Epic Says Piracy is Killing PC Gaming

You make some very good points I can't help but pick on the " fiduciary duty to make money" thing coming up so often on the internet. Its a pretty twisted interpretation of reality and has only gotten more twisted as it has spread by from person to person, in what is like a real world version of the game of "telephone"(do they still call it that?).

If anything upper management have a responsibility to bring "value" to a companies shareholders, usually in line with some mission statement. While sounding similar to money; value means something very different. In fact it can mean the exact opposite in many cases since short term profit usually involves a trade for long term growth which can hurt the value of a company.

LOL, if you think of fiduciary duty as a "thing that comes up so often on the internet," you're not in much of a position to lecture me on it considering that I have MBA/JD from top schools and this is my main area of practice. I doubt you are very acquainted firsthand with how boards, execs, and large shareholders generally act.
 
I still haven't installed the PC version though because like I said I don't have a DVD drive in most of my computers, so I give MW2 credit for registering with Steam.

You could have just bought BC2 on Steam. I think you can register your retail key with the EA store and download it from there but I'm not sure.
 
Its a baloney excuse.

Consoles are more profitable simply because there are so many of them. There are 40 Million X360s and PS3 is set to overtake MS in 2012. Compare this to the tiny number of PC gamers and you have found your reason why devolopers are switching.

As to why Indie companies are gone? Cost. It now costs $15-30 Million to make a big budget game. Furthermore only a few games each year actually turn a profit, some break even, and the rest run red ink. So it is vital the studios make games that will sell vast volumes and again thats the console market.

And the piracy excuse is crap as well. Xbox, PS games can (and are) pirated. Granted it takes alittle more work to pirate a console game but it can be easily done.
 
I remember when you used to be able crack a game by replacing the .exe with a demo .exe lol. Try and do that thse days...
 
The lack of talented game developers is whats killing PC gaming. Oh and whiny kids who have a zero learning curve and have to have there games dumbed down for them.
 
^ This MS and Sony have spent billions promoting their plastic boxes. How much was spent on the PC as a platform in the last five years?

Just stfu already Epic, work on your game engine and make console games only. I don't give a fuck about your shitty games. UT3 is such garbage, and gears 3 or what ever will be the same, wait we won't know because you can't be bothered to port it from xbox to PC. Wake up and actually make an interesting top quality game and it will sell well on the PC. Shocking I know..

Oh and BTW the best PC game I have played in three years was built on your engine and released this year. Mass Effect 2. Stick to working on UE3 and keep your mouth closed about the PC, just leave the game development to those who know what they are doing mkay.
 
Its funny, i dont know where people are geting the idea that microsoft gives a shit about PC gaming but i have read and heard a few people talking about how "microsoft is getting back into PC gaming because of or for windows 7" etc. Unfortunately the people that buy that crap need a reality check because the truth is completely the opposite.

There is one definite trend from microsoft over the last few years and thats that they are moving as far from PC game production and development as they possibly can. All of their big hits have stopped being ported to the PC entirely and they have nothing PC exclusive coming.

I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if the next flight sim is a 360 exclusive too.

Yeah, and the sole purpose of Direct-X is to keep developers from using OpenGL, which could potentially open up the game market to non-windows platforms.
 
Its a baloney excuse.

Consoles are more profitable simply because there are so many of them. There are 40 Million X360s and PS3 is set to overtake MS in 2012. Compare this to the tiny number of PC gamers and you have found your reason why devolopers are switching.

All depends on what type of games you make. There's a lot more PC users out there than console users. Don't need to make a graphics intensive games. Just look at Plants vs Zombies. The game plays on netbooks.
 
MBA/JD from top schools and this is my main area of practice

So your either some rich kid who kept going to school because your parents were paying for it and you were too scared to go out in the real world, or a person that had gotten themselves over there head in debt or enjoyed spending other peoples money so they stayed in school forever?

Getting an MBA/JD usually takes an absolute minimum of 8 years of schooling, which means that you would be at least 26 by the time you got out of college if you went straight from high school through all the degrees. That is if a "top school" of business admits someone without experience. A "top school" is what 35-50 thousand dollars a year now? What schools did you go to that they managed to be a top business school and a top law school? Seems like spending quarter to half a million dollars of someones money and many years of opportunity cost to argue with someone on the internet is kind of a waste. Where did you manage to get all this experience working with top boards and CEO's while you were spending all this time in school, or are you counting sitting on your dads lap on take your kid to work day when you were 6?

Whats the point of being a person who is 26 and has a "Masters in administration". Why would a law firm hire someone that wasted 2 years getting a masters in business instead of practicing law and why would a business hire someone who spent 2 years studying law while there peer would have 2 years of work experience instead?
 
PC gaming is dying because less people want to play games on PCs.
 
