f13.net

No more Titan Quest. No idea what the status of DoW: Soulstorm is, though I'd guess it's in done and delivered.
http://www.ironlore.com/

We would like to extend our thanks to everyone who has helped us in the last seven years – our team who moved mountains to create such great games, our publisher THQ who has been a great partner through three product development cycles,

Venting my frustrations with PC game-dev

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Greetings:
So, ILE shut down. This is tangentially related to that, not why they shut down, but part of why it was such a difficult freaking slog trying not to. It's a rough, rough world out there for independent studios who want to make big games, even worse if you're single-team and don't have a successful franchise to ride or a wealthy benefactor. Trying to make it on PC product is even tougher, and here's why.

Piracy. Yeah, that's right, I said it. No, I don't want to re-hash the endless "piracy spreads awareness", "I only pirate because there's no demo", "people who pirate wouldn't buy the game anyway" round-robin. Been there, done that. I do want to point to a couple of things, though.

One, there are other costs to piracy than just lost sales. For example, with TQ, the game was pirated and released on the nets before it hit stores. It was a fairly quick-and-dirty crack job, and in fact, it missed a lot of the copy-protection that was in the game. One of the copy-protection routines was keyed off the quest system, for example. You could start the game just fine, but when the quest triggered, it would do a security check, and dump you out if you had a pirated copy. There was another one in the streaming routine. So, it's a couple of days before release, and I start seeing people on the forums complaining about how buggy the game is, how it crashes all the time. A lot of people are talking about how it crashes right when you come out of the first cave. Yeah, that's right. There was a security check there.

So, before the game even comes out, we've got people bad-mouthing it because their pirated copies crash, even though a legitimate copy won't. We took a lot of shit on this, completely undeserved mind you. How many people decided to pick up the pirated version because it had this reputation and they didn't want to risk buying something that didn't work? Talk about your self-fulfilling prophecy.

One guy went so far as to say he'd bought the retail game and it was having the exact same crashes, so it must be the game itself. This was one of the most vocal detractors, and we got into it a little bit. He swore up and down that he'd done everything above-board, installed it on a clean machine, updated everything, still getting the same crashes. It was our fault, we were stupid, our programmers didn't know how to make games - some other guy asked "do they code with their feet?". About a week later, he realized that he'd forgotten to re-install his BIOS update after he wiped the machine. He fixed that, all his crashes went away. At least he was man enough to admit it.

So, for a game that doesn't have a Madden-sized advertising budget, word of mouth is your biggest hope, and here we are, before the game even releases, getting bashed to hell and gone by people who can't even be bothered to actually pay for the game. What was the ultimate impact of that? Hard to measure, but it did get mentioned in several reviews. Think about that the next time you read "we didn't have any problems running the game, but there are reports on the internet that people are having crashes."

Two, the numbers on piracy are really astonishing. The research I've seen pegs the piracy rate at between 70-85% on PC in the US, 90%+ in Europe, off the charts in Asia. I didn't believe it at first. It seemed way too high. Then I saw that Bioshock was selling 5 to 1 on console vs. PC. And Call of Duty 4 was selling 10 to 1. These are hardcore games, shooters, classic PC audience stuff. Given the difference in install base, I can't believe that there's that big of a difference in who played these games, but I guess there can be in who actually payed for them.

Let's dig a little deeper there. So, if 90% of your audience is stealing your game, even if you got a little bit more, say 10% of that audience to change their ways and pony up, what's the difference in income? Just about double. That's right, double. That's easily the difference between commercial failure and success. That's definitely the difference between doing okay and founding a lasting franchise. Even if you cut that down to 1% - 1 out of every hundred people who are pirating the game - who would actually buy the game, that's still a 10% increase in revenue. Again, that's big enough to make the difference between breaking even and making a profit.

Titan Quest did okay. We didn't lose money on it. But if even a tiny fraction of the people who pirated the game had actually spent some god-damn money for their 40+ hours of entertainment, things could have been very different today. You can bitch all you want about how piracy is your god-given right, and none of it matters anyway because you can't change how people behave... whatever. Some really good people made a seriously good game, and they might still be in business if piracy weren't so rampant on the PC. That's a fact.


Enough about piracy. Let's talk about hardware vendors. Trying to make a game for PC is a freaking nightmare, and these guys make it harder all the time. Integrated video chips; integrated audio. These were two of our biggest headaches. Not only does this crap make people think - and wrongly - that they have a gaming-capable PC when they don't, the drive to get the cheapest components inevitably means you've got hardware out there with little or no driver support, marginal adherence to standards, and sometimes bizarre conflicts with other hardware.

And it just keeps getting worse. CD/DVD drives with bad firmware, video cards that look like they should be a step-up from a previous generation, but actually aren't, drivers that need to be constantly updated, separate rendering paths for optimizing on different chips, oh my god. Put together consumers who want the cheapest equipment possible with the best performance, manufacturers who don't give a shit what happens to their equipment once they ship it, and assemblers who need to work their margins everywhere possible, and you get a lot of shitty hardware out there, in innumerable configurations that you can't possibly test against. But, it's always the game's fault when something doesn't work.

