The usual "wisdom" from PC game developers is that piracy hurts and if not controlled or effectively eliminated, it will lead to the death of PCs and PC games. However, Randy Stude, president of the PC Gaming Alliance, disagrees with this thinking.
Stude believes that the issue of piracy is overblown.
"The [online game] revenues being generated [in China and Korea] just blow the mind. You’re talking almost 5 billion dollars. Almost half the world’s PC software revenues are coming from marketplaces that have almost no retail at all…
"You look at a game like Spore… despite the fact it’s pirated out there on torrent networks, its selling great by any standard… it sort of bucks the notion that all games are going to be destroyed because of piracy. That’s not the case…
"I’m not saying that the [PC gaming] industry needs to accept piracy. I’m saying that if there’s nothing that can be done, the assumption that gaming will die on a platform is ridiculous."
Stude twisted the knife into Lucas Arts because it refused to port Star Wars: The Force Unleashed to the PC because of a lack of audience. The real reason, may be more elementary.
"That’s not an educated answer. In the last several years there have been at least 100 million PCs sold that have the capabilities or better of an Xbox 360. It’s ridiculous to say that there’s not enough audience for that game potentially and that it falls into this enthusiast extreme category when ported over to the PC. That’s an uneducated response…
"LucasArts hasn’t made a good PC game in a long time. That’s my opinion… I think the last good PC game they made was probably Jedi Knight 2… So I can understand why they would make that call."
Big game companies can weather the incidents of PC game piracy, but it is more of a serious issue for smaller game developers. What then, is the solution? That is hard to say, but EA’s attempt at turning the screws tighter on the DRM of Spore was definitely not the answer. The answer probably lies somewhere in the middle.
[via gamepolitics]