PC games are getting dumbed down to the level of console games. Two of the biggest FPS games recently were mere ports from the console : Bad company 2 and modern warfare 2. Both games are way too n00b friendly and hold no competitive values. They need to go back to games where it actually takes skill, just look at the difference between counter-strike and modern warfare 2... CS was just a game where you shoot people with a few different objective based game modes. MW2 has all these lame perks, killstreak rewards, 15 or so different game modes, tons of shitty unbalanced maps. The perks give everyone an advantage in some sort of way. Killstreak rewards promote camping and non-objective based gameplay. The more a gamer plays the game the more weapons and perks he unlocks. In CS you simply play round by round. CS was a much better game than mw2 imo.
 
Piracy is bad, period. Anyone who thinks otherwise is deluding themselves. Is piracy the only problem of factor? Of course not. Would abolishing piracy help the situation? Absolutely.

Game developers need to make money. Piracy doesn't make anyone money. Its that simple.

What I want to know is what happened to demos? Back in the day almost every game had either a demo disk or a demo for download on a gaming website. Demos were perfect for "try before you buy" and also allowed people to see how their system would run a game.
 
How much was spent on the PC as a platform in the last five years?

Are you kidding? Microsoft has spent considerable amounts of money on Windows gaming. Sure it could do more but a re-write of the kernel and the new driver model, while not all about gaming has a lot to do with it. DX is a large investment that shows up on the PC first and then goes to consoles to leverage that investment. And what about AMD and nVidia? Hell nVidia is selling GTX 400s at a loss, and this isn't even a console!

PC hardware R&D DRIVES consoles, not the other way around.
 
Killstreak rewards promote camping and non-objective based gameplay. The more a gamer plays the game the more weapons and perks he unlocks. In CS you simply play round by round. CS was a much better game than mw2 imo.

You mean like in CS when you get money for killing people? How is CS "balanced" when one team has to attack and the other defend? In MW2 both teams have access to the same weapons, in CS they do not. In that way its completely balanced.

How in the world can you say that a game based around protecting hostages or a bomb site would not "promote camping". How can the maps in MW2 be so unbalanced when the spawn points move around during the match. Some maps work better for different modes and people can vote before a round starts. Its hard to to consistently get big kill streaks by camping in one place without a team cooperating together and an opposing team willing to keep walking into the trap. If the game wasn't at all skilled base I wouldn't have people on my friends list that I play with that have over 3:1 K/D and consistently performs at this level and in differnt play modes.

I can agree that the more items and weapons in the game the harder it is to balance. There are few items that are always better than every other weapon of the type, which is pretty impressive. If we exclude one shotgun it was one of the most balanced shooters on release that I have ever played. One of the base classes that any rank has access to (Recon) is a very effective build and the Famas is a great assault rifle (for me its the best on the PC version) and is available at the start. It only takes a couple kills to attach a grenade launcher to it. Most of the people that are very into the game will prestige often so they won't have access to all the gear even though they have been playing the game more.

CS is famous for pretty much everyone buying the same kits. CS certainly wasn't balanced day one, even the first non-beta, it got more balanced as it went on. I remember in Beta 3 where if someone got hit with the P90 they couldn't even move because it shot so fast.

More than one of those modes works just like CS, so is it choice that makes you grumpy, do you play CS on an Apple?
 
Piracy is bad, period. Anyone who thinks otherwise is deluding themselves. Is piracy the only problem of factor? Of course not. Would abolishing piracy help the situation? Absolutely.

Tell that to Microsoft. They've said that they would rather people pirate their software than use someone else's.
 
So your either some rich kid who kept going to school because your parents were paying for it and you were too scared to go out in the real world, or a person that had gotten themselves over there head in debt or enjoyed spending other peoples money so they stayed in school forever?

Getting an MBA/JD usually takes an absolute minimum of 8 years of schooling, which means that you would be at least 26 by the time you got out of college if you went straight from high school through all the degrees. That is if a "top school" of business admits someone without experience. A "top school" is what 35-50 thousand dollars a year now? What schools did you go to that they managed to be a top business school and a top law school? Seems like spending quarter to half a million dollars of someones money and many years of opportunity cost to argue with someone on the internet is kind of a waste. Where did you manage to get all this experience working with top boards and CEO's while you were spending all this time in school, or are you counting sitting on your dads lap on take your kid to work day when you were 6?

Whats the point of being a person who is 26 and has a "Masters in administration". Why would a law firm hire someone that wasted 2 years getting a masters in business instead of practicing law and why would a business hire someone who spent 2 years studying law while there peer would have 2 years of work experience instead?

