Fear and Loathing in the Gaming Industry?
Are game developers avoiding the PC platform to avoid losing money to piracy?
No, says Christopher Sundberg, co-founder of Sweden based Avalanche Studios and creator of “Just Cause” and the newly released “Just Cause 2″.
However, the latter, unlike the former, will not be released for the PC.
Sundberg released a statement last week saying: “We always recommend the publisher to avoid a PC SKU as PC gamers are PC gamers and console gamers are console gamers.”
Contrary to this statement, as previously stated, the first “Just Cause” was indeed released for the PC platform. As was a previous game released by the studio, “Hunter”, which was exclusively for the PC.
Confusion prevails here at FreakBits, as we were under the impression that gamers are gamers no matter what they use to game.
The problem here is that such a question would even have to be presented in this day and age. Christopher may indeed be telling the truth, but how long before some other less-than-scrupulous game developer forsakes the Windows platform in order to cut out the issue of piracy altogether?
It could be next week… or tomorrow. Stay tuned, as the good people here at Freakbits will not rest until this happens somewhere and we are the first to report on it. That is, if it hasn’t already.
Thanks go out to Jim at Destructoid and Greg at The Escapist for raising my paranoia on this subject to all-time high levels.
Games like Empire: Total War are PC only. But they require Steam to play them. Which is why you can’t pirate E:TW. I think if many game developers chose this approach, there would be more games for the PC?
Steam games are easy to pirate, Empire was no exception.
JC2 is steam only & i pirated it, SR2 is steam only & i pirated it, GTA4 needs steam & i pirated it, metro 2033 needs steam & again, i pirated it.
Hell even MW2 needed steam for PC, i also pirated it.
Steam’s a digital distribution service, not a DRM method.
Guys like you are the problem, pay for your games if you enjoy them, don’t be a douche.
Stream games can just as easy be cracked as any other ways games get released, only games with no single player elements can say them selfs free of being cracked, and even does can be supported with home made servers and software
Maybe I read this article REALLY badly, but did you say that Just Cause 2 was not on PC? Because I just finished playing it, on my damned PC.
And are you not aware that companies just giving up on developing for the PC these days is actually really common. And most of the ones that do release PC versions are just shoddy ports (*cough* modern warfare 2). Outside of Valve, Blizzard, Bioware and to some extent, DICE, the PC platform has been pretty much left for dead (no pun intended) by the majority of the major developers. MMOs and RTS games are still dominated by the PC for obvious reasons, but shooters and RPGs have been dropping, delaying or badly porting their PC versions for years.
For someone who sounds so passionate about the issue, it sounds like your knowledge of the pc gaming industry is zilch. Unless I’ve read this all wrong, in case I’m sorry. But if I’m right, i suggest you do some serious boning up on arstechnica or bigdownload or one of the other PC focused game industry websites.
Also, many hardcore PC gamers do consider there to be a difference; albeit its purely elitist rejection of the mainstream adoption of consoles, but there’s a difference dammit XD. We like our lack of auto-aim, our directx11, our dedicated servers and our harder games.
I suppose, in a way, I’m lucky. Aside from Minecraft and possibly the occasional re-play of old SNES and N64 platformers, my interest in gaming pretty much died out as the golden age of platformers, adventure games, and puzzlers did.
These days, aside from reading, I get pretty much all my entertainment from programming or geeking around in other ways.
On the plus side, I’m more productive than ever and I don’t need to dual-boot to comfortably run Linux.
Interesting article however I am confused by the claim that Just Cause 2 is not being released on PC:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Cause_2
http://www.amazon.com/Just-Cause-2-Pc/dp/B0013RC1W4
http://pre.scenedb.org/index.php?preq=just.cause.2
It definitely is :/
You really need to double check you sources if this is the kind of information they are giving you, because it is quite patently wrong. It is available on the PC, as my mate just bought it for both PC & PS3. Now there is a story behind this, which I think relates to your somewhat misguided, article.
