It costs me time, but I try to avoid games which use invasive copy protection like SecuRom or others that have a bad reputation for calling home or causing problems with the PC. I have not played Spore. The SimCity series is among my favorites, and while The Sims is not, I always consider Will Wright's titles when they come out. I was actually very excited about The Spores when I heard about it. But then I heard about the 3 activations limitation and opted out. I didn't even get a hacked version. I despise DRM but I don't agree with piracy either.

On the other hand, I'm a fan of the technology mentioned in the article. Bit Torrent is a commonly known protocol now, but in the beginning it was exciting to see this idea take hold. We need to keep in mind that it is pirates who are misusing technology who are in the wrong, not the technology itself. Similar technologies that struggled through development were cassette and vhs, and even cd-rom to a lesser extent. It should be noted that even some of the 'online only' games offer end users the ability to share the load as it were by using bit torrent to download updates (WOW did this for a time, and may still do it, you'd have to ask someone who still plays.)

Bottom line, if we reform Itellectual Property laws and remove the stigma on piracy, then legitimate technology such as bit torrent, and entertaining games, like Spore, will be usable by all. Music, video, book and software publishers need to develop new strategies to adopt

This artical is too funny. I was pirating Playstation 1 games the most, first week I had my playstation it was mod chiped one month later I had over 100 copied games. But to be fair I also had over 100 real games by the time I sold everything minus the copied games. Get real consols get pirated way more then PC. I personaly thing I have downloaded 8-10 games in the past 5 years. 5 of them I did not like and deleted them, other 5 I went out and bought the real ones. I still used the pirated ones because of possible drms. God I hate that crap. Get with it consoles are pirated way more. I remember one console in paticular that got pirated into oblivion. Anyone remember Sega Saturn? You did not even need a mod chip to play burn games.

noname,

you managed to prove what an utterly and completely clueless moron you are by writing a single sentence: "Because open standards like OpenGL are 1)crap, 2) well outdated and 3) maintained by people who cannot agree on anything."

Actually I am still flattering you with my comment.

I think sporedom has hit the nail on the head, its a game that was great to start with, but as it went on it got crap.

Once you get into space travel, you get continuously pounded by enemies with 20+ ships, and you only have 1 ship.

The piss poor odds make the game unplayable.

The game was obviously not finished, and the spacey bit at the end just bodged on without thinking it through...

So yes, just crap really.

It's rubbish. Once you play through it once and realise how boring it is, you never want to play it again, unless you're the sort of person who enjoys designing buildings and costumes, which serve no purpose at all.

To anybody complaining...they sold 2 million and they aren't happy.

Not accounting for most e-tailers that sell the games 2/3 of the price, lets assume they all sold for $50.

Lets take a guess how that $100 million is divided.

- $10-15 million development costs
- $10-15 million advertising costs
- $10 million to retailers ($5 per unit)
- $5-10 million manufacturing costs (CD)
- $5-10 million packaging costs

$40 million left

- $30 million to publishers (profit)
- $10 million to studio (profit)

The studio has money to make maybe 2 games, hardly a good safety net. If others aren't received well, then they go down the drain before they've barely even started.

There's probably other costs associated taking another $5 million split between them both. For starter studios, publishers probably fund most the development, so they might make a couple million, no more. It would be 4/5 games time before they even have money in the bank to fund their own development costs, and only then (7 years maybe?) would they even begin to make $10 million a game.

Despite the popularity of gaming, it is hardly one of the safest businesses to be involved in.

who do you think has more power hardware companies or software programers.look in side those consoles and you wil see pc hardware parts. Ati's chip set is old hardware they don't much money on them!if those those chips cost more those console go up in price. That is why sony is having a hard time with that cell and console sales.It's also the reason sony can't drop their price on their consoles right now.

old hardware means it's cheap parts and can be used to make consoles. By the way amd is hurting real bad in sales. Their gpu's is whats saving them right now with ati cards. Pc gamers are the ones buying those ati cards by the way.

who buys the newest and more powerful hardware for games. who is the backbone of the pc industry pc gamers.

