As some of you may know, Iron Lore, the developers of the hack n’ slash game Titan Quest and the upcoming Dawn of War expansion Soulstorm, recently closed their doors because of a slew of circumstances. THQ’s creative director Michael Fitch is coming out and saying that piracy, hardware vendors, gamers, and reviewers are the main reasons why Iron Lore studios shut down.
"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," he said. It’s true, piracy is the number one enemy for the PC gaming industry right now and we need to see a bigger push in protection, because Iron Lore isn’t going to be the last developer to fall under the sword of pirates (so to speak).
According to Fitch, hardware vendors "make it harder all the time with integrated audio and video that have little or no driver support, marginal adherence to standards, and sometimes bizarre conflicts with other hardware".
As for the audience, "There’s a lot of stupid people out there. That’s on account of not doing 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." Yeah, come on guys, what are you thinking not updating your drivers and de-fragging your hard drive? You should all be smarter than that.
And finally he rips on reviewers saying, "one complained that the game made him carry stuff around, apparently having missed a teleport system, while another had a problem with a bug in a review build, but mentioned it despite it having been fixed." There are always some bad apples in the batch, but one or two reviews shouldn’t make or break the overall sales of the game.
"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," he concluded.
At this point Iron Lore went on to say that they are pursuing licensing opportunities for their own engine and tool set, and that the individuals behind the studio are available for other opportunities. I hope all goes well for the rest of the employees, and I hope this gives the PC industry some insight on how bad piracy is getting.
via [gameindustry]
