> And, to be honest, they have a point, because PC game piracy is out of control.
No, they do not have a point. I bought Settlers 7, shortly after release, for full price. I couldn't play it. My internet connection at the time would "blip" every ten minutes or so, it would go down for a couple of seconds and come back up. Every time this happened I got kicked out of my game.
The next Ubisoft game that came out, I pirated. Why? Because the pirated version of Settlers 7 /works/. If I'm paying something, I expect a better experience than I would get if I didn't pay. To me, that seems like a fairly basic tenet of economics.
Many game companies "get it". Valve for example provide me with unending streams of new content for games I have paid for, even going as far as giving me a free copy of Portal 2. Thanks Valve! You win money.
...and what do you propose? Unfortunately for the PC games industry, the number of gamers willing to pay for games is not very high.
Companies like Epic have basically gone out on the record and said "we stopped supporting PC because of piracy." If you were a publisher, what would you do? There are precious few successes of games without DRM, and remember that all Steam games are also DRM'd.
I participated in the launch event and earned the maximum number of potatoes, for which I received Portal 2, giftable copies of all the other games they've made (too numerous to list from memory), and a little flag for my robot in Portal 2 co-op.
Comments
> And, to be honest, they have a point, because PC game piracy is out of control.
No, they do not have a point. I bought Settlers 7, shortly after release, for full price. I couldn't play it. My internet connection at the time would "blip" every ten minutes or so, it would go down for a couple of seconds and come back up. Every time this happened I got kicked out of my game.
The next Ubisoft game that came out, I pirated. Why? Because the pirated version of Settlers 7 /works/. If I'm paying something, I expect a better experience than I would get if I didn't pay. To me, that seems like a fairly basic tenet of economics.
Many game companies "get it". Valve for example provide me with unending streams of new content for games I have paid for, even going as far as giving me a free copy of Portal 2. Thanks Valve! You win money.
...and what do you propose? Unfortunately for the PC games industry, the number of gamers willing to pay for games is not very high.
Companies like Epic have basically gone out on the record and said "we stopped supporting PC because of piracy." If you were a publisher, what would you do? There are precious few successes of games without DRM, and remember that all Steam games are also DRM'd.
Why did they give you a free copy of Portal 2? Do you own so many of their games?
I participated in the launch event and earned the maximum number of potatoes, for which I received Portal 2, giftable copies of all the other games they've made (too numerous to list from memory), and a little flag for my robot in Portal 2 co-op.
I think he's referring to how if you buy Portal 2 on the PS3, Valve gives you a free copy of it for PC.
Nope (although I have that one too!), see my reply above.