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During the "classic" age of interaction making games wasn't expensive and the customers were fewer... everything was perfectly balanced, it was like in ancient Greece, a utopia politika.
Ever since the technology race between ID and EPIC began, videogames costs began swelling up and to cover these they had to appeal to vaster and vaster slices of population.
It seems that a healthy market is one that's able to get more and more expensive and maintain itself. Consoles seem to be right born for this. A console game is easily recognizable for its few crisms of accessiblity, action and gratuitous entertainment. Most console players already know the new game is addressed to them and will gladly give in to that invitation and purchase it. So that costs can puff up all they want, there's players ready to support the system. Console games are becoming more and more accessible, more and more hollywood-like, more and more flat to please the ever growing market.
It seems PC market is unable to sustain this, just like a nation that gives too much power to a capitalist aristocracy will sooner or later blow up in revolution and bloody beheading. When a console game is made also for PC the costs are again tragically swollen, plus the game is made for flat-minded gamers, like the console ones. Some publishers don't know the PC gaming community is completely different from the other one, they still deem the players as homogeneous as the console folks, folks who will buy anything. But PC fails giving them fair profit. HEnce many form this conclusion: PC market is plagued by crime and it's in decline.
Why does this happen? We already mentioned the HOW, the swollen costs. But why can't PC market cover these?
--- pause to allow everyone to form some conjectures, waiting-room jingle airs ---
Everybody formed his/her own opinion? Well keep reading, if it's at least similar to the following ones you were right... the solutions are implicitly mentioned in the above lines, mind you, the following is just to single them out.
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There's two basical reasons for pc market to reject the blister-swollen system of growing costs=dwindling complexity=games for kids.
1)PC gaming community is ipso facto not well-blended, a Personal Computer is an object that the most diverse types of human possess, people who have one at home(or office) for the most disparate reasons, and since they have one, they decide to buy a game. So naturally because of this sheer diversity of lives and mentalities, the community is formed by at least 10 different NICHES, making it numerically IMPOSSIBLE to reach too high sales for games that are for example extremely polarized into ACTION and ARCADE.(I only buy adventures and simulations, for example)
2)This one is simpler. People can(and have the right to) download the game if they don't have enough money/don't feel like buying it. They had to buy the peripherals to run them, or they're simply trying to pay off something else, or they're humble proletarians, it's a RIGHT to have something for free, it should be legalized so that people with low pay-checks are allowed to download 5+ games a year. But in the case of a person who just bought the new Geforce, downloading a game whose programmers and publishers SURELY already received their dirty mazoola from video card manifacturers definitely isn't a crime... is it, engines-making underworld gomorra/mafia?
Both reasons should explain the market sales that sometimes are weak if there's more than 2 great games in a month. But the most important point is: is it a bad thing?
Of course it's not. Both reasons serve the same purpose as a speed-limit signal on a highway. They tell the driver to slow down. If the community is formed of small niches, and if some people rightfully download the new game(and i repeat, we must defend the rights of people who can't afford games but still wanna have fun), you're advised to bite the brakes, PIPE DOWN those costs, so that with lower production costs you may still get a high profits off your game and you don't have to make something for everyone, so that quality itself doesn't get choked to death.
That's why piracy is bad for them and good for us: because it sauvegardes quality by preventing bloated prices.
So fellow gamer of the nigh-apocalypse age, turn that mule frown downside up and get down to business!.
Over & out.
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"just like a nation that gives too much power to a capitalist aristocracy will sooner or later blow up in revolution and bloody beheading."
Right, let's go steal stuff because developers are a bloated capitalist aristocracy.
That doesn't seem biased to you? 100% of triple a developers are like that? Piracy is a reminder that not everyone is a rich PRICK? Yeah, man. You fight the good fight.
if
buyers 100
pirates 20
production costs 100
*zero profit*
solution:
buyers 100
pirates 20
production costs 60
*high profit*
while the first game had to be dumb so that everyone could play it, the game that's cheap can respect the niches, be interesting and experimental, and would stop the hardware race madness.
IF PC market can't sustain ALL tripleA productions it's not the market's fault, then, it's the games being too expensive.
Another point is that many of the people who pirate this stuff off don't do it for the political agenda, they just want the stuff for free. Not because 'it's not worth the price'.
If triple A productions are so watered down and bloated, why play them? There are more then 2 releases per month, but many indie games do not go through the major channels.
If you want a better industry, use the wallet to vote, buy indie games.
Pirating does nothing, NOTHING at all to change the industry.
Why do the people have the right to have something for free for starters?
People who want to play games can find enough cheap and free solutions. People don't have to rely on triple A games. Such games are in no way a necessity to live, or to be happy. The idea of 'can someone hungry steal a loaf of bread' is at least debatable, because food is a necessity. Games are not. So how does it become a right to get them for free, especially when there are already enough free and cheap solutions out there? (freeware, bargain bin, Wii ware).
Where does this right to get something for free come from?
I don't see you people complaining about those who download music and films... in the end they don't damage the industry exceedingly, the truth is piracy only limits exceeding wealth, puts a roof to production costs, makes us humbler.
A slice of free distribution needs to be accepted as a just inevitability.
And people can already get fun, for free. (freeware games)
Communism may be noble in theory, but humans have already proven that it doesn't work that way- we are greedy. Not just the cooperations, but when chance arises, also the poor people.
Piracy might not harm the big players exceedingly, but I wonder how it goes for small people. I know that one of the starters in the game industry in the Netherlands (got quite some international fame too) toppled over in the end; not because his products were too expansive, but it was the time of the cassettes, and everyone would copy the games from each other, so he sold nearly nothing (while his games were widely played)
I know piracy is not going to disappear, and most pirates are not 'evil'. But I do not think that free distribution would be the solution.
1: Most pirates are not people who have a lack of money.
2: Such a system is next to impossible to set up; how do you decide who has the 'right' for free games? How do you give it to them?
3: Which games would have to be given away for free?
Maybe another principle can work to make sure that people can play the games they like, and don't end up with a mis-buy. For example- what about games that you can play for free up to 1/3rd of the game (enough time to get into it and judge the game on its merits) and from there you reach a point where you can decide to buy it to continue?
Why?
Because if the company is in red, you can't blame pirates, even if it's easy and infact without the pirates you would be in green. you have to blame the exceeding costs you undertook to produce that item. did you loose 200.000$ and, look at that, piracy costed you exactly that sum? Don't blame piracy, those 200.000$ you have lost are in the unnecessary production costs as well
So piracy simply re-balances some producers' megalomania, use cheaper engines, quality will gain.
And I'm certainly not for the stupid copy protection measures these days (where you lease a game instead of really owning it), so I do agree with you on what the problems are.
If pirates really just only pirated games that they don't think as being so great anyways (as in, they would never have bought it), I would find it no problem actually. But for many people it's so natural that they even pirate games that they think of as great (and that *are* great). They don't stop to think that such actions harms the developer of that game.
So if go you like 'piracy is ok', at least urge people to buy if they come across a game that they think that is great- onlt *then* it would have the effect that you are hoping for, that the game business will increase in quality, and decrease in bloatedness.
Then again, a bit of free distribution brings us closer to communism, a world without money and greed.