On March 19 2013 05:35 Taekwon wrote: That's the spirit! Now start doing better practices - like maybe no DRM?
Hmmmmmm?
Always on is not the same as DRM, and as long as people pirate video games, publishers will try to stop them.
I don't recall saying it was.
And I don't think that will or should be the case. This isn't directed at you because I don't think anyone supports DRM but I do disagree with the idea that publishers will continue this practice. Anyone who bought a piece of property should be entitled to play it at any time, anywhere. Piracy is a widespread issue that will never, ever be stop or be stopped - it's an issue that along with security, needs to be dealt on the company's end without affecting the average consumer. It's fascinating how forgetful some gaming companies are becoming of grade school level public-business relations.
When you're buying a game, you're not buying a piece of property (other than the actual DVD and the packaging). And I think SC2 and Diablo 3 have shown that always-on can be a great anti-piracy measure, even if you have to live with reddit shitstorms.
You earnestly think that purchasing a product doesn't entitle you to playing it whenever or wherever you want it? Wings and D3 are laughable in comparison to their predecessors - their perception far precedes just reddit.
If I buy a gameboy and pokemon red for 50 dollars, there should NOT be a stupid message popping up on the gameboy screen to say "Uh...you can't play", even if I'm on the fricking moon.
So what is your solution then? Games actually need to sell a LOT to earn back their investment. Game prices have been the same or even getting lower in the past 20 years, yet development costs have gone up by at least 10 times. With the rampant piracy and devaluation of games because of bundles and mobile/tablet platforms publishers and developers feel forced to do everything within their power to protect their games.
I agree, DRM does more harm than good, but the gamedev industry is a very tough and unstable industry. The animosity that game developers and publishers receive compared to how much effort they put in their games is mind boggling. It is like people have no clue how hard game developers work. It is quite incomparable to any other IT job I know, the crunches are brutal and you often have to relocate quite a bit and there are frequent lay offs after a game ships. How much cheers and praise piracy gets for essentially taking bread out of hard working peoples mouths is even more depressing.
If you only care about the bottom-line (Money), why would you get into the game industry? When you could save all that trouble and start a real estate agency or accounting company instead, and not have to struggle with small profit margins in an unstable industry. Its just insanity.
That's the problem with big game companies, they are unstable simply because they only care about the bottom-line. They only care about getting bigger and bigger, and then requiring more and more money to fill the needs of its ever increasing (and already absurd) size. This ends up becoming a huge bubble that the companies have to go into crisis mode when revenue stops increasing (which has to happen eventually).
Keep in mind that these kinds of greedy for-profit businesses work on the basis that they want more profit every year, to pay their shareholders/executives, that means less money proportionally goes into development each year as well. The problem is not piracy at all. In this industry companies are eventually going to hit a brick wall and stop making more money, and when that happens these companies that absurdly rely on positive forecasts every year are going to go into crisis mode. That's where the problem lies.
Note that Valve isn't having anything like the kind of problems that other big gaming companies have, its not to do with the business model, its that they basically don't have sponsors and shareholders to worry about, and act like a not-for-profit business. I'm pretty sure most if not all of the proceeds are directly invested straight back into Valve.
Even if piracy was as prevalent 20 years ago, game companies wouldn't need DRM because they didn't need to sell a million copies of a game just to break even, and didn't work on the same profit margins and greedy business models.
The fact that flat-lined revenue is a crisis for big game companies is their own damn fault, a game is a luxury not a necessity, we can't expect money to increasingly pour into game companies forever in an ever increasingly competitive market. If not for piracy, something else would have happened and these companies would have the same problem. A lot more revenue was generated from people playing cod, than first generation consoles, companies are making more money than ever before and are still complaining.
Its just dumb business logic to expect to run a business based on profit in the game industry, when there are much more viable markets to be conducting business in that way.
So that is your solution, stop making games because it does not make sense to make games? I agree with you though, it is simply dumb to start a game development company these days. It requires a ton of skill, dedication, risk, investment and time and a company gets little in return. I have worked in many different IT sectors and game development is by far the least rewarding in terms of revenue, but for me it is the most rewarding considering how fun it is to actually make games.
