Id’s Kevin Cloud Says Piracy is Killing PC Gaming news from 1UP.com
During a QuakeCon Q&A panel, Kevin Cloud, co-owner of Id and exec producer on Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, responded to a question about PC games disappearing from retailer’s shelves by saying that piracy was “killing PC games.”
“It’s the primary reason retailers are moving to the console,” Cloud said, continuing on to say that ways to reduce piracy are in the forefront of every PC developer’s mind, and citing World of Warcraft’s subscription-based nature as an example of a possible solution to the problem.
Id CEO Todd Hollenshead went on to theorize that “&about seventy percent of the landmass in the world where you can’t sell games in a legitimate market, because pirates will beat you to the shelves with your own game.”
“Nobody knows,” said Hollenshead, “but you may literally have more games being played illegitimately than being played legitimately.” Hollenshead explained how this his the PC devs by explaining that retailers would rather give up their valuable shelf space to product that can’t easily be downloaded elsewhere: namely console games.
I’m not sure it’s dying off. I think it’s also actions. EA (& DICE) have slowly killed off a strong PC gaming franchise with their actions around Battlefield 2. With the charging for any extra content they have made most Battlefield Gamers think twice about buying Battlefield 2142. Plus the pushing for more and more at the expense of looser and looser coding… People start debating upgrades.
Some of the other thngs that have killed various games are more the hacks that “can’t be stopped”. Basically driving away gamers to a console where you are rare to find someone using hacks on. Or driving gamers away from gaming all together.
One other way (besides subscription play servers) to stop Piracy is something EA has been doing for it’s Battlefield Expansion Packs called registered names. To play Battlefield 2 you need to register an account name, which you use to play. For the expansion packs, you are only allowed to play that game with that name you registereed with the expansion pack. I could copy all the files and install the expansion pack on another machine, but i won’t be able to play it except as the name I registered with it. It seems to of been pretty effective with making people actually buy the “expansion pack.”
Tags: Gaming, Interesting, News
