Titan Quest producer rants on PC market.

[Starwars]

Saw this over at RPGWatch, and thought it was an interesting read. Like Dhruin said, it's likely fueled by anger of Iron Lore shutting down, but it's still kinda interesting.

 

Greetings:

So, ILE shut down. This is tangentially related to that, not why they shut down, but part of why it was such a difficult freaking slog trying not to. 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 **** 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.

 

One guy went so far as to say he'd bought the retail game and it was having the exact same crashes, so it must be the game itself. This was one of the most vocal detractors, and we got into it a little bit. He swore up and down that he'd done everything above-board, installed it on a clean machine, updated everything, still getting the same crashes. It was our fault, we were stupid, our programmers didn't know how to make games - some other guy asked "do they code with their feet?". About a week later, he realized that he'd forgotten to re-install his BIOS update after he wiped the machine. He fixed that, all his crashes went away. At least he was man enough to admit it.

 

So, for a game that doesn't have a Madden-sized advertising budget, word of mouth is your biggest hope, and here we are, before the game even releases, getting bashed to hell and gone by people who can't even be bothered to actually pay for the game. What was the ultimate impact of that? Hard to measure, but it did get mentioned in several reviews. Think about that the next time you read "we didn't have any problems running the game, but there are reports on the internet that people are having crashes."

 

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.

 

Enough about piracy. Let's talk about hardware vendors. Trying to make a game for PC is a freaking nightmare, and these guys make it harder all the time. Integrated video chips; integrated audio. These were two of our biggest headaches. Not only does this crap make people think - and wrongly - that they have a gaming-capable PC when they don't, the drive to get the cheapest components inevitably means you've got hardware out there with little or no driver support, marginal adherence to standards, and sometimes bizarre conflicts with other hardware.

 

And it just keeps getting worse. CD/DVD drives with bad firmware, video cards that look like they should be a step-up from a previous generation, but actually aren't, drivers that need to be constantly updated, separate rendering paths for optimizing on different chips, oh my god. Put together consumers who want the cheapest equipment possible with the best performance, manufacturers who don't give a **** what happens to their equipment once they ship it, and assemblers who need to work their margins everywhere possible, and you get a lot of ****ty hardware out there, in innumerable configurations that you can't possibly test against. But, it's always the game's fault when something doesn't work.

 

Even if you get over the hump on hardware compatibility - and god knows, the hardware vendors are constantly making it worse - if you can, you still need to deal with software conflicts. There are a lot of apps running on people's machines that they're not even aware of, or have become such a part of the computer they don't even think of them as being apps anymore. IM that's always on; peer-to-peer clients running in the background; not to mention the various adware and malware crap that people pick up doing things they really shouldn't. Trying to run a CPU and memory heavy app in that environment is a nightmare. But, again, it's always the game's fault if it doesn't work.

 

Which brings me to the audience. There's a lot of stupid people out there. Now, don't get me wrong, there's a lot of very savvy people out there, too, and there were some great folks in the TQ community who helped us out a lot. But, there's a lot of stupid people. Basic, basic stuff, like updating your drivers, or de-fragging your hard drive, or having antivirus so your machine isn't a teetering pile of rogue programs. PC folks want to have the freedom to do whatever the hell they want with their machines, and god help them they will do it; more power to them, really. But god forbid something that they've done - or failed to do - creates a problem with your game. There are few better examples of the "it can't possibly be my fault" culture in the west than gaming forums.

 

And while I'm at it, I don't want to spare the reviewers either. We had one reviewer - I won't name names, you can find it if you look hard enough - who missed the fact that you can teleport from wherever you are in TQ back to any of the major towns you've visited. So, this guy was hand-carting all of his stuff back to town every time his inventory was full. Through the entire game. Now, not only was this in the manual, and in the roll-over tooltips for the UI, but it was also in the tutorial, the very first time you walk past one of these giant pads that lights up like a beacon to the heavens. Nonetheless, he missed it, and he commented in his review how tedious this was and how much he missed being able to portal back to town. When we - and lots of our fans - pointed out that this was the reviewer's fault, not the game's, they amended the review. But, they didn't change the score. Do you honestly think that not having to run back to town all the time to sell your stuff wouldn't have made the game a better experience?