Sure, there are a hand full of companies that do manage to stay on top for a while. Someone mentioned Valve and Valve just has everything going for them, even though it is just a matter of time they make one product that is not perfect and get shit on. Look at Blizzard, one game, D3 does not live up to expectations and they take a massive hit in reputation that will have a major influence on future sales, even though they have been producing top quality games for decades.
It is like digging for gold or oil, there are a couple of success stories and a whole lot of failures. Also, the person who thinks the game development industry is run by greed is flat out wrong. Companies just want to stay in business so they can keep making games and one failure means bankruptcy and that can lead to very protective/safe game development with little innovation.
You're exaggerating the issues by a massive degree.
One failure only means bankruptcy when millions of dollars are spent on it. And for that matter, it has to be an absolutely spectacular failure to destroy a massive company.
Take a look at Gearbox. Duke Nukem Forever, complete flop...but it certainly didn't kill any hype for Borderlands 2. Aliens: Colonial Marines, a completely trash game that got brutalized by players and reviewers...no bankruptcy.
The only time a single game is going to destroy an entire company is when they overspend, devote almost everything they have into it, and fail to turn profit. Anything short of that means the CEO actually managed his resources properly.
Just to be clear, game developers don't want to integrate DRM solutions in their games, it is a major hassle. Does anyone think that DRM would be in if there would not be piracy? But if you build 10000 cars and put them in a holding area and 9000 get stolen, then at some point you are going to put a lock or a fence somewhere.
Car analogies are always so stupid...
If you build 10000 cars, find 20000 exact duplicates on the road the next day, but still sell 98% of your cars, would you keep every employee you have under complete security lockdown for the entirety of their employment? And when all of your employees quit, do you act as though it was the copycats that drove away your work force?
DRM is never about recovering losses. It's about pretending that potential sales are recoverable lost sales, and sacrificing reputation, customer rapport and real money and resources into the hopes that you gain enough of those potential sales to offset the differences.
No, I am not exaggerating at all. You thinking I am exaggerating shows that you don't know how bad it really is. Maybe there are a couple of companies from the 90's that still had some money. Back then 1 success could cover about 4 failures. But the newer game development studios really can't survive a single failure. Hell, the money even isn't at the game development studios anymore, it is at the publishers. Game development studios get "hired" to build a game by a publisher, if it fails the game development studio is done. The money a game development studio gets for making a game covers only that game, nothing more.
Like I said, DRM is stupid, but people spend more time blaming DRM than they spend actively speaking out against piracy, and that is what annoys me. DRM is there because if you don't you will get a 90%+ piracy rate, and again that is no exaggeration. I am not saying this means a company misses out on 90% of its sales, but it does make a big difference.
If that was the case then why did Valve experience a record 50% growth (2012) in a supposed bad period of the games industry. Not to mention that TF2 and Dota2 are free games, even on release TF2 was a fraction of the price of other retail games without micro-transactions.
Valve is growing faster now than EA did when EA didn't even have to compete with pirates.
It makes no sense for EA to be worried about losing money to piracy when overall revenue in the market is increasing.
If a games company is going to go bankrupt over one failed game (not to mention EA has several franchises to buffer its losses) then it is its own damn fault. DRM is just a stupid excuse for the fact that they waste so much money and blame it on piracy.
On March 19 2013 06:09 blackone wrote: [quote] Always on is not the same as DRM, and as long as people pirate video games, publishers will try to stop them.
I don't recall saying it was.
And I don't think that will or should be the case. This isn't directed at you because I don't think anyone supports DRM but I do disagree with the idea that publishers will continue this practice. Anyone who bought a piece of property should be entitled to play it at any time, anywhere. Piracy is a widespread issue that will never, ever be stop or be stopped - it's an issue that along with security, needs to be dealt on the company's end without affecting the average consumer. It's fascinating how forgetful some gaming companies are becoming of grade school level public-business relations.
When you're buying a game, you're not buying a piece of property (other than the actual DVD and the packaging). And I think SC2 and Diablo 3 have shown that always-on can be a great anti-piracy measure, even if you have to live with reddit shitstorms.
