Hockey Sim Development Ended By Piracy
Sports Interactive, creator of Eastside Hockey Manager 2007 for the PC, has ended development of the hockey sim after its sales collapsed in the face of piracy. Luckily it didn’t kill the company entirely, as they were able to reassign at least some of their developers to other projects. ArsTechnica reports that SI wasn’t even able to break even on the title in the face of an ever-rising number of bittorrent downloads of a cracked copy of the game. People were interested in and liked the game, but wanted to steal it instead of paying for a legitimate copy.
This isn’t some flyweight piece of shareware, either. I haven’t played it, but a look at the website seems to back up the developer’s statement that it has more licenses than any other hockey game. It also has a PC Gamer Editor’s Choice Award.
Ars did some digging and seems to have found that this is the first game that was slain by piracy, or at least the first game publicly stated to have been terminated this way.
Everyone wants new and fun games to play, and everyone wants smaller developers to survive. But if established developers with multiple projects can’t make money on their games due to piracy, apparently everyone isn’t getting their games honestly.
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I dont know about this one. As much as I deplore video game piracy, blaming the folding of game development on its shoulders is a bit much.
The game was available solely through digital distribution but like so many, chose to distribute it themselves instead of attaching themselves to a proven and trusted system like ‘Steam’. As such, it was leaked to bit-torrent and made freely available. Surely digital distribution means that you can spend more focus on anti-piracy measures, pass codes, online subscription etc. There are ways and means to make sure that people who play are those that paid.
In actuality, isnt it more likely that a niche genre game (Eastside hockey management) was released through a niche medium (digital download) thus limiting those who can buy it, passing trade in shops and a lot of marketting so people dont even know the title exists.
Unfortunately, I don’t buy into this whole “piracy killed our game.”
See my previous post on the subject:
http://www.aeropause.com/archives/2006/07/piracy_vs_crap/
GalCiv2 is supposedly a niche game, as well, and is distributed digitally. Granted, they sold boxes as well, being the highest sold software at Wal-mart for a while.
No, sorry. If anything, the game was probably poorly marketed. I had never heard of it until this post, and I usually like games like this. But whatever, failing companies have to save face somehow.