Adam Thierer

Is Piracy Killing PC Gaming?

Sean Sands makes the argument that it is in a very powerfully worded editorial today over at The Escapist entitled “Sink the Pirates“:

PC developers are being forced to make more dramatic decisions in the face of overwhelming piracy, an issue that Cevat Yerli, CEO of Crysis developer Crytek, recently enumerated at one legitimate copy to every twenty pirated. [...] Yes, I think Cevat is inflating his 20 to 1 statistic, but he’s probably not nearly as far off as you or I might think. Looking at arguably one of the largest P2P torrent sharing sites on the web (no, I’m not going to link to it), and the number of Games torrents currently available, the evidence is absolutely damning. Despite PCs’ relative weakness in the marketplace, clearly in the backseat by orders of magnitude in relation to the next gen and handheld systems, it represents 50% of all torrents. Let me stress that - the number of illegal PC downloads are, at any given moment, equal to or greater than the illegal downloads for every other system combined. [...] Here’s the bottom line: Yes, piracy is destroying PC gaming. That is an immutable truth, evidenced by the exodus of PC developers defecting en masse to make games for consoles. End of story.

I’m not prepared to offer an opinion one way or the other, but I have noticed the slowdown in the PC gaming market recently and wondered about why many developers were moving over the more secure gaming consoles. That doesn’t necessarily prove that piracy was the primary factor, but it certainly could be part of the explanation.

What do you think?

July 14, 2008 | Comments |

Viewing 8 Comments

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    I'd need a lot more proof to believe that PC gaming is in trouble than just the overinflated estimates of someone with an interest in complaining about piracy and the number of downloads of PC games compared to the number of downloads for console games.

    Obviously the number of torrents for PC games is much higher than that for consoles; it takes a lot more effort to download a console game and put it onto a playable disc in a format readable by the console than it does to just download a game playable on the system you're already using anyway. I'm pretty heavily involved in the gaming scene, and I've only heard rumors of people being able to share Xbox 360 and PS3 games via computer and then somehow transfer those files to a disc in a way that the console can understand. In reality, most of the filesharing for console games going on is for previous generation systems like the Dreamcast and PS1-2 that didn't include the elaborate protections and disc types that the newest systems use. As you can imagine, the demand for those games, even when free online, is not very high.

    This is all a long-winded way of saying that if the number of PC games being shared on torrents is only equal to the number of all console games being shared, then the problem can't be very big, because there just isn't that much sharing of console games going on. I'd look to other reasons for the rise of console gaming instead.

    And anyway, if people are getting their fill of PC games for free via torrents, then how can there be so much demand for console games? Shouldn't some of that demand be lessened by the lure of free games on PC, and shouldn't people be less enthusiastic about buying expensive consoles and relatively expensive (relative to free) console games? Seems so to me, and yet game developers and game buyers are both extremely enthusiastic about consoles.

    By the way, the newest game in a famous franchise (Street Fighter) will be released to PC for the first time simultaneously with the console releases.
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    Looking at arguably one of the largest P2P torrent sharing sites on the web (no, I’m not going to link to it)


    My apologies, Adam, I could not possibly resist:

    http://thepiratebay.org/
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    Wait a second... why should we give the gaming industry a free pass on data abuse when we slam their competitors in the music and movie industries for the same thing?

    So, in the interest of fairness, I'd like to point out, that the number of pirated copies is STILL not a proxy for lost sales.

    http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080320-p...
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    Adam,

    You may be interested in my reply, siding with Cord.

    http://www.openmarket.org/2008/07/15/is-pc-gami...
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    Alex... I do not believe I "claim[ed] that PC games are on the way out, killed by the threat of easy piracy."

    In fact, I pretty clearly stated that "I’m not prepared to offer an opinion one way or the other," and that, if there has been a slowdown in PC gaming RELATIVE TO CONSOLE GROWTH, "That doesn't necessarily prove that piracy was the primary factor, but it certainly could be part of the explanation."
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    Fair enough. I should have simply said that you raised the question why PC game sales appear to be lagging behind console game sales - and that one possible explanation was piracy.
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    Regardless of the stance taken on the issue, the article in question doesn't really have an argument beyond "don't listen to people that disagree with this article," adding "they aren't important, except when they are important since they are killing PC gaming."
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    Surely the number of pirated games is quite high but what about those games on consoles no matter what type of console, the torrents to those games are there, & available to download. May I also remind you that downloading the game for a console is better than that for a pc as all you need to do is burn the game to a DVD & play it ( assuming the console is modded). For a PC you have to cross your fingers that the game actually works on your pc.
    So I actually can't understand why all this fuss for PC games being pirated when there are console games out there which are still & will also remain being pirated!
 

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