PC gaming not dead yet, but pirates are working on it.

By Stephen Munn | May 1, 2008

The announcement has come from Crytek that they believe they will no longer be making games exclusively for PC. Let’s call this step one, because once they start putting their games out on consoles and nobody buys the PC one, that will be the last of their work on PC, and with good reason. Joe and I discussed copy protection for a little bit in podcast 30, as it relates to the Steam download service. What I didn’t mention at that time is I admire the Steam business model in that the games, which ping home to make sure they’re legit, are all but ensured immunity to piracy. That’s good for the developer, the publisher, and as we will soon see, good for the consumer who wants to play these games. At all.

“We are suffering currently from the huge piracy that is encompassing Crysis,” said Yerli. “Similar games on consoles sell factors of 4-5 more. It was a big lesson for us, and I believe we won’t have PC exclusives as we did with Crysis in future.”

The article at 1up points out that EA’s not bringing Madden NFL 09 to the PC at all because of piracy concerns, and I completely understand that. While console piracy does exist on all five platforms, it’s far more complicated than PC piracy and therefore far less commonplace.

Any sort of copy protection fails on two levels: it creates problems for the legitimate consumer, and it’s barely any concern at all to the software pirate. I don’t see any other solution, besides these digital-distribution and DRM-key systems like Steam, for PC software publishers to significantly deter piracy.

Source: 1up