A quick and simple google serach will return you several hundred private Warcraft servers, many of them amazingly stable and with better ecconominc stability and player balence than the paid for realms.

Quite a few of them are now updated to Wrath of the Lich King and are generally only a few weeks behind when Blizz release new patches.

Single player games are failling because the majority of developers can't be arsed to write a decent length storyline, I am not going to pay £30 to £40 for a game that I will finish in a few days.

It is part of every first-term business administration lecture, that pricing is important.

All the companies complain about piracy but never ever even think about the possible effects, a more moderate pricing could have on em. Take spore as an example.

Is it better to sell 2m copies at 50 euros / bucks or to sell let's say 3m copies for 35. and for how much does DRM account? and what about completely new customers, if prices would hit 25? maybe 6m copies then. minus DRM.

market theory and marketing practice are none of their strenghts it seems...

I wasn't interested in spore anyway, but any game with DRM gets crossed off my wishlist.
However, the continued bleating of games developers and producers does get old when they can not see the wood for the trees.
I would almost certainly guarantee that they would sell more games and make a bigger profit if games were cheaper and appealed to the wallets of the masses.
Here in NZ new PC games cost about $100 for a high grade studio release, the problem for me is that is about 1/9th of my weekly income, I can't justify that on a game, so I wait for it on on the 2nd hand market at closer to $30, but sometimes that takes so long eventually I forget about it or something else comes along. I have a mate that used to buy games new (having spent about $1100 in 2007 on new PC games) but haven't realized the money wasted and seeing me getting bargains has decided to wait and buy 2nd hand instead.
Now surely it would make more sense, especially in NZ where wages are not very big, to have much lower prices for games, at $50NZ for COD5 I would buy it brand new, but I ain't paying $100NZ. I would have thought that its better to sell 10,000,000 copies at half the price than 2,000,000 copies at full price, you greatly increase your affordability and appeal, pirating, whilst not eradicated, will be lower as some people will pirate regardless of cost. But then you can do away with DRM and save on development costs for a solution that never seems to work, just get on with writing a good game and selling for a realistic price.

Seems simple to me.

thank you for being a reader of Torrentfreak. We aim to carry only new, previously uncovered stories. I have to question why you've termed us a 'bog'.

Yours
Ben Jones
CTO, TorrentFreak.com

Even if EA and other big companies dropped all PC games some startup company would step in. STALKER was good and not from these mega companies. Fallout 3 is the bomb, a must have PC title. EA can kiss my arse, I don't buy anything with EA on it even for my console.

1)Sell the game at a sensible price
2)Promote good online features that require a legitimate copy of the game that adds value to actually purchase
3)Don't burden players with invasive DRM it pisses them off and makes them want to crack it anyway
4)Make a game people want

The games industry is going through the same transition as the music industry. Consumers are fed up with being ripped off with high price low quality products.

You want to make money? simple: make a quality product people want.

@mogwai "The number of good solid GPL single player games has risen to the point to where Windows is no longer THE Gaming Platform"

ROFL. You are joking right? Windows has always been THE gaming platform, and most likely always will be. You know why? Because open standards like OpenGL are 1)crap, 2) well outdated and 3) maintained by people who cannot agree on anything. Where are all these l33t games for Linux, and don't dare say Doom3. Does Prince of Persia work on linux? How's about GTA4? Any of the NFS series? How about the C.McCae series? Linux is good for crappy 80's style arcade ports, chess and text based rpg's. Why would any commercial organization bother developing titles for the extremely anal 1-3% of the population who still think socailism is cool?

The actual problem with PC gaming is not piracy, it's a genuine lack of good games with variation.
Stuart Campbell raised a valid argument that game piracy is not killing the PC games industry in Total PCGaming 09: It's people releasing generic games that tend to conform to the same genres with nothing special to them and a load of fads.
Myself, I've gone off buying games for the PC this year (usually I used to buy ten to twenty a year, this year only five) because I am not in the mood for dealing with befuddled, generic games with Draconian DRM. I lost my copy of Bioshock, can't play it anymore due to losing the CD key.
To be honest, putting in the CD key with Bioshock was the only advancement from System Shock 2, the rest was unadulterated regression.