 

We had another reviewer who got crashes on both the original and the expansion pack. We worked with him to figure out what was going on; the first time, it was an obscure peripheral that was causing the crash, a classic hardware conflict for a type of hardware that very, very few people have. The second time, it was in a pre-release build that we had told him was pre-release. After identifying the problem, getting him around it, and verifying that the bug was a known issue and had been fixed in the interim, he still ran the story with a prominent mention of this bug. With friends like that...

 

Alright, I'm done. Making PC products is not all fun and games. It's an uphill slog, definitely. I'm a lifelong PC gamer, and hope to continue to work on PC games in the future, but man, they sure don't make it easy.

 

Best,

Michael.

 

http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/sh...ead.php?t=42663

Edited February 28, 2008 by Starwars

[J.E. Sawyer]

I agree with pretty much everything he wrote.

[Tale]

It's been building up to this for a while. It's like we've hit a breaking point in the PC market where more and more PC developers are getting sick or it as the problems just gets worse. It's hard to find too many PC devs sticking up for PC gaming anymore. Kind of sad.

 

If PC gaming does die (or get so badly injured it needs life support), hopefully that'll cause enough backlash down the line that people will address some of the problems for a potential revival. As fewer games get released, fewer people will buy PCs. Won't even guess how many or few that will be, but that'll start hurting hardware vendors. I know Intel and Microsoft along with a few others claim to want to do something to help, but after Microsoft's attempts at Windows Live, I'm just going to laugh at whatever they claim is an attempt to "help."

 

Piracy will be a harder problem to deal with.

Edited February 28, 2008 by Tale

[Gromnir]

had no notion that pc software piracy were that bad a problem. +70%? sure, hang out at codex and see many folks telling us that piracy is not bad a bad thing, but even there it not seem like 70% o' people is supporting such notions. shows how wrong Gromnir were. we were thinking that this were a very small % in US and slightly worse (but not real bad) in europe. our impression were that only in asia were software piracy a pervasive kinda thing.

 

oh well. if things is that bad, then maybe it were best killed quick... move to consoles and improve the PCness o' those devices and applications rather than prolonging the death throes.

 

HA! Good Fun!

[Kaftan Barlast]

Although the piracy scene on the Xbox 360 is now equal to or even procentually higher than the PC. Of all my friends, only one has a non-hacked 360, and that is largely because he's been too busy to flash it.

 

 

You can go into the local computer store here(Expert- a huge retail chain) and ask "Which DVD's do I need to burn 360 games?" and theyll hand you a pack that works.

[Tale]

Although the piracy scene on the Xbox 360 is now equal to or even procentually higher than the PC. Of all my friends, only one has a non-hacked 360, and that is largely because he's been too busy to flash it.

 

I'm going to have to doubt this claim. NA, the single largest video game market worldwide, still has quite a taboo on modding of systems. It's not as easy for it to be obtained and is thus rarer.

 

Of course, that's primarilly speculation. Just because I don't see lots of it going on doesn't mean it's not.

[Gorgon]

Aren't most Mmogs more or less immune to piracy by the fact that what you are really paying for is your account information, and that practically no hackers bother with online support.

 

Given that there is a 90% profit increase available here, I don't understand why all PC games don't require you to register and authenticate the product online. Just wondering.

 

It didn't work with integrated steam, people were able to get around it, but that hack was like a rite of passage, like cracking the latest version of windows, meaning everyone and their grandmother wanted a go at it. A huge difference from merely mounting a CD image.

 

If all games required the same large effort, and if certain content was only added as you played the game surely it would cut down noticeably.

Edited February 28, 2008 by Gorgon

[Tale]

Aren't most Mmogs more or less immune to piracy by the fact that what you are really paying for is your account information, and that practically no hackers bother with online support.

 

Given that there is a 90% profit increase available here, I don't understand why all PC games don't require you to register and authenticate the product online. Just wondering.

 

It didn't work with integrated steam, people were able to get around it, but that hack was like a rite of passage, like cracking the latest version of windows, meaning everyone and their grandmother wanted a go at it.

 

If all games required the same large effort, and if certain content was only added as you played the game surely it would cut down noticeably.

The difference between MMOs and online authentication is miles apart. MMOs actually require you to log in and manage the content (notably other players) on their own servers. You can't hack around that. You remove the authentication in an MMO, you no longer get to play on the servers, which means content is no longer given to you. MMOs are an actual service, not just an authentication scheme.

Edited February 28, 2008 by Tale

[Morgoth]

90% in Eurotasia? I blame the Russkies!

