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

Nope. The PS3 blows computers away in the 'difficult to program for this hardware' sector. For online games, maybe, and if it were true it would only prove that there are more people playing PC games, which would completely contradict everything you have said about profits. Again, Dragon Age--Disk Check OR standard online verification (if you bought it that way). No other DRM.

Where did it rank for steam again for two weeks after it's release? Top two. Not even the top ONE spot, both the top spots were taken by different versions of the game.
How about D2D? Yeah, the same.

Oh what's that, EA? You say it's a triple platinum game?

Without any expensive security measures?

What you are saying does not jive with reality. That is the problem.

Don't get me started on Starcraft Beta. People have been waiting for this for years and the line is going to be out the door for it.

I mean, if we honestly asked Square which is harder to program for, which would you believe in regards to FF XIII?

I'm pretty sure that it was for Sony's machine hands down.

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I'm not entirely a PC fanboy. I just like Steam. So yes, I play a lot of TF2. It's a game that isn't all that hard to update and does rather well for a 3 year old game. Let's not forget the HUGE fervor over Activision's decision to not have any dedicated servers for their fans. Braid was also a PC game before it became a staple in the Xbox lives game room. All of these games are hugely prevalent in the PC market which, in a way, influences the console market.

What you're basically saying is that the PC game market is dead, which isn't true at all. Ubi's example should tell us something. It's alive and it won't be ignored.

Hot diggity damn! A console vs PC fight is just the kind of spice this forum needed! Here's hoping for sexy consequences.

Can we do Apple vs Microsoft while we're beating dead horses?

oh yea my bad, its been so long I forgot about that flaw with the PS3. Their processor forces companies to program from scratch.

Bring your own stick, roast, and marshmallows. Krylo's a cheap bastard.

Um, not really? If you look at job openings in game companies, a lot of them say to know how to program for the Wii and 360. The only major difference between the 360 and PS3 is that the PS3 uses OpenGL, which is universal, where the 360 uses Direct3D, which is Microsoft proprietary. The code is apparently quite easy to port.

I beg to differ.

If you program on the PS3, you can do it for the 360 or Wii. Sony makes money off of the games. but the full potential of the PS3 has yet to be explored because it's a difficult little bugger to open up.