PC Gaming is having problems. Part One.

If you’re a PC Gamer, you most likely know your platform is dying or at the very least transforming into something else. The question isn’t is it happening, the question is why is PC Gaming as we, the players of RTS, RPG and FPS games, know it declining? And to lesser extent, can it be saved or even, should we bother to try to save it?

Lets start with the why first. The why is a pretty important question as it should help answer the questions after it…and it’s a being debated all across the internet even as we speak. This week has had some pretty interesting commentary as a matter of fact. This one is from one Michael Fitch of THQ:

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.

That’s just a part of the rant he goes off on (the whole thing is definitely worth a read) and to be fair to him, he’s pretty upset with the closing of ILE. While he didn’t work for them, he apparently did work with them a lot. This is the meat and bones of his argument 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.

And all I can think after reading that is, boy did ILE fuck themselves. They released a product that caused problems for pirates without telling anyone it was because of the software being pirated…and what did pirates do? They shaped the god damn word of mouth of the game. The game got a bad name on the street because the first people to play it, the pirates, felt that had a broken, buggy game. I admit, I heard the rumors and believed them. I stayed away from TQ because I heard people complaining on message boards and more. That’s not to say there wasn’t legitimate complaints about crashing, memory leaks and performance at release (just read the patch notes), there were. But did pirates shape the feeling around the game as much as the game itself did? No one can say for sure, but Fitch feels pretty certain they did.

So the Titan Quest guys made a big mistake in not seeing that a huge part of their market was not fucking with people illegally taking their game. That’s pretty messed up on a lot levels. So now when you release a game you have to consider the actual market perception and the people that will be stealing your game and playing it and offering opinions on it before anyone else. Harsh way to learn that lesson.

If you read further in that QT3 thread I linked above, you’ll learn a few things. One, don’t tell the people that make games for a living you steal their games. It’s bad manners and pretty stupid. Two, don’t be a jackass (this applies to the entire internet). Three, the solution the industry will turn to to combat piracy will be some extreme form of DRM (Love you, Brad!).

So the reason for PC Gaming slowly but surely declining in favor of consoles is piracy…? I just can’t accept that. Yeah, piracy is bad and really bad for certain genres (FPS in particular), but I just can’t believe all of these bastards that are getting their software for free would be paying if they couldn’t get it for free. Sure, a percentage would, but not a big percentage. Enough to bump up sales, but not enough to save PC Gaming. As matter of fact, it might have the reverse effect. Follow me on this one for a second. Yeah, pirating games isn’t great, but it does have the effect of pimping your game in advance of being for sale…if the game is good. The internet will be ablaze with the release of good new games, well in advance of the street date of the game or demo release. Just like in music where people track illegal downloading of songs to convince radio stations to play music, I think that pirating actually provides a pre-market in which your product is taken through the ringer and then hype is generated one way or another.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that’s great, but I think it definitely exists. So when ILE released TQ with crashes in their product made specifically for pirates, but didn’t mention that was why it was crashing, they fucked their pre-hype. For good or bad, that seems to have been a big part in why their game didn’t sell great.

So a big part of why PC Gaming is going the way of the dodo is because of pirating…but what about other things. To continue use TQ as an example…what about huge system requirements? Did TQ really need that huge engine it had to run the game they made? I know they were going for eye candy and that’s important to lots of gamers (I like pretty pictures, but they aren’t the end all be all for me), did it help them or severely limit their potential install base? And what about the patch notes I linked up above with memory leaks and crashes and so on being fixed? Developers in the PC Gaming industry have fallen into release and patch as a way of doing business. Yeah, there can be some of that, but if you’re releasing a game with memory leaks and known crashes, that’s not good. And it’s not unavoidable.

Look at Neverwinter Nights 2. That game was almost unplayable when it was first released. It crashed, slowed to a crawl in many different areas and had a mess of bugs. How can piracy affect or not affect a game like that? No matter whether it’s being pirated or not, it’s going to sell less on word of mouth alone (for instance, I didn’t buy the expansion after having been tricked on the original until the expansion was on sale for $10…and I still haven’t brought myself to install it).

Whether pirating is the reason PC Gaming is falling down or not, there are multiple different things game developers/publishers could be doing different to fix it themselves. They need to understand the market (and the illegal pre-market), they really need to start releasing games when they are done (and this often publishers more than developers), not a specific date. Yeah, PC Game development isn’t easy. But that isn’t an excuse, it’s part of the platform and you have to take that into account. And last but not least, they need to quit trying to hit the top of the line machine only. I know they want to have pretty graphics and that purty screenshots often help sell games, but how many people are going to sell to? Is it worth it to have awesome graphics if they just cut their potential install base in half? At what point does the limiting of an install base become a detriment and the graphics become the problem instead of a selling point?

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What Would Matt Do: If I were a PC Game developer, well then I probably wouldn’t be on this site offering advice what to do since I’d be in the middle of it going, WTF!? Tomorrow or so I’ll add a part deux discussing the more on how to and should the PC Gaming market be saved at all.