooters, classic PC audience stuff. Given the difference in install base, I can't believe that there's that big of a difference in who played these games, but I guess there can be in who actually payed for them.
Let's dig a little deeper there. So, if 90% of your audience is stealing your game, even if you got a little bit more, say 10% of that audience to change their ways and pony up, what's the difference in income? Just about double. That's right, double. That's easily the difference between commercial failure and success. That's definitely the difference between doing okay and founding a lasting franchise. Even if you cut that down to 1% - 1 out of every hundred people who are pirating the game - who would actually buy the game, that's still a 10% increase in revenue. Again, that's big enough to make the difference between breaking even and making a profit.
Titan Quest did okay. We didn't lose money on it. But if even a tiny fraction of the people who pirated the game had actually spent some god-damn money for their 40+ hours of entertainment, things could have been very different today. You can bitch all you want about how piracy is your god-given right, and none of it matters anyway because you can't change how people behave... whatever. Some really good people made a seriously good game, and they might still be in business if piracy weren't so rampant on the PC. That's a fact.
Let's dig a little deeper there. So, if 90% of your audience is stealing your game, even if you got a little bit more, say 10% of that audience to change their ways and pony up, what's the difference in income? Just about double. That's right, double. That's easily the difference between commercial failure and success. That's definitely the difference between doing okay and founding a lasting franchise. Even if you cut that down to 1% - 1 out of every hundred people who are pirating the game - who would actually buy the game, that's still a 10% increase in revenue. Again, that's big enough to make the difference between breaking even and making a profit.
So Fitch, seemingly, is proving Wardell's point. Seemingly. I believe, though, that there are spaces in-between.
First off, and this is tangential, what exactly is the "research" that Fitch has seen? Every time I see a piracy number from any industry, it's astronomical, but what I never see is any discussion of methodology. Industries throw gigantic numbers around, but I never see anything to back those numbers up. I'm not saying that piracy isn't a problem, because clearly, it is, but I tend to be skeptical of any number that is arrived at by black box methodology.
Here's what I find particularly curious, though, and it's what led to me believing that there was some "space" between Fitch and Wardell. Titan Quest, according to Fitch, simply crashed when someone playing a pirated copy reached a certain point in the game.
...the game was pirated and released on the nets before it hit stores. It was a fairly quick-and-dirty crack job, and in fact, it missed a lot of the copy-protection that was in the game. One of the copy-protection routines was keyed off the quest system, for example. You could start the game just fine, but when the quest triggered, it would do a security check, and dump you out if you had a pirated copy. There was another one in the streaming routine. So, it's a couple of days before release, and I start seeing people on the forums complaining about how buggy the game is, how it crashes all the time. A lot of people are talking about how it crashes right when you come out of the first cave. Yeah, that's right. There was a security check there.
So, before the game even comes out, we've got people bad-mouthing it because their pirated copies crash, even though a legitimate copy won't. We took a lot of shit on this, completely undeserved mind you. How many people decided to pick up the pirated version because it had this reputation and they didn't want to risk buying something that didn't work? Talk about your self-fulfilling prophecy.
That seems incredibly self-defeating. You want to stop pirates, not piss them off. The people stealing the game still post on message boards, and there's no skull and crossbones beneath their avatar. They are still part of the word-of-mouth about your game.
Actually, that approach isn't self-defeating--it's downright idiotic. Why in the world wouldn't there just be a message about the copy not being legitimate, then having an unskippable 30-60 second trailer to show them all the cool stuff they're missing? And if there are concerns that doing so would pinpoint where the security check was occurring, why not just store the results of the security check, then pop up the message and the cut scene based on a random time variable?
That approach seems like a way to treat pirates not as customers, necessarily, but as influencers, because they are--like it or not, they help shape opinion on a game.
As strange as it sounds, they have value.
So at the same time a developer is trying to stop piracy, they should also be doing everything they can to shape the pirate's opinion of their game.
Like it or not, they do count.
<< Home