Single-buttock cut and waste of a BBC news article.. "if it's BBC News, it must be Emma Hughes".

Amazing that they pay you for that, makes even Nick Farrell look hard-working. At least he takes the trouble to make it blokishly unreadable, denuded of all information, and packed with basic grammar and spelling howlers- thus covering it up a bit. Do keep up at the back.

I would have purchased Spore until I found out about the ludicrous DRM policy and like many others refused to shell out 50 bucks for temporary entertainment. OTOH, I have no problem being given a specific registration code that allows me rights to run the software at any time on any computer of mine. I wouldn't even care if they checked some online DB with registration codes as long as they don't require their server to be active to install the product. It's interesting that extreme DRM measures seem to have the opposite effect of encouraging people to bypass them.

to begin with, the game is so boring! most people who pirate a game want to see what the hype is about. Once they see that its worth it, they will eventually buy it for other reasons. Especially once it goes down in price like in the second hand market. Every review said it started really good and got boring to the end. And in multi-player mode there is not much offered. As far as those people who say that valve is a better alternative are ediots who never use it. I used to have a 16/2 fios line and when it was time to download you would think it was fast. The max was always 200-300 /k thats not even close to any decent download speeed. Then the other problems with steam is the second hand market, constant internet conection, it can be cracked just as easy. Do you remember when hl2 came out with the offline steam mode? And to make things worse once it is steam is cracked it gives people access to a shid load of games. Putting a bunch of developers who would never be victims of piracy just because the game steam is already cracked. So please people dont comment on stuff you dont know about, besides steam is just as bad as punkbuster. Some people just take gaming to far. Get a life! or a demonoid account. Besides when you make good games, like ID you dont have to worry about it.

The end of "Commercial" single player pc games isn't a bad thing. Any gamer who runs Linux can attest to this. The number of good solid GPL single player games has risen to the point to where Windows is no longer THE Gaming Platform. The end of commercial single player games is a good thing for Linux.

Just need to do something about those subscription games.

Piracy, unfortunate because there are so many cool games many of which I purchase and play. Would all the folks pirating these games purchase them, probably not so piracy numbers are hugely inflated.
Publishers your DRM consumer hostile crap only promotes down loads of hassle free cracks to run your games purchased by legitimate customers.
It's real simple, I bought it, it's mine and I will load it on and play it on any computer I choose.

Perhaps EA could have looked into other, better ways to manage their intellectual property. My first thought is partnering with Valve and distributing their game via Steam. Instead of locking out the game with DRM, it could be locked into a Steam UserID instead. At least Valve's method lets you install on as many computers as you want at any given time yet provides a user-friendly (and hardly upsetting) experience to launch the game.

Of course Steam automates patching & updates as well instead of giving a user an ingame message that tells them to quit the game to apply the update; games are patched *prior* to launch. Much better experience there too.

My 2¢

You know, I don't mind activation so much... developers cost money and should get paid for their work (I know, Blasphemy!). My problem is give me a way to unregister a piece of software when it's uninstalled. You buy something for use with a work laptop, and you work for a company that just replaces the entire laptop for minor problems, you could easily install two or three times in a year. If you multiboot or have multiple computers installs become even more frequent. I'll pay the small penalty in time to uninstall... just give me credit for it. Don't make me spend hours on the phone begging to use legally purchased software in a legal manner. Gives me sympathy for the pirates it does...

if a game has drm then i become intrigued - it must be something special!

but i refuse to install drm infected software (rootkits!) so my only alternative is reluctant piracy!

come on manufacturers - stop victimising the buying punters and sell the goods at a reasonable price!

It's a little stunt that will back fire right on micro soft lap. Software is big buiness on the pc. You gaint companies that will way in you watch.

there are programs that are worth $10 000 to $1000 even more on the pc.

By the way I forgot to talk about one more thing even if all game devs was to make console only games. Consoles would be pirated more. Then there is also the fact that pc gamers could still play all console games using emulators.
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/989729/how_to_play_ps2_games_on_pc/

there is elmutrs for every type of console out there, even the ps3.

