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id and Epic: Multiplatform because of piracy
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Posted by: Ion Silverbolt
Across two separate lectures at this week's Game Developers Conference, id Software CEO Todd Hollenshead and Epic Games president Michael Capps both admitted that piracy of PC games caused their companies to pursue developing beyond the PC platform. "Piracy has pushed id as being multiplatform," stated Hollenshead, whose company contracted Z-Axis to handle the PlayStation 3 version and Nerve Software the Xbox 360 edition of Splash Damage's forthcoming Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (PC).
Comments made by Epic's Capps carried a similar tone. "PC gaming is really falling apart," he revealed. "It killed us to make Unreal Tournament 3 cross-platform, but Epic had to do it," adding "the market that would buy a $600 video card knows how Bittorrent works." Epic is currently developing Unreal Tournament 3 for the PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in-house.
Meanwhile, Firaxis designer and programmer Soren Johnson remained confident in PC development. He suggested that "game design on the PC is going to bend toward persistence," noting Blizzard's World of Warcraft is "successful because you can't pirate WoW. You cannot pirate an MMO. Period."
http://www.shacknews.com/ja.zz?comments=46079
Posted by: pdnielsen
Well, you may not be able to pirate a monthly fee itself. But there have been victims of credit card and debit card fraud ("identity theft") who have lost a good amount of money to people who've used the stolen numbers to charge monthly fees of various kinds. It would not surprise me if some credit thieves used the numbers for WoW and to pay for cable internet services to play interactively with other thieves.
Posted by: Bishop
That's a whole different kind of crime.
And one that's a lot less happening than casual piracy.
aaaand it's easy to pirate the actual game, but you're going to end up paying the monthly fee regardless.
Seeing as how the boxed version is only a few dollars more than the monthly fee (in most cases) and includes a free month of gameplay, you're not really missing out.
Posted by: khmerxkid781
Well there are private WoW servers out there and you can download the game to play on their servers. Is that allowed?
Posted by: Outlaw
That's not allowed.
I'm not even gonna start with listing all the disadvantages a private server has either, it wouldn't fit in one post.
Posted by: Ion Silverbolt
I think PC gaming is a dying animal myself. Sure there will always be some A1 titles for the PC, but you just get so much more on consoles now, it's hard to justify spending a ton on a graphics card. From a developer's standpoint, consoles are just so much more easy to code for. Not to mention the piracy factor.
On the plus side, I would be surprised if the next generation consoles are not almost full blown PCs anyway. Just more proprietary and less customizable like a Windows PC.
Posted by: FadedMaster
Here's the thing that I don't like about the current trend. I don't have to spend $600 to play my PC games, but I do if I want to play PS3. I haven't had to upgrade my PC to play a PC game in a looong time. And I only payed ~$120 or so for the video card. Then again, I don't care about graphics.
I have no problem with the graphics of Ultima. As a matter of fact, I hate better graphics for certain games (especially RPGs). But that's a whole different topic. My point is that not everyone pirates games, and it's a shame that because of those who do, the PC gaming market is shrinking. I just know though, if things focused more towards console, people would just rent games and copy them to play... like people do with movies already.
Posted by: Bishop
Modern games like wow won't see much benefit from playing on a private server, although this is variable and will change as time goes on.
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