Even if you get over the hump on hardware compatibility - and god knows, the hardware vendors are constantly making it worse - if you can, you still need to deal with software conflicts. There are a lot of apps running on people's machines that they're not even aware of, or have become such a part of the computer they don't even think of them as being apps anymore. IM that's always on; peer-to-peer clients running in the background; not to mention the various adware and malware crap that people pick up doing things they really shouldn't. Trying to run a CPU and memory heavy app in that environment is a nightmare. But, again, it's always the game's fault if it doesn't work.


Which brings me to the audience. There's a lot of stupid people out there. Now, don't get me wrong, there's a lot of very savvy people out there, too, and there were some great folks in the TQ community who helped us out a lot. But, there's a lot of stupid people. Basic, basic stuff, like updating your drivers, or de-fragging your hard drive, or having antivirus so your machine isn't a teetering pile of rogue programs. PC folks want to have the freedom to do whatever the hell they want with their machines, and god help them they will do it; more power to them, really. But god forbid something that they've done - or failed to do - creates a problem with your game. There are few better examples of the "it can't possibly be my fault" culture in the west than gaming forums.

And while I'm at it, I don't want to spare the reviewers either. We had one reviewer - I won't name names, you can find it if you look hard enough - who missed the fact that you can teleport from wherever you are in TQ back to any of the major towns you've visited. So, this guy was hand-carting all of his stuff back to town every time his inventory was full. Through the entire game. Now, not only was this in the manual, and in the roll-over tooltips for the UI, but it was also in the tutorial, the very first time you walk past one of these giant pads that lights up like a beacon to the heavens. Nonetheless, he missed it, and he commented in his review how tedious this was and how much he missed being able to portal back to town. When we - and lots of our fans - pointed out that this was the reviewer's fault, not the game's, they amended the review. But, they didn't change the score. Do you honestly think that not having to run back to town all the time to sell your stuff wouldn't have made the game a better experience?

We had another reviewer who got crashes on both the original and the expansion pack. We worked with him to figure out what was going on; the first time, it was an obscure peripheral that was causing the crash, a classic hardware conflict for a type of hardware that very, very few people have. The second time, it was in a pre-release build that we had told him was pre-release. After identifying the problem, getting him around it, and verifying that the bug was a known issue and had been fixed in the interim, he still ran the story with a prominent mention of this bug. With friends like that...


Alright, I'm done. Making PC products is not all fun and games. It's an uphill slog, definitely. I'm a lifelong PC gamer, and hope to continue to work on PC games in the future, but man, they sure don't make it easy.

Best,
Michael.

Also, the post is almost as bad as an "I'M LEAVING U GUYZ R MEAN" post.

Meh, piracy. Weak.

Meh, piracy. Weak.

Fucking consoles NEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEED Diablo clones.

This isn't like some obscure idea either. It's fucking obvious. All we get is the mediocre Untold Legends series and once in a blue moon a Fushigi no Dungeon title gets released in America (COMING SOON TO A DS NEAR YOU).

Piracy costs a nebulous amount of money though. There's no way to exactimate. Now, people being stupid probably costs them a LOT more money than piracy.

One, there are other costs to piracy than just lost sales. For example, with TQ, the game was pirated and released on the nets before it hit stores. It was a fairly quick-and-dirty crack job, and in fact, it missed a lot of the copy-protection that was in the game. One of the copy-protection routines was keyed off the quest system, for example. You could start the game just fine, but when the quest triggered, it would do a security check, and dump you out if you had a pirated copy. There was another one in the streaming routine. So, it's a couple of days before release, and I start seeing people on the forums complaining about how buggy the game is, how it crashes all the time. A lot of people are talking about how it crashes right when you come out of the first cave. Yeah, that's right. There was a security check there.

So, before the game even comes out, we've got people bad-mouthing it because their pirated copies crash, even though a legitimate copy won't. We took a lot of shit on this, completely undeserved mind you. How many people decided to pick up the pirated version because it had this reputation and they didn't want to risk buying something that didn't work? Talk about your self-fulfilling prophecy.

One guy went so far as to say he'd bought the retail game and it was having the exact same crashes, so it must be the game itself. This was one of the most vocal detractors, and we got into it a little bit. He swore up and down that he'd done everything above-board, installed it on a clean machine, updated everything, still getting the same crashes. It was our fault, we were stupid, our programmers didn't know how to make games - some other guy asked "do they code with their feet?". About a week later, he realized that he'd forgotten to re-install his BIOS update after he wiped the machine. He fixed that, all his crashes went away. At least he was man enough to admit it.

Someone here should just build a Diablo clone using XNA.

This topic is stupid and think the man is silly for thinking people would see eye to eye with him after his company just went under.

But come on! Surely the fact that less than 10% of PC games in circulation are legitimate versions has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that the non-MMO & non-Steam/Stardock/etc PC game market is dying on its arse?

(I don't do green)

Um his company didn't go under.  The poster works for THQ and still is employed by THQ. 

I never got any official support. The game is still in my steam account and I can't play it. Fuck this guy blaming his consumers. New line of work.

A.

Falsehood #1: "Piracy is killing teh pc!"

