Have a civilized discussion. I was not aware that consoles were pirated at all. That is new to me. I am only a pc guy. I can remember back to the days of the Commodore 64. I was a young lad then and I used to pirate games back then. The older I get the more I realize that the more stuff is pirated the less of what people want will come out. That is the point I was trying to make. I am amazed at some of the people here that have so many posts but seem to want to argue all the time. You can flag my post that you do not like it. I laugh at this...
We've had this discussion dozens of time on this forum, pre 2005 and post.
I used to copy tape to tape on my old Spectrum like nobodies business, I've played pirated PC games, hacked consoles, emulated games - whatever. Been there. Done that.
I see what you're saying but are you seriously saying never knew console games were never pirated? How can you judge an industry you only have one view of?
Piracy does not put off developers from developing PC games, it is an excuse commonly placed for justification of a shift of focus - aggressive DRM puts PC players off paying money for a game with inherent runtime issues they can avoid by breaking the law with no consequence. Not to mention the whole psychological issue. This issue is amplified when you look at older games that you cannot run these days without cracked .exe's.
I (and lots of like minded folk) will not pay full price for a game with aggressive DRM, limited installs etc because of the insinuation I am likely to pirate the game - be it the original Mass Effect, BioShock...whatever - I shouldn't have to limit myself (I paid for the ***king thing - and I'm the one up **** creek?) when those who choose to acquire the game illegally have no such limitation because of a few hours work by some semi-talented individuals.
Johnny the pirate can install the game countless times on countless PC's with little or no effort or hassle?
Please.
You can't honeslty think that PC devs switch to console development because they're losing sales due to piracy. Pick a game, big budget, particularly well marketed or not - go and search ISOhunt or any torrent site at least a few weeks before release (console or PC) I guarantee you will be able to download the game. You could probably argue reasonably well that low budget, low publicity games are far easier to protect than those with a massive profile.
"the more stuff is pirated the less of what people want will come out"
This doesn't justify any shift in development focus, honestly - Gears of War 2 (developed my Epic, a PC dev originally) is a good example as it hit warez at least 3 weeks before release. You can bet your arse GoW3 will be pretty damn similar to GoW or GoW2...Unreal Tournament (also developed by Epic) was phenomenally successful, critically acclaimed, and sold massively - and had no DRM to speak of at all. I could have pirated the thing like no-ones business and yet I own 3 different copies.
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