Yeah, that’s basically the same difficulty as downloading a torrent.
Plus, the 360 has the effective anti-modding defense of breaking a lot. So you buy a modded 360 and play pirated games for three months. Then it breaks. Now what?
It cost $40 to get your 360 modded and then all you need is a gamefly subscription (or better yet access to someone with a game fly subscription) and access to a dvd burner. Most non microsoft studio games let you play online with no risk to your account.
FYI I only know this because all the gamers I work with are doing this. I’m the chump that still buys my games. I don’t know how much casual do you want to get.
Maybe they’re going for collective punishment or something? They figure that when they leave the room we’ll all gang up on the pirates for delaying our precious Tom Clancy’s EndWar.
None, obviously. Also, did you notice how many millions - nay, billions - of DS pirates pirated codpieces?
The numbers you so prettily recite is no basis for the superstition you’ve embraced. For that to be the case, you’d need much, much more data.
Indeed, the data you have makes equally good support for the argument that the COD publisher killed PC sales themselves.
Either superstition requires you to make a bunch of assumptions you have no evidence to support.
Your superstition requires you assume little or no overlap between the PC & console COD buyers, something you do not demonstrate.
My example superstition requires you assume the opposite.
I’m not saying your superstition is wrong, and I’m certainly not implying you should put any faith in the superstition I provided as counter-example. But if this is your evidence, then what on Earth would possess you to think it’s sufficient basis for any kind of conclusion?
See? I told you so.
- Well, Saint’s Row 2 is a good example of this, consoles next week, PC next month.
What exactly are they going to do in that extra month?
Because, allegedly, this has been in simultaneous development for both of the consoles and the PC from the start.
So it magically takes an extra month to finish the PC, even though it’s going to be a console port?
As to why I care, why should I have to wait?
Microsoft for one I know has said they stagger their releases of titles to push console sales.(Gears of War)
However, that’s not going to force me or encourage me to buy their system.
In fact it has the opposite effect, haven’t purchased, never going to purchase, Gears of War for the PC.
Same with Bully, and a lot of others.
This leads to “Oh noes, PC sales are down, PC gaming am d0med!!”.
- With some of the console ports I’ve seen this wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing.
Make sure the console port is nailed down since it represents a likely 5-10x sales ratio over the PC version, and only then worry about the PC version.
I’m sure it sucks to be a PC only gamer and feel marginalized, but, well, that’s life. What are you going to do, go out and play the plethora of other Saint’s Row like games on the PC which have been released this year?
The obvious message is that if you want to be treated like a primary market customer, you should be part of the primary market. Look at those sales figures quoted again. What reasonable justification could you give for them devoting resources to a simultaneous release when it’s clear the PC is universally the last place player in the war for the developer’s attention? (Other, that is, than Steve’s aforementioned sense of entitlement.)
Given all the various combinations of PC configurations that need to be tested vs. the single console configuration, I’m suprised it’s only a month difference.
-CJ
Well, serious PC compatibility testing has to be done months in advance of any possible release date. If a developer only finds out about an incompatibility in the last month or even week before going gold then it will usually not be possible to fix it in time. And as new driver revisions for video and sound cards fail regression tests quite often not to mention that they introduce new problems, PC developers never really know what the end-user experience out of the box will be.
It cost $40 to get your 360 modded and then all you need is a gamefly subscription (or better yet access to someone with a game fly subscription) and access to a dvd burner. Most non microsoft studio games let you play online with no risk to your account.
We can go around and around on this but what you’re describing is still way more effort than clicking a torrent link.
Sure, if someone WANTS to pirate games, as your co-workers do, then they’re going to take the steps necessary to do so. But if someone is casually interested in maybe getting free games and then find out they have to pay money to mod their XBox and burn discs then they are probably going to lose interest.
I work in the games industry and wouldn’t have the first clue where to go to get my XBox modded even if I wanted to. I’m sure if I googled it, I could find it fast enough, but my point is that it isn’t exactly common knowledge. I’m sure most XBox players aren’t even aware that piracy is possible.
Going to a store and paying someone $40 to flash your DVD drive is a bit more effort than clicking a link, but afterwords, copying 360 games on mass in minutes is easier and quicker than hunting down a torrent, configuring a client, and waiting for it to download.
I bet if there was a gamefly like service for pc games, torrent numbers would be down to console numbers.
I’d like to stop going around and around now. :)
Barrier to entry is a huge part of this though. It’s just so easy to start pirating PC games - or movies, or music - that it occurs on a much greater scale than console piracy, even if the latter might yield more in the long run.
Jon
I don’t know. People who find the pc is hard to use because of fussing with drivers and installing software and patches aren’t going to find configuring torrent clients and tracking down good game torrents and all the steps needed to get them to work is somehow easier than just paying someone a few bucks to do it for you.
People who find the PC is hard to use don’t play games on it and don’t pirate anyhow. Anyone who can install a game can locate a torrent for it with not much effort. Not everyone with a 360 is willing to shell out the cash to void the warranty on an already shaky piece of hardware. Nobody’s saying it’s difficult to pirate games on either platform, just that it’s way simpler to do it on a PC.
The thing is: It’s even easier on the DS since you need some software to mount images on the PC.
Yet DS software is selling like hotcakes.
That is one of the main reasons I call “bullshit” on the publisher moaning concerning PC piracy.
Here on Argentina you CANT find a X360 without the chip that allows you ot play pirate games, it is the same with the PS2 and Wii.
Chips are generally installed on Hong Kong. Then the consoles go to Paraguay and theeeen to Argentina.
Which might be a reason why most publishers do not bother to sell games in your country officially.
What about PS3? Do they sell it in Argentina or do they hold out until that can be cracked as well?
They are similar enough for a target audience/marketing standpoint. The very fact that they were exclusive on their platforms is key.
For instance, if Civ Revolution did supremely well compared to Civ IV, that might push a decision to develop their next title for consoles. If, however, if performed poorly compared to Civ IV, that might push them to focus on PC development. In fact, I bet that’s exactly why Civ Revolution was developed. To stick a toe in the console water, so to speak.
I think I read on a Steam blurb that Civ IV has sold over 6 million copies, though, so Civ Revolution would have to do awfully well to make them focus on consoles exclusively. What I imagine is that they will use sales as a litmus test for a game that they might release on Pc and current gen platforms.
Pour your elitist contempt like boiling oil on the console tards all you like, PC gamers, but money talks and the market has listened: those mouth-breathing glassy-eyed mindless sheep buy way the hell more games than their “enlightened” PC brethren, despite the vast disparity in install bases. Proclaiming that console piracy “isn’t that hard” ignores the fact that the vast majority of console gamers don’t even know which video cables to use to hook up to their fancy-schmancy TVs. HW mods? WTF are those?
So champion the superiority of our M+K controls and deeper gameplay and fancier HW all you like. But until someone comes up with a clever way of convincing millions of tech-savvy, morally compromised PC pirates to buy some goddamn games for a change, the gaming ship has sailed for more profitable shores and we’re left churning in its wake. Publishers have learned that the stupid masses are more likely to be honest consumers because they just plain don’t know any better; so they had the unmitigated gall to abandon us for a richer, more generous sugar daddy.