Epic Games: No Gears 2 on PC, PC enthusiasts are Pirates,

High-end videogames suffer because developers make them solely to be high-end.   Little thought is put into fun and playability, and all the emphasis is on polygon counts, texture resolution, and sparkly new effects.  

I agree with Slapnuts; people will pirate crap games just to see what they look like but if you actually develop a compelling title then it will sell real copies.  These game devs are out of touch when they think X number of sales "should" be happening simply because they wasted Y years and Z million dollars developing a newfangled graphics engine.

 

Pretty much my thoughts exactly

 

Well, considering you don't have a 360 anyway I don't think that technically a sale has been lost.  You know damn well you'll still play it at a friends house if they have a 360.  Either way, I think that these generalizations of PC enthusiasts is getting out of hand.  I literally have not pirated a single PC game EVER (no, I'm not holier than thou) and I'm a PC enthusiast. 

Why don't they just admit that developing for the PC is much harder because system specs vary to widely?  Also, why don't they admit that the majority of games released for the PC these days sucks terribly because of poor development? 

PC game makers need to start focusing on quality and content instead of half-assed implemented ideas and far fetched game play.  If you build a good game, they will come.  See: Orange Box

 

My friends, and even staff here, joke that they should get me one.  At some point if one of the good bundles hit sub $200, I would maybe consider it. 

Exactly.  Truly good games sell, and sell well on the PC.  Sure Spore has sold well, but it has also been pirated all to ****.  Why?  It isn't that great and the online aspect isn't all that compelling to require "authorization" so to speak. 

These companies can release "****" on a console, and people will still buy it, and if they try to pass that same crap off on to the PC it doesn't fly. 

 

Only the best of the console games get ported to computer and still only sell a few 100k vs. millions that they sold on the consoles.  I'm not to sure what you mean by games being **** having anything to do with them being pirated.

I won an Xbox 360 at a stag and doe a couple weeks ago and have officially gone over to the dark side.  Sure playing with piss poor graphics sucks, but it's just so much more fun socially when so few people want to deal with the hassle of computers. I've dumped several hundred dollars already on a some games and controllers and I'm having loads of fun being able to have people over for drinks and we shoot each other for a few rounds.

They need to figure some way to make computer games harder to crack or I'm never going to buy a game that doesn't require online play.  Why do I pirate?  Because I can, end of story. 

Heard a statistic on the radio at work the other day.  The average Canadian breaks the law once a day.  No one is watching. It's easy to do. Whats stopping average Joe from taking instead of paying?

 

Did he really have lump PC enthusiasts in with pirates when the two groups certainly aren't mutually inclusive?

If you assume that everyone savvy enough to be capable of running GoW2 on a PC is also savvy enough to pirate it, your potential customer base falls in to groups:

1)  Those that know how to pirate the game, and choose to do so
2)  Those that know how to pirate the game, and choose not to do so.

Assuming you agree with the premise of his argument, there are no potential customers that are incapable of stealing it if they do not want to pay for it.

He didn't say you will steal it... he said you can if you want to.  And he's probably right.

It is pretty well established that DRM simply doesn't work for offline games.  Unless you have a CDKey and a phone-home every time you log in, it'll get cracked, and it'll be an inconvenience for legitimate buyers.  So their options are to require online authorization (bad, for offline games), or just not sell the game.  I don't think you can fault them for making that smart financial choice.

 

But you can fault them for being meaniepants.

 

I don't know about you guys but pirated stuff works better then stuff you get from the manufacture. My vista I bought legit wouldn't work worth ****, so I pirated it on my other comp and copied it to a disk and it worked like a charm.

If you want sales on the PC market you have to have some online play not my fault you didn't include online play in your game maybe then I would have bought it.

 

... I really, really, really enjoyed that picture.

 

glad you liked it.  Too me, it is a big difference.  Part of the reason I feel these piracy lawsuits and their outrageous settlements are absurd.  The time does not fit the crime.

 

I've pirated more console games than PC games =\

 

Haha, i just wrote a post on this and other annoying industry issues. Good thing I don't read your posts first. Lawl!

 

I wouldn't buy gears of war 2 cause gears of war 1 was ******* terrible. Yes, I pirated it, and yes, it failed to keep my attention for more than 5 minutes.

 

so they just make games for stupid people, nice.

 

It pisses me off to no end when I see nearly every studio that I had respect for either sell out to EA or sellout to consoles where their target market is a bunch of idiots with the IQ of 12 who are too stupid to use a computer. When I see a game like Unreal Tournament completely fail because it was essentially ported to the PC (instead of the other way around) then I don't understand why devs don't just improve their games instead of selling the same old product that they've been rehashing for over 10 years to a new audience (consoles) who thinks it's new material.  The reason that PC sales are down so much is that we've seen it all before, and we want something new and good, not a SameOld**** 6.0 with slightly better graphics and 2 more weapons.  The reason we pirate is because we're too used to the disappointment that new games all-to-often bring, and frankly I don't have 50 bucks to throw away on every single game I'd like to try that might be good.

Their problem is...gaming market and individual gamers themselves have evolved.  And the developers/publishers have to evolve along with their market. 

The reason that Valve/Steam is so successful is obviously that their games have a huge multiplayer element and their devs are very intune with their audience.  Just look at the amazing support that a game like TF2 recieves.  Other devs should take a hint.  Games like COD4 (available on Steam) have both an amazing single player as well as the best FPS multiplayer out there at this time.

Personally, I only buy good games and I pirate games to test them out prior to buying them.  It's pretty sad that the last game I bought that wasn't through Steam was WoW-BC.

As far as upcoming games, imagine if a game like Fallout 3 had a multiplayer or co-op component.  I know that's a lot to ask for a game of that magnitude, but how awesome would that be?

Future games I will definately buy:  Starcraft 2, Left4Dead, WOTLK, Red Alert 3, and a few others I can't think of off the top of my head now.
Probably not GTA4 for PC, because exclusivity to Windows Live is stupid.

 

I still feel that is one of the biggest issues with PC games.  You can't rent them, and generally for most places, you can't return them when opened either. 

What does this mean?  If you buy a POS you are stuck with it.  At least with a console game you can gamestop it up, ebay it, pawn it off to a unsuspecting friend. 

This is why more games need to have demos/trials, etc.  This is something i mentioned in my "gamers bill of rights" which was a touch of humor, but does make sense.  Some sort of try before you buy concept.