You earnestly think that purchasing a product doesn't entitle you to playing it whenever or wherever you want it? Wings and D3 are laughable in comparison to their predecessors - their perception far precedes just reddit.
If I buy a gameboy and pokemon red for 50 dollars, there should NOT be a stupid message popping up on the gameboy screen to say "Uh...you can't play", even if I'm on the fricking moon.
So what is your solution then? Games actually need to sell a LOT to earn back their investment. Game prices have been the same or even getting lower in the past 20 years, yet development costs have gone up by at least 10 times. With the rampant piracy and devaluation of games because of bundles and mobile/tablet platforms publishers and developers feel forced to do everything within their power to protect their games.
I agree, DRM does more harm than good, but the gamedev industry is a very tough and unstable industry. The animosity that game developers and publishers receive compared to how much effort they put in their games is mind boggling. It is like people have no clue how hard game developers work. It is quite incomparable to any other IT job I know, the crunches are brutal and you often have to relocate quite a bit and there are frequent lay offs after a game ships. How much cheers and praise piracy gets for essentially taking bread out of hard working peoples mouths is even more depressing.
If you only care about the bottom-line (Money), why would you get into the game industry? When you could save all that trouble and start a real estate agency or accounting company instead, and not have to struggle with small profit margins in an unstable industry. Its just insanity.
That's the problem with big game companies, they are unstable simply because they only care about the bottom-line. They only care about getting bigger and bigger, and then requiring more and more money to fill the needs of its ever increasing (and already absurd) size. This ends up becoming a huge bubble that the companies have to go into crisis mode when revenue stops increasing (which has to happen eventually).
Keep in mind that these kinds of greedy for-profit businesses work on the basis that they want more profit every year, to pay their shareholders/executives, that means less money proportionally goes into development each year as well. The problem is not piracy at all. In this industry companies are eventually going to hit a brick wall and stop making more money, and when that happens these companies that absurdly rely on positive forecasts every year are going to go into crisis mode. That's where the problem lies.
Note that Valve isn't having anything like the kind of problems that other big gaming companies have, its not to do with the business model, its that they basically don't have sponsors and shareholders to worry about, and act like a not-for-profit business. I'm pretty sure most if not all of the proceeds are directly invested straight back into Valve.
Even if piracy was as prevalent 20 years ago, game companies wouldn't need DRM because they didn't need to sell a million copies of a game just to break even, and didn't work on the same profit margins and greedy business models.
The fact that flat-lined revenue is a crisis for big game companies is their own damn fault, a game is a luxury not a necessity, we can't expect money to increasingly pour into game companies forever in an ever increasingly competitive market. If not for piracy, something else would have happened and these companies would have the same problem. A lot more revenue was generated from people playing cod, than first generation consoles, companies are making more money than ever before and are still complaining.
Its just dumb business logic to expect to run a business based on profit in the game industry, when there are much more viable markets to be conducting business in that way.
So that is your solution, stop making games because it does not make sense to make games? I agree with you though, it is simply dumb to start a game development company these days. It requires a ton of skill, dedication, risk, investment and time and a company gets little in return. I have worked in many different IT sectors and game development is by far the least rewarding in terms of revenue, but for me it is the most rewarding considering how fun it is to actually make games.
Sure, there are a hand full of companies that do manage to stay on top for a while. Someone mentioned Valve and Valve just has everything going for them, even though it is just a matter of time they make one product that is not perfect and get shit on. Look at Blizzard, one game, D3 does not live up to expectations and they take a massive hit in reputation that will have a major influence on future sales, even though they have been producing top quality games for decades.
It is like digging for gold or oil, there are a couple of success stories and a whole lot of failures. Also, the person who thinks the game development industry is run by greed is flat out wrong. Companies just want to stay in business so they can keep making games and one failure means bankruptcy and that can lead to very protective/safe game development with little innovation.
You're exaggerating the issues by a massive degree.
One failure only means bankruptcy when millions of dollars are spent on it. And for that matter, it has to be an absolutely spectacular failure to destroy a massive company.
Take a look at Gearbox. Duke Nukem Forever, complete flop...but it certainly didn't kill any hype for Borderlands 2. Aliens: Colonial Marines, a completely trash game that got brutalized by players and reviewers...no bankruptcy.
The only time a single game is going to destroy an entire company is when they overspend, devote almost everything they have into it, and fail to turn profit. Anything short of that means the CEO actually managed his resources properly.
Just to be clear, game developers don't want to integrate DRM solutions in their games, it is a major hassle. Does anyone think that DRM would be in if there would not be piracy? But if you build 10000 cars and put them in a holding area and 9000 get stolen, then at some point you are going to put a lock or a fence somewhere.
Car analogies are always so stupid...
If you build 10000 cars, find 20000 exact duplicates on the road the next day, but still sell 98% of your cars, would you keep every employee you have under complete security lockdown for the entirety of their employment? And when all of your employees quit, do you act as though it was the copycats that drove away your work force?
DRM is never about recovering losses. It's about pretending that potential sales are recoverable lost sales, and sacrificing reputation, customer rapport and real money and resources into the hopes that you gain enough of those potential sales to offset the differences.
No, I am not exaggerating at all. You thinking I am exaggerating shows that you don't know how bad it really is. Maybe there are a couple of companies from the 90's that still had some money. Back then 1 success could cover about 4 failures. But the newer game development studios really can't survive a single failure. Hell, the money even isn't at the game development studios anymore, it is at the publishers. Game development studios get "hired" to build a game by a publisher, if it fails the game development studio is done. The money a game development studio gets for making a game covers only that game, nothing more.
Like I said, DRM is stupid, but people spend more time blaming DRM than they spend actively speaking out against piracy, and that is what annoys me. DRM is there because if you don't you will get a 90%+ piracy rate, and again that is no exaggeration. I am not saying this means a company misses out on 90% of its sales, but it does make a big difference.
If that was the case then why did Valve experience a record 50% growth (2012) in a supposed bad period of the games industry. Not to mention that TF2 and Dota2 are free games, even on release TF2 was a fraction of the price of other retail games without micro-transactions.
Valve is growing faster now than EA did when EA didn't even have to compete with pirates.
It makes no sense for EA to be worried about losing money to piracy when overall revenue in the market is increasing.
If a games company is going to go bankrupt over one failed game (not to mention EA has several franchises to buffer its losses) then it is its own damn fault. DRM is just a stupid excuse for the fact that they waste so much money and blame it on piracy.
It's easier for a small company to grow than it is for a large company, especially when that small company has a niche and is part of a fast growing market (digital distribution).
Valve release 1 or so games a year. They could potentially double their revenue by releasing 2 games. 50% more games.
If EA release 50 games a year, releasing an extra 1 or 2 games does next to nothing to increase revenues, that's 2 or 4% more games.
Not hard to grow when you are small, and stupid to compare large company and small company growth rates. Add in Valve being a digital publisher, and not being particularly active in the console market, where DD is less of a growth area currently, and you have even more differences.
Valve probably make more money taking a cut of everyone elses sales than they do from their own games. EA also has publishing agreements with some developers (including Valve) where they publish retail copies of games, but the margins are much smaller, and that area of business is declining.
On March 19 2013 06:09 blackone wrote: [quote] Always on is not the same as DRM, and as long as people pirate video games, publishers will try to stop them.
I don't recall saying it was.
And I don't think that will or should be the case. This isn't directed at you because I don't think anyone supports DRM but I do disagree with the idea that publishers will continue this practice. Anyone who bought a piece of property should be entitled to play it at any time, anywhere. Piracy is a widespread issue that will never, ever be stop or be stopped - it's an issue that along with security, needs to be dealt on the company's end without affecting the average consumer. It's fascinating how forgetful some gaming companies are becoming of grade school level public-business relations.
When you're buying a game, you're not buying a piece of property (other than the actual DVD and the packaging). And I think SC2 and Diablo 3 have shown that always-on can be a great anti-piracy measure, even if you have to live with reddit shitstorms.
You earnestly think that purchasing a product doesn't entitle you to playing it whenever or wherever you want it? Wings and D3 are laughable in comparison to their predecessors - their perception far precedes just reddit.
If I buy a gameboy and pokemon red for 50 dollars, there should NOT be a stupid message popping up on the gameboy screen to say "Uh...you can't play", even if I'm on the fricking moon.
So what is your solution then? Games actually need to sell a LOT to earn back their investment. Game prices have been the same or even getting lower in the past 20 years, yet development costs have gone up by at least 10 times. With the rampant piracy and devaluation of games because of bundles and mobile/tablet platforms publishers and developers feel forced to do everything within their power to protect their games.
I agree, DRM does more harm than good, but the gamedev industry is a very tough and unstable industry. The animosity that game developers and publishers receive compared to how much effort they put in their games is mind boggling. It is like people have no clue how hard game developers work. It is quite incomparable to any other IT job I know, the crunches are brutal and you often have to relocate quite a bit and there are frequent lay offs after a game ships. How much cheers and praise piracy gets for essentially taking bread out of hard working peoples mouths is even more depressing.
If you only care about the bottom-line (Money), why would you get into the game industry? When you could save all that trouble and start a real estate agency or accounting company instead, and not have to struggle with small profit margins in an unstable industry. Its just insanity.
That's the problem with big game companies, they are unstable simply because they only care about the bottom-line. They only care about getting bigger and bigger, and then requiring more and more money to fill the needs of its ever increasing (and already absurd) size. This ends up becoming a huge bubble that the companies have to go into crisis mode when revenue stops increasing (which has to happen eventually).
Keep in mind that these kinds of greedy for-profit businesses work on the basis that they want more profit every year, to pay their shareholders/executives, that means less money proportionally goes into development each year as well. The problem is not piracy at all. In this industry companies are eventually going to hit a brick wall and stop making more money, and when that happens these companies that absurdly rely on positive forecasts every year are going to go into crisis mode. That's where the problem lies.
Note that Valve isn't having anything like the kind of problems that other big gaming companies have, its not to do with the business model, its that they basically don't have sponsors and shareholders to worry about, and act like a not-for-profit business. I'm pretty sure most if not all of the proceeds are directly invested straight back into Valve.
Even if piracy was as prevalent 20 years ago, game companies wouldn't need DRM because they didn't need to sell a million copies of a game just to break even, and didn't work on the same profit margins and greedy business models.
The fact that flat-lined revenue is a crisis for big game companies is their own damn fault, a game is a luxury not a necessity, we can't expect money to increasingly pour into game companies forever in an ever increasingly competitive market. If not for piracy, something else would have happened and these companies would have the same problem. A lot more revenue was generated from people playing cod, than first generation consoles, companies are making more money than ever before and are still complaining.
Its just dumb business logic to expect to run a business based on profit in the game industry, when there are much more viable markets to be conducting business in that way.
So that is your solution, stop making games because it does not make sense to make games? I agree with you though, it is simply dumb to start a game development company these days. It requires a ton of skill, dedication, risk, investment and time and a company gets little in return. I have worked in many different IT sectors and game development is by far the least rewarding in terms of revenue, but for me it is the most rewarding considering how fun it is to actually make games.
Sure, there are a hand full of companies that do manage to stay on top for a while. Someone mentioned Valve and Valve just has everything going for them, even though it is just a matter of time they make one product that is not perfect and get shit on. Look at Blizzard, one game, D3 does not live up to expectations and they take a massive hit in reputation that will have a major influence on future sales, even though they have been producing top quality games for decades.
It is like digging for gold or oil, there are a couple of success stories and a whole lot of failures. Also, the person who thinks the game development industry is run by greed is flat out wrong. Companies just want to stay in business so they can keep making games and one failure means bankruptcy and that can lead to very protective/safe game development with little innovation.
You're exaggerating the issues by a massive degree.
One failure only means bankruptcy when millions of dollars are spent on it. And for that matter, it has to be an absolutely spectacular failure to destroy a massive company.
Take a look at Gearbox. Duke Nukem Forever, complete flop...but it certainly didn't kill any hype for Borderlands 2. Aliens: Colonial Marines, a completely trash game that got brutalized by players and reviewers...no bankruptcy.
The only time a single game is going to destroy an entire company is when they overspend, devote almost everything they have into it, and fail to turn profit. Anything short of that means the CEO actually managed his resources properly.
Just to be clear, game developers don't want to integrate DRM solutions in their games, it is a major hassle. Does anyone think that DRM would be in if there would not be piracy? But if you build 10000 cars and put them in a holding area and 9000 get stolen, then at some point you are going to put a lock or a fence somewhere.
Car analogies are always so stupid...
If you build 10000 cars, find 20000 exact duplicates on the road the next day, but still sell 98% of your cars, would you keep every employee you have under complete security lockdown for the entirety of their employment? And when all of your employees quit, do you act as though it was the copycats that drove away your work force?
DRM is never about recovering losses. It's about pretending that potential sales are recoverable lost sales, and sacrificing reputation, customer rapport and real money and resources into the hopes that you gain enough of those potential sales to offset the differences.
No, I am not exaggerating at all. You thinking I am exaggerating shows that you don't know how bad it really is. Maybe there are a couple of companies from the 90's that still had some money. Back then 1 success could cover about 4 failures. But the newer game development studios really can't survive a single failure. Hell, the money even isn't at the game development studios anymore, it is at the publishers. Game development studios get "hired" to build a game by a publisher, if it fails the game development studio is done. The money a game development studio gets for making a game covers only that game, nothing more.
Like I said, DRM is stupid, but people spend more time blaming DRM than they spend actively speaking out against piracy, and that is what annoys me. DRM is there because if you don't you will get a 90%+ piracy rate, and again that is no exaggeration. I am not saying this means a company misses out on 90% of its sales, but it does make a big difference.
If that was the case then why did Valve experience a record 50% growth (2012) in a supposed bad period of the games industry. Not to mention that TF2 and Dota2 are free games, even on release TF2 was a fraction of the price of other retail games without micro-transactions.
Valve is growing faster now than EA did when EA didn't even have to compete with pirates.
It makes no sense for EA to be worried about losing money to piracy when overall revenue in the market is increasing.
If a games company is going to go bankrupt over one failed game (not to mention EA has several franchises to buffer its losses) then it is its own damn fault. DRM is just a stupid excuse for the fact that they waste so much money and blame it on piracy.
There is a transition from retail to digital. It is more of a shift than an increase, Valve is riding that wave. Also, Valve is more of a store owner these days than a game developer. They take about 30% of all sales on the Steam store. On the steam store a LOT of games are sold, but they are often also sold at bargain prices or in bundles which is bad news in the long run of the game development industry, but it is good for Valve in the short term.
On March 19 2013 06:02 Grovbolle wrote: Why do people buy EA games if they hate DRM? Speak with your wallet people, not that hard.
People like my 12 year old nephew buy EA games. The "mindless masses" buy EA games. You have to consider that people on TL are a bit more dedicated to gaming then the average player these days hence has a superior taste/criteria or whatever.
On topic i do doubt that this will change anything. EA likes money for their shareholders, current practices gets them lots of it so why would anything change. The fact that SW:ToR bombed hard wont change anything, the fact that Sim City was a clusterfuck wont change anything either. EA has been like this forever. And will be forever.
The "mindless" masses are the people who think everyone else thinks the games suck ass. People who don't read reviews or just bandwagon on whatever internet sources say actually enjoy the game. It's pretty polarizing, but not everyone hates the games EA produces until someone tells them to.
Last EA game i got was DA2, and that kinda sealed the deal for me. A complete murder of the series which i hope will be redeemed with DA3. DA2 is actually a really good example. Extremely low production time, extremely bad production value just to get it out while DA:O was still hot in everyones minds so it will sell more copies. I doubt, and hope that releasing DA2 or making it so rushed was not biowares decision.