 

But I wonder if Steamworks, which is for free, could change that. After all, every customer has to create an account that is then connected to Steam, thus Piracy should be an....impossibility? Every retail PC games should use it these days.

[Starwars]

I think it should be pointed out that the protection method they chose probably wasn't thought through completely. In a rather bizarre way, they created a lot of their own problems with having a anti-piracy system like that.

 

I also believe the best answer to piracy, at least in the short-term, is simply to make the game a real bugger to crack. Even though they likely will be cracked eventually, I have a feeling that most piracy occurs when the game is first released, and if you can hold off people cracking it for a while then I believe there will be a lot less downloaders. Though I'm still not convinced that it would raise sales all *that* much because I also believe in the whole "downloader isn't necessarily a possible customer".

 

The hardware/software stuff must be extremely frustrating for PC gaming companies though. I really wish that the whole PC parts market would be streamlined, but at the same time it would suck for us who have *some* idea of what we're doing (I'm definetely not an expert though) because it would mean less customizing. That's both good and bad.

 

What I would *really* like to see is less of the constant pushing of graphics, and just more optimization in general. I really wonder if hot graphics really sell PC games that well when compared to a game that can be played on a much wider range of systems.

 

EDIT: I also believe developers should look more towards Europe as a market, and perhaps specifically Eastern Europe. STALKER seems to have done really well in that regard. http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/36980/S-...ion-Copies-Sold

Though of course, it IS an Eastern European game itself.

 

But if I remember correctly, I think JE Sawyer stated that NWN2 sold better in the EU than the US.

Edited February 28, 2008 by Starwars

[Hurlshort]

This is well written, I wish that every snot nosed pirate will get a chance to read it.

 

It does seem like an online authentication system would be a prevention method. Can you pirate Half-Life 2? Doesn't it require an internet connection just to play?

 

I see no problem requiring people to be online when playing games, but you will hear folks complain about it. Still, if the numbers are that high, it makes me think they might as well do it.

[Gorgon]

This is well written, I wish that every snot nosed pirate will get a chance to read it.

 

It does seem like an online authentication system would be a prevention method. Can you pirate Half-Life 2? Doesn't it require an internet connection just to play?

 

I see no problem requiring people to be online when playing games, but you will hear folks complain about it. Still, if the numbers are that high, it makes me think they might as well do it.

The hack was able to get around it, somewhat, I played my pirated game, got bored with it, and when I decided to go back to it a week later, lo and behold, it didn't work anymore. Other versions were a compilation of downloaded game content re arranged and re released, a tall order to complete, but at the time probably the most prestigeous thing you could have your

name attached to.

[Pop]

If all games required the same large effort, and if certain content was only added as you played the game surely it would cut down noticeably.

You must realize the gigantic BAAAAAAW and sales backlash that would come out of gaming if anybody ever actually tried that.

[Tale]

Can you pirate Half-Life 2? Doesn't it require an internet connection just to play?

Yes, you can pirate Half-Life 2. CD-key protection schemes require a CD-ROM just to play, so what?

 

Unless you actively store the content on a remote server (like with MMOs), we're not going to see a solution remotely near that simple. And if we go that way, we're going to see subscription fees for server maintenence.

Edited February 28, 2008 by Tale

[Lokey]

Given that there is a 90% profit increase available here, I don't understand why all PC games don't require you to register and authenticate the product online. Just wondering.

900% actually. I guess he can't do math while he rants.

 

Doesn't matter, take his 50% scenario. If the suits can't be convinced that is a problem, why the hell would you want to work for them? That's what they get paid 10x as much money as you to handle so you can do the heady game-design stuff they can't.

[Kaftan Barlast]

What I reacted the strongest to in this was the following:

 

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 **** 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.

 

 

This is a classic textbook case of how DRM's creates far more trouble than its worth. They paid good money for a protection system that probably lost them far more revenue than it "protected". The irony is just overwhelming

[Pidesco]

I agree with pretty much all he says except about the copy protection issues. The problem wasn't the piracy just in and of itself, but rather that the copy protection scheme failed to stop it in any way, and, in the process generated bad publicity for the game.

 

I don't know how to solve the problem of piracy, but I do know that copy protection isn't the solution.

[newc0253]

Which brings me to the audience. There's a lot of stupid people out there.

ha! he's an angry, angry man.