Just Cause 2 is not available on XP. It requires Vista or 7. This is what the furore is about surrounding this game. Over 40% of Windows users are still on XP, so it’s a big gamble that the users are prepared to upgrade to 7. Not much of a gamble if you consider that you need pretty top-end hardware to play it anyway, why wouldn’;t you be running 7? Dual-boot if you really want to keep XP, or put XP inside a VBox or summat.
Oops, I’m not Tiny, I’m Tony.
My sources are listed in the article, which contain the full quote from the developer.
“Jim at Destructoid and Greg at The Escapist ”
Both articles have now been edited to look like they never mentioned that just cause 2 would not be released for PC.
Bastards.
PC Gaming is dieing (yes PC gamers I know about the 25 million users on steam)
The big reason is consoles, consoles are owned by everyone and have far more exclusives than PC, and with a console kiddos don’t have to know the difference between parts, it’s the low intellect and willingness to learn that killed PC gaming, not piracy.
@ Dale,
E:TW can be pirated, i in fact have a pirated copy, works 100%.
Check your facts before stating them.
Its not like the consoles are safe from piracy. Consoles are way easier to pirate games on anyways. All you have to do is rip an ISO and it can be pirated without any CDkey and work online perfectly.
So id say consoles are even more pron to piracy the PC.
No worries xxoozero, not you fault that they lied to you.
Bastards indeed. :)
the problem with declining pc releases is not piracy. its the ease of development on consoles. standardisation: release a game for xbox360 and you know it will perform the same everywhere, less headaches after, less patches, less need for after sales service. now release the same on pc and you have to deal with misbehaving drivers on hundreds of GPU’s etc.
what is so surprising is that the actual games have become ‘stale’. there’s a huge number of FPS releases on consoles which more or less are the same thing reiterated with different weapons and story lines but no substantial improvement. GPU’s have increased in speed 4-5 times since the initial release of the PS3/360 but the games are still performing fine on the pc hardware that was available back then. the game studios should have been pushing the boundaries, making games for today’s pcs and then less demanding editions for consoles. instead they do the opposite.
I completely agree, i.e. Crysis 2 looks more like gears of war than crysis 1. The PC platform allows virtually limitless ability to do what you want in a game, whereas if you do console focused your going to have a watered down idea of what you wanted alot of the time. Reminds me of Hideo Kojima saying he was dissapointed with MGS4 because the ps3 couldn’t do as much as they thought it could. Would’ve made a great pc game that realized the full vision.
The explanation is very simple. The Just Cause developers are a) lazy and b) not very good, as the bugginess of their first title demonstrated.
As already mentioned, PC games require more care and effort due to the wide range of possible hardware. So for lazy incompetent devs it’s of course the best choice to avoid it.
The explanation is very simple
P I R A C Y
is killing home gaming on PC
Just like home taping is killing TV
Just like Video is killing the radio
Just like home cooking is killing the Restaurant Industry
Go Troll somewhere else
Go f*ck yourself with ya downloaded Porno
Freedom of speech LOL
Strange review for an unobtainable game
http://uk.gamespot.com/pc/action/justcause2/review.html
Wasn’t Johnny Depp in Fear and Loathing in the Gaming Industry
Oh wait…
Go f*ck yourself with ya downloaded Porno
Just FYI every game on PC Platform can be pirated. and again EVERY console game can be pirated. even xbox live is being pirated atm. so the platform is not the problem. the need for user content is not being taken seriously, so there is always gonna be a cracked version of the n game. Sharing is Caring.
Peace.
There are some little things that was left out..The company that designed the game just cause 2 didnt release or work on the pc version…that was all done by the publisher square enix…Square Enix made the choice to release the pc version..if had be left up to the creators of just cause 2 there wouldnt have been pc version
to be honest i have to go with Gabe from valve and say that “many pirates are under served customers.” while im willing to buy a game like dragon age that is well supported and obviously been crafted with a lot of care and consideration of its platforms. I am unwilling to buy a game such as cod4mw2 (lackluster and the lack of dedicated servers makes playing on my nz internet insufferable). im pretty sure that if developers paid more attention to what customers wanted, they would cut down on piracy substantially.
@ Guy scum: I stopped buying pc-games (I don’t have a consol), because all the protection (e.g I need to download a no-cd crack) and the need to patch the games. There are games (like Dragon Age) that I still buy afterwards, but I always play the pirated version.
And my friends that have consols (PS3 an WII)also use pirated games, so I don’t understand this discussion. ??? All games can be cracked!
You BUY games and still play the PIRATED versions?
Weird, man…
Thanks to the DRM protection on GTA IV, I recently had to re-install the game and all related updates around five times to get mine to work.
In the end, after suffering accusations from the software of using “modified files” and waiting weeks for some kind of help from Rockstar Games Support, I gave up on waiting for them.
Instead I ended up having to get a new hard drive and just install w7 ult and GTA IV, nothing more.
So somewhere along the line it seemd that something wouldn’t work. SecuROM (potential), Steam (doubtful), Civ4 (doubtful), or MS C++ 2008 Redistributable (likely).
Anyway, who cares, I got it working in the end. No thanks to R*, but thanks to my good friend who helped out by creating a sure-fire set of known working disc images from his own discs (to ensure my discs weren’t messing up the install).
Officially you should do the above, but it worked and my copy is completely legit (which you expect when you pay for something).
All that and not one spelling mistake until right at the end. *rolleyes*
Fixed:
Officially you should *not* do the above, but it worked and my copy is completely legit (which you expect when you pay for something).
Sure you can pirate E:TW. i have a perfectly working pirate copy of that myself on my laptop along with the legal version on my main PC.
its really not that hard to pirate steam games.
PulsedMedia provides good servers…and a cheap one for only 13 USD a month (115GB, 256 MB, 100mbit)
link…
http://pulsedmedia.com/clients/affiliates.php
any game can be pirated no matter what platform
the thing now is the devs donn play their games tats y they donno wat pure gaming is bout like i can never have proper fun playing a fps on a console cause their targeting system is based on approximation…if its near the head its a head shot..tats jst crap u know…they donn know the fun tat is pc gaming
its either tat or xbox/ps3 r paying them to not release games on pc so that their consels get the promotion tat they dont deserve
Korupt
Is English not your first language?
I am unable to understand what the hell you are attempting to say
@Guy Sum, Korupt said:
“Any game can be pirated, regardless of platform. The developers dont play their games anymore, and have lost appreciation for the art of a proper headshot. Or, it may be a massive conspiracy.”
i thnk tat he donn jes like tat talk, coz the blah blah inna tat ding ding babba boom tat governmental agency.
love,
Trifecta
ah I see?
Lov n peice nall tat innit gov ya kin
WTF
PC game sales are laughable when a title launches on multiple platforms. Fact of the matter is that it’s money efficient to write games for one or two hardware sets. PCs can have widely differing hardware and for these up and coming studios that are just getting off the ground, there are so many these days, they don’t make a giant % of their money from PC sales, and sometimes the numbers are so low that it’s a waste of money and time to even try to launch it on PC also. You can play a brand new XB360 title on a 5 year old XB360 and it looks the same as on a new XB360. You can’t play these newer PC games on a 5 year old PC cause of all the higher requirements. Gamers don’t wanna play the newest games on lowest resolution and all the added beautiful graphics dumbed down.
Consoles do one thing and do it fairly well and it’s a one time investment, since you don’t need to upgrade it to play newer games. And many home computer owners are scared to upgrade themselves or don’t want to pay $40 for some idiot “tech” at Bestbuy to “install” a new video card. That’s on top of the $100 low end video cards. I wouldn’t blame game designers, I’d blame computer component companies for lynching our dough for subpar equipment. There are so many numbers and letters in any video card that you cannot tell which one is better from the next without research. Streamline it, make it simple to understand. Teach people how to take 3 screws out and install their own upgrades and I think PC games might have a better time…but only slightly, since all that requires effort.
Thanks for reading