Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

Well, another prominent game developer, this time id software’s Kevin Cloud, is spouting off about piracy killing the PC market.

I won’t rehash what I’ve already said about piracy in the PC game space, but I will take the time to respond to some of Kevin Cloud’s assertions.

Basically, Kevin makes the following points:
1. Piracy is what is killing the PC game market, and is the primary reason you see fewer and fewer PC games on store shelves.
2. A subscription-based model, like World of Warcraft seems to be a solution to the problem, although there is no good solution right now.

Well, if you take the stand that Stardock does about piracy, then point 2 becomes kind of irrelevant.

Regarding the first point, that Piracy is killing the PC game market, you should really refer to my previous article.

In summary, I made the point that piracy isn’t killing the PC game market, it’s the constant release of poor-quality games, especially from companies like EA, where quality control amounts to “How well can we market this game, even if its buggy?”

So, if id has been experiencing a drop in PC game sales, let’s look at what they’ve released recently.

Doom 3 (released 2004) – Gamerankings.com average of 87%
Doom 3: Expansion Pack (released 2005) – Gamerankings.com average of 79%
Quake 4 (released late 2005) – Gamerankings.com average of 81% (76% on Xbox 360)

These are not top-tier, high-rated games like Half-Life 2 (96%) or Civ IV (93%). Based on just review scores, id’s titles just do not rate as well as games that have proven to sell fairly well. (IMHO, Doom 3 is overrated as well.)

What everyone out there needs to understand is that, like it or not, the game industry is becoming more and more like the movie industry. When movies fail HORRIBLY it’s not because of piracy! It’s because I only go to the theater when I absolutely MUST SEE a movie in the theater. Otherwise, I’ll just pass. Because I’m sick of sitting down for a movie I already paid $8 for, and then being forced to watch 30 minutes of commercials.

Kind of like buying a game, and then being forced to use the CD as some kind of security verification dongle. Consumers simply don’t want to mess with all the crap that comes along with PC gaming. Who wants to buy a game and not be 100% sure that it will even run on your machine in the first place? Then, if it DOES run, having to deal with game-breaking bugs that will periodically delete your save games, crash to the desktop, spawn demons from hell, or all of the above.

Unless I know the game is going to be TOP-FREAKING-NOTCH, I am not going to spend money on it, because otherwise it’s not worth it to slog through the now-standard PC gaming gauntlet of garbage.

Remember Battlefield Earth? The budget on Battlefield Earth was somewhere around $200m, and grossed a tiny fraction of that. Was it because of piracy? Please.

It’s because we live in a free market and PEOPLE DON’T PAY $50-$60 FOR CRAPPY GAMES ANYMORE.

PC Developers need to catch up to how the industry is now. Back in the old days, crappy video games would kind of sell, anyway, because when I was 8, and trying to find a new game for my Apple IIc, none of my friends had any freaking clue whether “Wings of Glory” or “Wasteland” was going to be any good. They didn’t HAVE computers. You just had to kind of look at the packaging and try to deciper 80′s marketing speak and hope for the best.

Nowadays, if a game sucks, you know it and everyone else knows it, because Joey who works at Gamestop took a sales copy home to play it and told his buddy, who wrote a review on his blog, that my brother-in-law’s cousin read who told me it was crap.

Come on, guys. This isn’t the 80′s anymore. Catch up, will ya?

Well, that’s enough ranting from me. Time to go play the Full Auto demo again (because there’s no way I’m actually paying dollars for that lump of console vomit.)