Call of Duty 4 I purchased and played on PC, and it was the best FPS I’ve played in years. It was better than HL2:Ep2 by a huge margin. Anyone who thinks CoD4 was just an iteration probably hasn’t played it.
The console vs. PC sales are apples and oranges IMO.
The only way the discrepancy matters in sales is if you are asserting that if it weren’t for piracy that the PC version of Call of Duty 4 would have sold 4 million or so units.
Is that your position? That minus piracy, Call of Duty 4 would have sold 4 million units on the PC?
Well, we could always go the 360 DRM route-- special discs with cryptographic executable signing and the decryption in an HSM in the drive itself.
Maybe so, but I have heard the length of the game is very low and the price is still very high. I’ll wait until it’s half price and I have a faster machine. I have Orange Box already, so I’m in no hurry to pick up another FPS (I haven’t even finished the original HL2 yet).
I gotta also chime in that I would think that PC gaming doesn’t have nearly the installed base of machines capable of running modern games (even ones that scale well) as there are 360’s and PS3’s out there.
It’s because the people that are into those games have largely migrated to Xbox 360 from the PC. So all MS did was canibalize the PC market with their Xbox 360. They didn’t generate more action game players at all just shifted them to another platform.
I predict AC will have similar results on the PC.
Mass Effect might get a bit more since role players didn’t move in droves as far as I understand.
Hell give the Xbox 360 a decent mouse + keyboard and I might switch, too.
But do sell magazines.
It’s actually the flip of your analysis*. It doesn’t matter if the game sells more on the shelves - it’s a question of whether the people who are interested in that sort of game will buy magazines (or go to websites) to read about it. Back when I was on PCG, we followed the UK sales figures pretty closely. The average “top” RTS sold twice what the “top” FPS sold**, yet still the sales when we put an FPS on the cover were - on average - higher than the strategy games.
So, no, it’s not about cool. It’s about money.
KG
*Which I generally agree with.
**Putting aside Half-life, in the UK, any of the big FPS did 70K and the big RTS did 140K. Roughly. Clearly, very roughly.
They may be apples and oranges, but the numbers matter if you are selling fruit. And their does seem to be a demand to play the game, but not to buy it.
Which is the crux of the issue. That odd dissonance between magazine coverage and sales for hard core pc games is just a reflection of people’s willingness to play, but not to buy the games. Coverage of Sins was muted because the amount of people interested in playing the game was similar to those that were willing to buy it.
I think that piracy did lead to significantly lower sales of COD4 on the PC. I do think that imagining a scenario that does not have piracy is a bit moot, and the best solution is to do as you have done, and make games for those that will pay. Hope everyone likes the Sims, Popcap, and WoW.
PC Gamer covers COD4 because people want to play it on the PC, and are interested in more information about it. They don’t appear to want to buy it. Their interest in playing the game leads to increased readership and ad revenue for the magazine.
Certainly - because the gamers who buy magazines are not necessarily the same as the people who buy games.
If I were running a game magazine and money was the focus, I would indeed put FPS’s on the cover but each magazine woudl have a Sims section and a WoW section - EVERY issue. But that’s another story. :)
What? No, not at all. I’m just saying, with respect to your post, that CoD4 on PC fits the mold of games that shouldn’t be made. It caters to a hardcore audience, an audience that’s prone to piracy, and the end result is weak sales on PC. It’s a game that should’ve done a million units on PC at least, as it’s a game that’s the bread and butter of hardcore pc gamers. Had CoD4 been done exclusively on PC, it would have been a dismal failure. Plus, the devs said (I’m pulling from memory here) that there was a magnitude of pirated PC keys being used for online multiplayer, which are lost sales due to piracy.
It really is, based on your post, something that devs shouldn’t do. So it’s like you are advocating just cancelling FPS games on PC. The only ones still viable are tied to the internet like Steam games, which is borderline, when it comes to your post.
Fixed that for you.
Both PC Gamer and GFW do this constantly. How many people actually read the best PC penis contests looking for a new PC? Why would anyone pay $4000+ for a PC unless they bleeding gold coins? What’s the market for this information other than the hardware editors of other PC magazines who get to play with stuff for free?
What’s the problem here?
It’s all relative though.
Ultimately the question is: If COD4 had the perfect copy protection, 100% effective, do you think COD4 would have sold 4 million units?
How many PC shooters have ever sold 4 million? I know of only one or maybe two and they both start with the letter “H.”
It’s probably second only to Windows. But it also sells enough from corporations to still be profitable. If corps bought games, people probably wouldn’t be too concerned about piracy.
I guess what I should say is that generally speaking, software applications have less copy protection than PC games. I’m all for any type of DRM, copy protection, whatever as long as it doesn’t inconvenience the people who actually buy my stuff.
This probably touches on markets. The market for applications is older and less likely to be bothered with piracy (or has already been burned by a virus and/or malware from Limewire and its ilk). I imagine the products that have a bigger issue with piracy are things like mixing software, or music players… apps designed for 16-24 year olds.
But in the game industry, certain genres of games have been classified as “cool” resulting in lots of games being made for those “cool” genres despite the well established history of having a relatively smaller number of actual buyers in the market.
I agree that there’s a disconnect here, and I’d even talked about it for years in my columns. But most developers don’t want to make games for their moms; they want to do those “cool” games, because that’s what they want to play. It gets them more press, more prestige, and puts them in a better position, career-wise. Or at least that’s what they believe.
Well, we could always go the 360 DRM route-- special discs with cryptographic executable signing and the decryption in an HSM in the drive itself.
And you’d “solve” piracy!
Obviously, that would preclude any online sales, you’d have a higher return rate to deal with and tech support costs, and there’s no obvious reason to believe that you’d actually sell substantially more games than you would on a DVD anyway…
Apparently ‘in/around Nov 2007’ these were released…
Clive Barker’s Jericho
TimeShift
Gears of War
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
Crysis
BlackSite: Area 51
Soldier of Fortune: Payback
(oh - and the previous month apparently had ‘orange box’, ‘quake wars’ and ‘strangehold’).
Isn’t that an oversaturated market? How many PC FPS gamers are there, and how many have the cash to buy more than 2 or 3 of those games at the most?
You might as well ask why Car & Driver reviews Ferraris, and why people like to read those articles. It’s just “ooh, that’s cool!”
When I was talking to hardware companies about what to cover, I told them the only machines I was interested in covering were super duper crazy high-end ones just for the freakiness factor and entertainment, or super duper low-end ones as actual buying guides for people.
Another thing I wanted to mention Brad, is that it’s your lack of coverage that’s helping with your piracy rate. If you had the amount of coverage as other big budget games, your piracy rate would skyrocket. The more people who are ‘interested’ in the game, the more people will pirate it.
It’s your obscurity that’s helping you as much as anything else.
But he wouldn’t lose sales, and that’s his point.
Wait, what? Are you saying he’d be losing more sales to piracy if more people knew about the game? That makes no sense at all.
Yes, more people would pirate his game if it was publicized better – but surely more people would be paying for it too, right?
Whoa, that’s deep.
— Alan
Yeah, in the business world they pretty much write off home users and focus on selling site licenses to companies. They don’t need effective copy protection because legal pressure is cost-effective when you’re talking about 100+ licenses.
In the gaming world they can’t follow that model. There is no business market so they can’t write off home users as incurable pirates, and it isn’t cost effective to try to pressure individual customers into buying software through things like the BSA.