I think the mediea should do their home work beofore they talk about garbage.

take a good look at the history of pircay you have internet!!! use it

If this game had a paid download for, like, $5, I bet a good fraction of these numbers would turn into a good amount of money.

$5 sounds fair since it's not a thing that you can buy, it's just a intelectual property that you will license but you can't even do a backup copy of it.

But no, they are ever stuck to this ancient business model and never learn. They deserve their piracy problem.

Companies like micro soft and sony want pc gaming dead.

The game devs who are saying that pc gaming is dying are all mirco softs little girls. Like epic games!

gears of war on the pc is garbage pc gaming has better games than gears of war.

Here are some links about micro soft you should look at.

http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/39622/Microsoft-Explain-PC-Game-Release-Delays

http://blog.cameronharris.org/2008/11/microsoft-are-killing-pc-gaming.html

I the people should look up the history on pircay and you will see that it's effects all gaming machines. Console pircay is in the billions.

By the way micro soft and sony have lost billions of dallors on consoles.

sony console is so bad that meny people are callit a marketing failure.

E3 was dead because of pc gaming.

One can ax oneself how many of these downlods were done by people who had bought the game. I own many games, and for virtually all of them I possess the NoCD crack because I really can't be botheres finding the CD every time I want to play them.

Technically I am pirating these games.

The DRM did not prevent the haxors from using less than 24 hours breaking it.

So, the DRM annoys the people who shell out bucks for the game whilst the pirated version is not annoying and provides "better value". Heh.

The industries attitude seems flawed beyond comprehension.

I can just imagine the board room meeting.

"We're not annoying our customers enough, how about we give them 3 lifetime installations and then they have to buy the game again."

"Hey, that's a great idea."

And again, 2 million sales is considered "not enough". 2 million sales, each $50 say, that's $100 million. A conservatie estimate, many of these sales were in the EU where the game cost €50, or €55 more likely. Which is more like $70.

Add in a few million console sales and they made a few hundred million on a game that cost somewhere around $50 million or so to produce(a guesstimate).

Modern day profit margins.

If you don't cash %1000 return of investment you're a loser.

Keeping the shareholders happy has come to be some sort of holy grail that is destroying the entertainment industry. Good product has come to be irrelevant.

The shareholders ought to be happy they're making profits at all. They're not actually producing anything. They sit on their fat asses and pollute the world is all they do. If it was up to me they'd taken to the town square and shot the lot of them.

Off with their heads. The scum of the earth.

One thing that people do not look at is the bad copies that are likely getting most of the downloads. Fake copies and virus riddled messes are likely all over the place. That and how many of these are just downloads started, but never finished (happens a lot) and how many are just people that have legal copies, but want to get around the DRM. I happen to own the game and my daughter (without knowing about the DRM) installed it on her computer too. I want to get a new hard drive and re-install Windows (still sitting on a 250GB), but that would be my last install. I also want it on my laptop, but I can't now. This DRM sucks and has created the need for pirated versions.

Bottom line I have a feeling that the number of actually true pirated copies are likely more like 1/10th those numbers... still quite a lot, but nothing like what they say. At 1.5M I would know several computer geeks that have downloaded it, but I only know 3 with legal copies. With the numbers they quote I should know at least 2 other people with illegal copies.

Wow this just another attack on pc gaming lets get some facts on the table.

http://www.gamedaily.com/games/gears-of-war-2/xbox-360/game-news/gears-of-war-2-pirated/6940/21592/

there is just as pircay on consoles.In fact it's in the billlions. Another thing it's imposable to even track pircay.

It's so bad on the psp that sony had to make another psp.

If you killed pc gaming all the pirates would go hack consoles!!!!

maybe some of you media people should some reaserch and speak the full truth

lastly there is more pc games being than consoles

http://adrianwerner.wordpress.com/games-of-2009/

pc gaming creates jobs consoles gaming destorys companies!!!

I was looking forward to Spore, but the DRM put me off buying it. Just as well, as the less than flattering reviews made it sound like than stunning- so I couldn't be bothered to pirate it either.

Much happier with Fallout 3 PC which didn't require any sort of Interwebs Activatorisation(tm) just to play the single player..