I could pirate all of the games on Steam, but I choose not to because Steam offers a good service. Guess what? Steam Sales grew by 50% in the last year. Simply put, piracy isn’t much of a problem on the PC platform.
Edit: Also of note, pirates take out the DRM. I expect a version of Simcity to pop on trackers soon. Which product do you think is the better one; the one with connectivity issues or the one with no DRM?
Yeah, I’m sure all the pirates out there think the same thing… or probably not. Also, you said, Steam stops you from pirating… so I guess you would have pirated SimCity, since it’s not on Steam?
That 50% increase is actually a heavy decrease in growth, BTW. I mean, it’s still great, but Valve has seen year over year growth of 100% for the past 7 years STRAIGHT. I guess you can’t keep doubling your business ad infinitum. Would love to see Steam go back to 100% growth this year, perhaps with a Steambox release.
Also, Diablo 3 remains uncracked. And 12 million+ sales.
Someone makes a good SimAnt and I will give them all the money.
It’s not the worst idea for a sim game I’ve seen
The fact that Steam works at all when it’s trivially easy to pirate games is an indication that the model works. Piracy is not new, so the fact that Steam sales are not growing at the original rate means nothing. It would only mean something if piracy suddenly got easier in that time period.
And your same logic can be used about Diablo III. It’s a long awaited game that was expected to do well. We can’t really use its statistics to tell us anything about piracy, as there was no other version that was pirate-able.
I don’t doubt that piracy hurts the big companies in some form or another, but, the thing is, they are all still hugely profitable, and, despite all the whining about there no longer being new games, that prediction has not only failed to come to pass, but there are actually more games out there thanks to the indie scene. They make money even on games with no DRM, because their content is actually good. And, possibly more importantly, they are priced competitively.
The thing is, no big company wants to admit that they are having problems with small independents taking their share. They have to try and blame it on something nefarious. And as long as they exaggerate the effects of piracy, the more this backfires, making people think they are the ones who are nefarious.
I mean, I personally would have no problem if EA suddenly went bankrupt. I thought it might hurt until THQ did it, and I felt nothing. Anything that is good will be bought out by someone else.
As the proud owner of a copy ofLeather Goddesses of Phobos, I am glad to see the genre continues!
Yeah, that and SimAIDS seemed like pretty bad ideas.
A minute’s research before purchasing the game would have been enough to discover that the game was Elder Scrolls with a FO paintjob. You might as well have bought Mario 64, discovered it wasn’t a 2D sidescroller like the previous titles and declared “This isn’t a Mario game!” and that you’re now reluctant to ever buy anything put out by Nintendo. Since we’re tossing around anecdotes, of the many, many people I know who played (and loved) FO3, not a single one of them, not one, had ever played an earlier Fallout title (or even heard of the series at all before FO3’s release).
It claimed to be a Fallout game. I knew that Interplay had been working on FO3, and I figured that this was FO3. The REAL FO3.
There are some authors that, when they put out a new book, I just automatically buy the new book. I don’t read anything about the book, because I prefer to read the book without any possible spoilers. Even some cover blurbs will completely spoil the book, and I’d like to be completely surprised. Same thing with games…some franchises have been so great in the past that I will just buy the sequels, and I prefer NOT to read reviews, because a lot of reviews will reveal spoilers. This means that sometimes, I get a dud game. This is disappointing, but not nearly as disappointing as learning a spoiler before I play the game.
As far as I’m concerned, calling that particular game a Fallout game was false advertising. If they wanted to make another Elder Scrolls game, they should have called it Elder Scrolls: After the Apocalypse or something like that. I’m sure the game would have sold very, very well, possibly even better than if they’d called it FO3.
Just adding a bit of information that destroys the idea that piracy kills games. Diablo 3 is unpirated, someone said. I should have done my own research. I recently stumbled on a bit of information while researching the SimCity debacle. There are D3 server emulators that were out about 3 days after the game was released. You download the program, authenticate with a fake server instead of the real one, play on that server instead of the real one, and you have a game without paying for it. That’s a crack, even if the base software hasn’t been changed.
Sure, Diablo III was a big, highly anticipated game and was going to do good anyways. But in no way does its monumental success prove that killing piracy improves gaming revenue. If anything, it implies the reverse.
It is the real FO3, in the same way that Mario 64 was the real new Mario game at the time, and in the same way that D&D 4th Edition was still the real D&D, despite the shouted whines of detractors.
Yeah, well, I guess you’ve learned that that’s a pretty fucking stupid thing to do, huh?
They called it Fallout because it was a Fallout game. Imagine the sound of a tiny violin when you’re composing your response.
The original Fallout 3, codenamed ‘Van Buren’ was mostly complete, they even put together a tech demo. They even had plans for Fallout 4, of which little is known - other than that Caesar’s Legion featured heavily. However Bethesda had nothing to do with the sad demise of Black Isle - it was InterPlay which laid off the dev team in 2003.
Incidentally some of the employees from Black Isle went on to Obsidian to make New Vegas, rejigging several ideas from the cancelled games. Without a doubt it owes its existence to Bethesda’s FO3.
The Fallout franchise after the unsuccessful Tactics and Brotherhood of Steel spinoffs was not what you’d call highly regarded by InterPlay - Fallout 3 and 4 weren’t the only cancelled games, they cancelled the sequels to Tactics and BoS and Extreme. After the success of the reinvigorated Fallout 3 InterPlay must be kicking themselves.
Because screwing over all your honest customers is fine as long as you mildly inconvenience pirates for a little while.
Yeah, I had assumeed that what Bethesda offered was Van Buren, out of beta testing and ready for the consumer. I didn’t bother getting Tactics and BoS because, after reading about them, I figured that they weren’t the types of games that I wanted to play. The names tipped me off.
Let us all bow our heads for a moment for the demise of Black Isle.
I posted this in a thread in the Game Room but it would seem fitting here a swell. EA released the list of free games you can choose from to compensate for the Server issues:
Battlefield 3 (Standard Edition)
Bejeweled 3
Dead Space 3 (Standard Edition)
Mass Effect 3 (Standard Edition)
MOHW (Standard Edition)
NFS Most Wanted (Standard Edition)
Plants vs. Zombies
SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition
I think the situation still sucks but appreciate that they are trying to make good.
EA’s CEO has resigned, probably at least partially over failing to meet earnings goals. It can’t have helped that EA’s demands of their associated studios (allegedly) drove off, among others, the founders of Bioware and various other valued and skilled designers from that group.
And all that stuff about allways-online being necessary, because of all the highly complex data processing being done on their servers.
Yeah they’re now all but admitting they lied.
Lucy Bradshaw has gone from being essentially unknown to being one of the better-known liars on the Internet in less than a month.
