Kevin Cloud says that piracy is killing the PC game
In a Q&A where the audience were asking questions, someone mentioned the word game piracy and Cloud decided to take on the question and subject. [quote] "Piracy is hard," Cloud continued, “It’s really – from my opinion, destroying the PC market." Cloud believes there are many good ideas on how to solve the problem, "but when you look out there at the number of games that are getting pirated, it is just devastating." "It’s the primary reason retailers are moving to the console," Cloud said. "It’s something that’s on every PC developer’s mind – on how to reduce [piracy]. Because, if you like the PC, you hate to see it fall lower and lower down." "The good side of things on the PC market," Cloud added, "I don’t think the PC market is shrinking at all. I think there’re tons of people playing games on the PC. I think World of Warcraft is a good example." "The game has a massive audience on the PC," Cloud noted because the game was subscription based, it couldn’t be pirated. "I think once we get that solved, you’re going to find a lot more PC titles not on the retail shelves." "There is about seventy-percent of the landmass of the world where you can’t sell games in a legitimate market, because pirates will beat you to the shelves with your own game. And that is a serious problem," Hollenshead concluded. "Even in the other percentage of the world: the United States, Europe, Canada, Japan, and some of the other Pacific Rim countries…we still have serious piracy rates among PC titles." "I would just hazard a guess," Hollenshead said, "Nobody knows – but you may literally have more games being played illegitimately than being played legitimately. So when you’re giving up that much market to people who aren’t paying for the games, or who are buying the games in ways in which the developers aren’t getting paid for it, it creates a big challenge. "Not only for the developers and publishers," pointed out Hollenshead, "But also for retailers, because they have to make bets when they buy their game inventory.” The result, says Hollenshead is that retailers look at piracy, and decide to place their multi-million dollar inventory commitments on a market that isn’t being pirated: consoles. "This industry is trying to work on that kind of a problem. And it is a very serious problem. There isn’t any magical solution, or else we’d solve it." [/quote] id will continue to support computer gaming however this is one issue that they as well as many developers want to solve. Apperently for those people trying to save some money will continue doing what they do today. However it is one thing to burn a copy of the game for yourself, it is another thing to burn a copy of the game and sell it to all your friends, family and other people.  Source: http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3581&Itemid=2 Picture's Source: http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1808556813/photo/970402931 |