 

i guess anyone in his position would be, if you'd produced a decent action RPG only to see your studio go down the drain.

 

but, angry as he is, i think some of his stuff is waaaay off-base. piracy in the EU at 90%? sorry but that's just crack talk. no doubt there's a hardcore of european gamers who pirate anything and everything they get their hands on (esp those eastern europeans - yeah Ivan and Piotr i'm lookin at you). but the idea that 9 out of every 10 people who play a PC game in Europe is playing a pirated copy is frakking stupid.

 

i'm sorry that his studio went under. i don't normally play action RPGs but Titan Quest kept me entertained for several hours and that's the highest praise i can bestow on a game of that genre. but he's gotta move past the hate and fast, because some of what he says is just really dumb.

Edited February 28, 2008 by newc0253

[Gromnir]

their copy protection scheme were flawed and exacerbated the piracy problem, but given the Scope o' the piracy problem...

 

+70% US.

 

90% in europe.

 

+90% in asia.

 

those numbers is staggering to Gromnir. free rider problem is covered in pretty much any basic economics course in high school and college, but we ain't never recalled examples wherein +75% o' total consumers for a given service or product is free riding... get over some certain % and almost always does such a service or good end up being wholly or partially subsidized by govt... or it simply disappears if it ain't deemed to be necessary. too inefficient.

 

sure, if you can still make big profit in spite of free riding, then some developers will continue to make pc games and make money doing so, but technology has made piracy more problematic in recent years

[Gorgon]

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.

 

Hmm, this would suggest that the idea that piracy is jacking up the prices of games does not hold water, since console games are noticeably more expensive. More likely companies will charge exactly what they can get away, and be sure to hit that ceiling regardless of piracy levels.

[newc0253]

can't speak for Asia or America but basic common sense tells you that 90%+ piracy in EU is simply an industry scare figure, something it tells itself when things are going bad.

 

90% of europeans who play PC games simply aren't smart enuf to find pirated copies of the latest titles. we just aren't that clever.

Edited February 28, 2008 by newc0253

[@\NightandtheShape/@]

I don't pirate games, I won't pirate games, and I look upon folk who do pirate games as the scum of the freaking earth!

 

Since '94 I have bought every game that I own, every last game, it probably amounts to tens of thousands of

[J.E. Sawyer]

but, angry as he is, i think some of his stuff is waaaay off-base. piracy in the EU at 90%? sorry but that's just crack talk. no doubt there's a hardcore of european gamers who pirate anything and everything they get their hands on (esp those eastern europeans - yeah Ivan and Piotr i'm lookin at you). but the idea that 9 out of every 10 people who play a PC game in Europe is playing a pirated copy is frakking stupid.

The numbers make more sense if you think of it terms of copies of games instead of number of people. Naturally, pirates will play tons of games -- it's not like it costs them anything to download ten games a month. Paying gamers probably buy only one or two games a month, if that.

[Gorgon]

but, angry as he is, i think some of his stuff is waaaay off-base. piracy in the EU at 90%? sorry but that's just crack talk. no doubt there's a hardcore of european gamers who pirate anything and everything they get their hands on (esp those eastern europeans - yeah Ivan and Piotr i'm lookin at you). but the idea that 9 out of every 10 people who play a PC game in Europe is playing a pirated copy is frakking stupid.

The numbers make more sense if you think of it terms of copies of games instead of number of people. Naturally, pirates will play tons of games -- it's not like it costs them anything to download ten games a month. Paying gamers probably buy only one or two games a month, if that.

Thats apples and oranges isen't it. Only a very small percentage of pirated copies translate into potential sales.

 

I have done a fair ammount of pirating in my day, I don't get much time to play at all these days so I don't bother, if something is worth my interest the cost wont kill me, and I prefer to have it in working order able to receive patches and updates, but there was a time where abject poverty prevented me from getting any games at all, other than the free way.

[Arclam]

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.

 

Hmm, this would suggest that the idea that piracy is jacking up the prices of games does not hold water, since console games are noticeably more expensive. More likely companies will charge exactly what they can get away, and be sure to hit that ceiling regardless of piracy levels.

 

Couldn't that also have something to do with the fact that these games were made with consoles in mind and the fact that your average PC in a Wal-Mart, Best Buy or other store where the majority of consumers get their computers can't run these games due to their high system requirements. It is much cheaper to get the console and the game than to get a PC capable of running the game.