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Thursday, July 27 2006

A response to Ritual on PC Piracy  by James B at 17:43

PC
Yesterday we posted a link to an interview with Ritual's Mike Russell, where he discussed piracy and how it was killing the industry. Ever the one for an argument, Something Awful have posted a front-page counter-argument to the claims that piracy damages the industry.

If you read yesterday's interview, I highly reccomend reading through this, if nothing else for the entertainment value.

While I really like Shacknews and have absolutely nothing against them, I have to say I didn't like this interview. Remo lobs softball questions at Russell and doesn't challenge anything he says. When you state that you've seen people lose their homes because of software piracy you really need to bring some numbers to the table. I'm not saying it never happened. But I would have asked him some follow up questions.

Who lost their homes? Which studios were shut down? Were they shut down because of piracy, or because they made terrible games? Remo asks none of these questions.
Comments
malis
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27 July 2006 17:45
Trademark SA acid wit, though he does raise some interesting counter-points.
hobgoblin
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27 July 2006 18:23
lol that guy is quite funny and as malis says he does raise some valid points
Landen
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27 July 2006 18:29
Yeh, tbh I can see Piracy having a negative effect on the profit margins of games developers/publishers so theyre bound to say its a terrible thing for the gaming industry. However I think the lack of original, good, well designed and developed games at the moment is having MUCH more of a negative effect.
Landen
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27 July 2006 18:33
... I refuse to pay £30-£40 for buggy, poorly optimised games that only give me around 10hours worth of gameplay and I wont use again after that. Gaming industry needs to take a good long look at itself before it starts blaming users.
Stan
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27 July 2006 18:51
agreed
Stan
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27 July 2006 18:52
pretty much same state of affairs as the film and music industry is also in.
Produce shite and sooner or later people will stop shovelling it.
Mani
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27 July 2006 19:46
Piracy and over compexity drive all the good dvelopers to the consoles as that's where the money is. Hopefully vista and more games that require an account to play on-line will slow the piracy down and reduce complexity enough to keep the better developers interested.

Let's face it the PC is the mother of all games technology, a test bed where companies learn to use new technology, without the PC as a strong paltform, all gaming suffers.
Spitfire
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28 July 2006 10:18
I have sympathy for the small developers for it is they as we all know who produce the most interesting & creative titles. If piracy drives them out of business all we have left are the EA style sh1t peddlers. I can deal with bugs as they are inevitable in game production as long as they are patched .It would piss me off if some Muppet requested support on my title when they blatantly pirated the software. Suffice to say I would ensure their stupidity would be rewarded. If I where running a small game developer right now my priority would be to address the console market where I could ensure a decent ROI. The PC titles would be focused upon online play so as to reduce the attraction to pirates.


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