Truth #1: Piracy is rampant on consoles, too.  RAM cartridges on the DS and Game Boy, cracked games loaded on hard drives for PS3, 360 and PSP, flat-out copied disks for all of the non-cartridge consoles.  People with a super aversion to paying for their stuff WILL steal it, regardless of hardware inconveniences.

Falsehood #2: "Piracy kills teh profits!"

Tell that to Stardock and their best-selling Galactic Civilizations and Sins of a Solar Empire, neither of which possess any copy-protection.  Ditto for Oblivion.  Whereas Bioshock is full of obnoxious copy-protection, and to my knowledge hadn't been cracked for some months after the game's release, so if the PC version was super-outsold by the console versions (which is something I doubt, honestly, but I haven't looked it up to know for sure), it wasn't because ze germans had pirated it before its release.

People will buy good games, period.  Jackasses will steal games too, but if anyone thinks that Pimply McPirate sitting in his dorm room with fifty torrents going at once was ever going to pay for software, that person needs to be reacquainted with reality.  The best way to deal with pirates is to ensure that they don't take up valuable personnel resources, such as requiring a serial key to access tech support forums.  That way, only legitimate users are taking the time of the support people.  Pirates will steal your game, take that as a given, but act to make sure that they don't cost the company money by tying up support forums and phone support.

Variation on Truth #1: Piracy is on consoles, but it's harder to get to. You probably need to pay someone to mod your box. You then have to find a source of physical copies, because electronic copies are a bit harder to find (although as more consoles come online, this is changing). On the PC, it's a lot easier to find a cracked copy, patch it up and play.

Real life Truth #1: Piracy on PS2 is incredibly fucking simple. Much simpler than on the PC.

Tell that to Stardock and their best-selling Galactic Civilizations and Sins of a Solar Empire, neither of which possess any copy-protection.  Ditto for Oblivion.  Whereas Bioshock is full of obnoxious copy-protection, and to my knowledge hadn't been cracked for some months after the game's release, so if the PC version was super-outsold by the console versions (which is something I doubt, honestly, but I haven't looked it up to know for sure), it wasn't because ze germans had pirated it before its release.

The best way to deal with pirates is to ensure that they don't take up valuable personnel resources, such as requiring a serial key to access tech support forums.  That way, only legitimate users are taking the time of the support people.  Pirates will steal your game, take that as a given, but act to make sure that they don't cost the company money by tying up support forums and phone support.

blah blah blah

Also: Please bear in mind that modifying consoles is illegal in at least one of the three major video game markets worldwide.

I've always enjoyed the defence that "piracy is always going to happen, so developers should just lie there and take it" that comes from the player base (and Will Wright). It smacks of personal entitlement and selfishness that its okay for the studio who spends all the time and risk in developing something should just accept losing a few million in revenue thanks to piracy because... well, it's just like that!  :uhrr:

I disagree that tech support is a reason people will purchase a legitimate copy.  I can be assed to go to a tech forum to try nad solve a problem when I bought a game because, well, I put down hard earned money (which I can't get back) for a game and I want to be able to continue playing it.  If I didn't pay for it then i really don't care and I'll write it off as a crappy and bug ridden game (even if the fault is a software conflict on my machine) and delete it off my machine.

It's a fact that people are more attached to things they have purchased then things they have gotten for free.  Entertainment is exactly the same. 

Got any sources for your opinions?

There is probably some irony that this whole thing occurred just before last week's EBGames.com top selling games list got posted on their site. They list Galactic Civilizations II as the top telling PC title and the #2 overall (all platforms).  And that was before this incident.

February 28, 2008 - In just 23 Earth days, Sins of a Solar Empire has managed to sell over 100,000 units. This makes it the bestselling PC game last week, toppling even the mighty Call of Duty 4, and The Orange Box.

I remember hearing at a conference that when an executive at a big publisher heard that Galactic Civilizations II shipped with no CD copy protection that they quipped “I hope bankruptcy treats them well.”

Millions of dollars in sales later as one of the top selling PC strategy games at retail (according to NPD) over the past couple of years let’s me say “Ha!” in response.

Anti-piracy measures on software do not work.  Period.  What they DO cause is a certain amount of resentment from legitemate users.

It seems like a no-brainer to me.

Yeah, I think it's especially ironic that he makes comment about the "it can't possibly be my fault culture" when the whole point of his long diatribe seems to be "it can't possibly be my fault".

There simply aren't enough people willing to pay for AAA PC titles to make it worthwhile making them.  And two MMO's with big budgets, lots of buzz, but high hardware specs, have bombed out (Vanguard and TR), so there simply may not be a AAA PC market worth targetting anymore.

Thus far, the learnings about using piracy control applications have been: make it smooth on the customer. If the Iron Lore guys had installed a "This is an unauthorised copy. Please buy the authorised copy <link>here</link>!" they would have avoided the problem of people thinking their game crashed all the time.

Nah, he's just ignoring the pink elephant in the room.

Titan Quest should've been a 360/PS3 release as well with downloadable expansions. They'd be rolling in it. Maybe then Blizzard would make a console Diablo that didn't suck :grin: