I don’t think he’s pointing out a problem as much as he’s pointing out how a lot of us approach this issue with skewed perceptions because the media that informs our perception has some hidden biases that skew their coverage.
Absolute number of sales would decrease, but proportion of legit copies to pirated ones would decrease. So, both would increase, but pirated copies would increase faster.
[QUOTE=Brad Wardell;1277676]
Piracy is a serious problem on the PC. But not just for games. All PC software has to deal with it. But the general PC software industry deals with it by focusing on making software for people who buy stuff.
[QUOTE]
Actually we deal with it by a combination of phone-home product activation systems and a rigorous pursuit of commercial users of pirated copies. All the other software companies in our industry have a similar approach. Obviously this option isn’t available to the games industry, since you can’t really go after private individuals who have pirated.
AND by making software people will want to buy.
With a few, small, exceptions (WindowBlinds is one) there simply isn’t a market for retail PC utilities, presumably because of good free alternatives and piracy of the non-free alternatives. This is why companies have moved towards a model with a free, non fully-featured, non-commercial/trial version and an expensive, fully featured, commercial version.
As MMO’s adopt this same model, I’m curious which converts to more real sales. This model versus the fully featured trial version which just stops working after the time expires. (I suppose assuming you had the same kind of online activation/distribution system such as via Steam or something)
Hidden bias? Is wanting to talk about interesting things a secret?
Steve, I guess I should be clear. I have a passing interest like everyone else. The high end of the PC market is interesting, every once and a while. But magazines concentrate way too much on these things for my taste and wallet.
As a consumer of multiple gaming magazines, I’d prefer information on hardware that is actually useful to me. Neither the low end or high end of market apply, although the low end is much more interesting.
Just take a peek at what we discuss in the hardware forum, a forum populated by the hardcore PC market. We don’t spend much time discussing gigantic monitors or $4000 PCs, unless your name is Gary.
The hardware section shouldn’t be a freak show, especially since the Vede moved on to other projects.
Not to mention there are other magazines that adequately fill the penis-computer niche, such as Maximum PC, Computer Power User, etc.
Maybe you’d get more circulation if there were more people who thought they could afford to join into the PC gaming culture.
Are you saying that if Sins had gotten more coverage it would be selling less?
The issue isn’t about piracy on its own. The issue is whether PC game publishers should be using piracy as a blanket reason to argue that the PC, as a gaming platform, is “dying”.
If covering super high end hardware sells more copies of the magazine, then that is what you should cover.
However, I would argue that if you’re making a game, the number of machines your game can actually run on should matter.
That is, I may pick up a copy of Car & Driver to read up on the latest super cars, but I would not use the fact that Car & Driver is covering super cars as evidence that I should start a mass market business making accessories that can only be used by people who have super cars.
How much influence does the market the game caters to play in piracy…and how much do game makers consider that when making games? I mean, what market segments have low piracy rates? Games for adults and maybe games for younger kids (whose copies are bought by adults). Now what genres are favored by these people? Deep games like EU, GalCiv, etc. Sims games. A personal favorite of mine are the hard-core simulations like racing and flight sims…I mean a person willing to spend $$ on a stick and pedals, a wheel and pedals, track-ir, or even a cockpit-like rig is also probably willing to pay for the good sim software. I know I am.
Just to drop this in, a Russian article on STALKER’s sales
STALKER’s Sales
A journalist talked to the CEO of GSC Sergei Grigorovich and learned that the game has sold 950 000 copies in CIS, 90 000 of them in Ukraine. In the rest of the world the game has sold 700 000 copies, almost all at full price.
Source (in Russian): http://gameplay.com.ua/node/1003763
I don’t disagree, but the problem with covering that middle ground is that there’s almost nothing to differentiate the products. The performance gap between machines in that range is almost irrelevant.
I mostly focused my coverage on value, and did multiple roundups of $50-$300 videocards.
Oh, sure. But I also think the “no machines can run this game” problem is way overstated.
That said, if I was making engineering decisions for a more mass market product or one targeted at older gamers, I’d make sure it ran on laptop graphics chipsets. I’d also have to learn to live with people on message boards making fun of the screenshots.
I think the other issue is to look at the size of the market for your games. If only 350 thousand people in NA are willing to buy your game for the PC, then don’t make games that require 500,000 people to buy it in order for it to be profitable.
Piracy is an issue, but not every game needs to have AAA production to be excellent. Just looking at this board you have many people talking about games like Armageddon Wars and Audio surf.
The PC is no longer the primary platforms for AAA productions, that doesn’t mean you can’t make good games.
Do you really think companies don’t make this calculation before they sign a game?
In fact, this is exactly the problem with getting a game signed; sales projections for PC titles are so low right now that it’s a challenge to get games signed that only need to sell 100,000 copies to be profitable.
(Edit: It’s easy to forget that all the games released this year were probably signed in 2004 or 2005. The actual impact of this perceived “PC games are dying” won’t be felt for a year or more, as PC releases start drying up even more than they are right now.)
Brad, I will gladly pay you full retail price for Master of Magic when it’s done.
(Just like I paid for Galciv, and Civ4 and Oblivion. I skipped Bioshock on PC because of the onerous copy protection. I don’t think that’s working out the right way. I’ll buy a used 360 copy just to show my pissed-offedness. (It’s not much, but what else can one grognard do?)
To be fair, a lot of these apps are (A) bundled with new PCs, (B) being sold to corporations who are a lot less likely to pirate software en-masse, or (C) being marketed to adults who are used to, y’know, paying for crap they use, as opposed to Johnny Gamer, Teen Pirate Extraordinaire, who just fires up his BitTorrent client every time he wants the latest release. Which feeds into your points about knowing - and choosing - your target audience(s) accordingly.
Are we talking about the budget games developed in parts of the world you’ve never heard of, much less can pronounce, where the programmers are paid with black-market canned foods and the art assets look like something scrawled out by a class full of autistic third-graders?
Because if so, I have one or two theories as to why they tank…
Are you asserting that magazine coverage creates demand? Because Kieron’s post suggests that magazines focus on what their readers already want. It’s the difference between feeding your audience what they ask for and getting them to want what you tell them to want.
I had a marketing professor who said that companies don’t create demand, they cater to it. His example was SUVs: car companies didn’t sit down one day and say, “Hey, let’s make a bunch of SUVs and get people to buy them;” they noticed that SUVs were becoming popular so they said, “Hey, let’s jump on that bandwagon and make some more SUVs!” Which expanded the market, which helped increase demand, which led to more SUVs being made & sold.
Buy Audiosurf instead. :)
Maybe companies—plural—don’t, but a single company created the first SUV, which created the demand.
Well, my professor’s point was that initial company didn’t employ some voodoo magic in their marketing to make people buy that first SUV rather than some other vehicle. It succeeded not because it created demand where none existed, but because it appealed to a market segment which hadn’t previously been catered to, which in turn opened the floodgates for more SUVs to be made.
Like I said, there’s a difference between creating and catering to demand; my belief is that game magazines do the latter.