The bigger a hassle it is, the more of a challenge it is.

The best solution is to stop trying to beat pirates at their own game before it starts crossing into the realm of pissing off your legit costumers

All the cracked steam games basically work by "popping in the disc" in this case you have to extract a rar and double clicking an exe and presto the game works. Pirating will never be overcome by any means if the game is resident on your machine

Honestly if I was a video game developer I'd consider outright abandoning the PC market. Lower profit, lower sales, higher development costs. Not really worth it anymore

Screw you too!

Even if it's not they just data mine while playing.

See: Illegal WoW servers, illegal RO servers, etc. Those games aren't stored on your machine, only a client that allows you to connect to them and handles some parts of the game does. Yet pirates can, and have, copied those games.

Lower profit? Yeah, no. You can put out a bunch of shitty games that cost next to nothing to produce on the PC market, and pull a higher profit margin off of them than your big block buster FFXIII and GoWIII games. Consoles have quality standards in place, and therefore you can't do the same--except with the Wii to a limited capacity.

Higher development costs isn't really right either, depending on which console you're using. Unless you're including impotent DRM schemes in the development costs.

And you know you can pirate console games right? It's not even hard. Spend a little time looking around and you can get your 360 or PS3 modded for like 20-40 dollars, and then a little more time looking around and you can get programs that let you burn downloaded games to disc--or, depending on where you live, just buy pirated discs.

Consoles aren't pirate free by any stretch of the imagination--they just don't get the same press yet.

Yeah, the highest costs for video game development are Console games, and they're getting into the 50+ million now, even for games that don't sell well. I read somewhere that Two Human's development cost was between 70-100million.

I'm not talking about those, last I checked Assassin's Creed wasn't shovelware. I am talking Assassin's Creed PC vs Console sales. Also look at this from their standpoint. They go into this with the thinking that every pirated game is one less sale, with the logic "why buy the console version when they get the PC one for free". We both know there are plenty of reasons but this is their thinking. So its a matter of atleast getting a 1 legit sale for each pirated version. Let me also point back to what I said earlier that DRMs cost money, something that simply doesn't exist with consoles. Its all about bottomline profit and its quickly becoming, is PC market worth it.

We know pirating wont stop, either they accept this and marginal profits, or they drop PC market all together and I'm saying if I was them, it just doesn't seem worth the effort. Why do all this work if people are just gonna steal from me anyways

Again: It costs MORE to produce for consoles

And AC is skewed as hell. The console version was released much sooner and it was never suggested there'd be a PC version until months later. Most people that wanted the game already had it. AND it was obviously a Console game to start with.

It'd be better to compare PC DA to console DA sales, or KotoR. And then there are entire genres of game that just don't work well on consoles, like RTS games. Even the Wii's motion controller (and possible ability to use it as a mouse surrogate) haven't changed this.

Also: Aero? Those cheap shovelware games?

They are released by the same publishers as games like AC2, Dragon Age, KotoR, Oblivion, etc. They are created in order to funnel money into the coffers of those companies. Like Activision.

P.S. Dragon Age Origins sold 3.2 million copies across the consoles, and was in the number one and number two slots for Steam's highest profitable sales for at least two weeks after release. Know how much DRM it has? Either the Steam/D2D inherent... or a disk check. That's it. They spent nothing on the DRM on this game.

Aero, have you been paying attention to the arguments of the last few pages? I'm confused how you're saying that console games have higher profit margins when they have higher costs. Getting the seal of approval from Microsoft or Sony is still quite difficult for young developers. I know with MS at the very least you have to have achievements in your game. With Sony, there's the time to program for the Cell machine. That raises the price on console games to the stratosphere. Honestly, programming for a PC is tons better such as the case for Peggle or Plants vs Zombies that don't need a lot of maintenance nor are all that hard to program as compared to God of War III.

Also, Sony? They have regionware. It's a kind of DRM since the days of Playstation. Get the money in one region, then get more with a release in another country.

I dont get why you cant tell the differance between a top teir and casual game. Why you believe that the PC version of a game is somehow cheaper then the console version. Despite the PC versions having much higher hardware demands, server loads, and security systems