LOL, cry more. Business and law school don't cost much if you are smart. There are B-schools ranked 10-20 that will buy your GMAT if you do well and I was getting a stipend to go. I finished during the post 911 recession with 0 debt (not a good time to job hunt), then went to a top 5 law school to pass the time. Again, law schools will buy your score if you do well on the LSAT so I ended up paying about 1/3 tuition. Sorry that this doesn't fit your imagined narrative. My parents are poor and don't have any money for me to spend so I went to the schools that paid up. By your questions, you indicate that you don't know much at all about law firm hiring. The only hiring criteria for students at good schools are acceptable first year grades and not drooling on yourself during the interview.

There are a lot of plusses for going that route. For one, bschool and law school aren't particularly difficult and most of the semester is spent playing Xbox. So after 5 years of fucking around in school and 3 years of working, I had already made more than most people who spent the entire 8 years working. The second advantage is that running your own firm is as much about managing a business as it is practicing law. And when you have your own firm made up of other lazy friends you met in school who just want to make six figs but don't care about being rich, you don't have to work very much. A few months of the year are bad with 70-90 hour weeks, but most of the time it's a 9-3 type job with plenty of time left over for me to slap you around on forums.
 
Are you kidding? Microsoft has spent considerable amounts of money on Windows gaming. Sure it could do more but a re-write of the kernel and the new driver model, while not all about gaming has a lot to do with it. DX is a large investment that shows up on the PC first and then goes to consoles to leverage that investment. And what about AMD and nVidia? Hell nVidia is selling GTX 400s at a loss, and this isn't even a console!

PC hardware R&D DRIVES consoles, not the other way around.

You totally missed my point, I am talking about marketing. You know money spent to get people to buy stuff. Saw the new COD black ops tailer this morning and of course at the end what do you hear. Buy it on xbox 360 this fall. When is the last time you saw a AAA trailer that said buy it for your windows PC this fall? Been a decade or more guaranteed.

Also are you seriously saying that MS rewrote the kernel and driver structure so games would run better?:rolleyes:

I agree about PC being the test bed, but that makes sense. The rest of your post is delusional.
 
Microsoft had game devs hold up the PC version release on many games to increase the 360 version sells.

They are not PC gamer's heros.
 
No one bought UT3 because they killed what could have been a great game on release by removing so much shit and having a shitty interface.
No one bought Gears of War on PC because it was a horrible buggy console port that was released after it's console counterpart. That game immediately, on release, had a reputation for being a buggy mess.
 
You totally missed my point, I am talking about marketing. You know money spent to get people to buy stuff. Saw the new COD black ops tailer this morning and of course at the end what do you hear. Buy it on xbox 360 this fall. When is the last time you saw a AAA trailer that said buy it for your windows PC this fall? Been a decade or more guaranteed.

Also are you seriously saying that MS rewrote the kernel and driver structure so games would run better?:rolleyes:

I agree about PC being the test bed, but that makes sense. The rest of your post is delusional.

You did say promoting, I apologize. But no I didn't say that Microsoft re-wrote the Windows kernel for gaming. However that effort has led to things like Eyefinity and Surround has it not? These things don't work on XP so reason why the kernel was re-written doesn't negate the benefits to gamers does it?

And the PC is more than a test bed for consoles. Do you think AMD and nVidia or any company could make the money they need to build chips from low priced consoles that are subsidized to begin with? The console hardware market doesn't sustain itself. Nothing delusional about that.
 
if developers made games that were worthy of their price tags then you wouldnt have as many issues. companies have gone the route of making half assed console games, marking up expansion packs or addons that should have been included in the first place, games needing patches before you even open the frigging box to run. some games never work right and your stuck. then people wonder why so many download games. they find out its shit or not worth the pricetag, which lets be honest is the vast majority of them, then they dont bother buying it. very very few games released within the last 10 years (of ANY format) were worth the high retail stickerprice that they carrried. its pretty sad when most of the "good" games recently are mere console ports, with crappy control sets, locked config keys and shitty gameplay. add to the the gimped multiplayer and IF your lucky lan play. i still say if developers started making good pc games that were not shitty console ports then people would be more inclined to actually buy them. i WAS ready to go out last weekend and buy one of the new titles until i found out about the absurd antipiracy methods, lack of lan play and the forced upgrading to play online. sorry but my $60 just stayed in my pocket.
 
anonmon said:

Yeah well I'm an astronaut. Its not that hard getting into a top 3 space school with the right scorew bro. I graduated from the air force at 18 with full benies after flying sweet secret jet fighter and it was post 9/11 man. The best part is its usually just me and my space college buddies sitting in a jacuzzi most of the time with hot women in bikinis, sure its long hours a couple days out of the year when we go to the moon but otherwise its sweet.

See if your going to make up a story at least make it cool. But no really I believe that you got an MBA and a JD in 5 years and then with only a couple years under your belt you own the lawfirm version of Sterling and Cooper in Mad Men.
 
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