And reviews are a load of bull. DA2 got like game of the year awards all around and shit by various magazines being praised as "even better then the original" while anyone who has half a brain would know that it wasn´t even close. Several aspects were indeed improved but the overall game just wasn´t close. Think the metacritic reviewers score was 90%ish from journalists and like 20%ish from normal gamers.
man, I think I'm the only 'normal gamer' that likes DA2 because of sarcastic Hawke.
Not a very good reason to like the game as a whole, but still.
Yeah i definitly had a lot of fun running around the same areas over, and over, and over, and over.... even when they were suppossed to be different places.
And I don't think that will or should be the case. This isn't directed at you because I don't think anyone supports DRM but I do disagree with the idea that publishers will continue this practice. Anyone who bought a piece of property should be entitled to play it at any time, anywhere. Piracy is a widespread issue that will never, ever be stop or be stopped - it's an issue that along with security, needs to be dealt on the company's end without affecting the average consumer. It's fascinating how forgetful some gaming companies are becoming of grade school level public-business relations.
When you're buying a game, you're not buying a piece of property (other than the actual DVD and the packaging). And I think SC2 and Diablo 3 have shown that always-on can be a great anti-piracy measure, even if you have to live with reddit shitstorms.
You earnestly think that purchasing a product doesn't entitle you to playing it whenever or wherever you want it? Wings and D3 are laughable in comparison to their predecessors - their perception far precedes just reddit.
If I buy a gameboy and pokemon red for 50 dollars, there should NOT be a stupid message popping up on the gameboy screen to say "Uh...you can't play", even if I'm on the fricking moon.
So what is your solution then? Games actually need to sell a LOT to earn back their investment. Game prices have been the same or even getting lower in the past 20 years, yet development costs have gone up by at least 10 times. With the rampant piracy and devaluation of games because of bundles and mobile/tablet platforms publishers and developers feel forced to do everything within their power to protect their games.
I agree, DRM does more harm than good, but the gamedev industry is a very tough and unstable industry. The animosity that game developers and publishers receive compared to how much effort they put in their games is mind boggling. It is like people have no clue how hard game developers work. It is quite incomparable to any other IT job I know, the crunches are brutal and you often have to relocate quite a bit and there are frequent lay offs after a game ships. How much cheers and praise piracy gets for essentially taking bread out of hard working peoples mouths is even more depressing.
If you only care about the bottom-line (Money), why would you get into the game industry? When you could save all that trouble and start a real estate agency or accounting company instead, and not have to struggle with small profit margins in an unstable industry. Its just insanity.
That's the problem with big game companies, they are unstable simply because they only care about the bottom-line. They only care about getting bigger and bigger, and then requiring more and more money to fill the needs of its ever increasing (and already absurd) size. This ends up becoming a huge bubble that the companies have to go into crisis mode when revenue stops increasing (which has to happen eventually).
Keep in mind that these kinds of greedy for-profit businesses work on the basis that they want more profit every year, to pay their shareholders/executives, that means less money proportionally goes into development each year as well. The problem is not piracy at all. In this industry companies are eventually going to hit a brick wall and stop making more money, and when that happens these companies that absurdly rely on positive forecasts every year are going to go into crisis mode. That's where the problem lies.
Note that Valve isn't having anything like the kind of problems that other big gaming companies have, its not to do with the business model, its that they basically don't have sponsors and shareholders to worry about, and act like a not-for-profit business. I'm pretty sure most if not all of the proceeds are directly invested straight back into Valve.
Even if piracy was as prevalent 20 years ago, game companies wouldn't need DRM because they didn't need to sell a million copies of a game just to break even, and didn't work on the same profit margins and greedy business models.
The fact that flat-lined revenue is a crisis for big game companies is their own damn fault, a game is a luxury not a necessity, we can't expect money to increasingly pour into game companies forever in an ever increasingly competitive market. If not for piracy, something else would have happened and these companies would have the same problem. A lot more revenue was generated from people playing cod, than first generation consoles, companies are making more money than ever before and are still complaining.
Its just dumb business logic to expect to run a business based on profit in the game industry, when there are much more viable markets to be conducting business in that way.
So that is your solution, stop making games because it does not make sense to make games? I agree with you though, it is simply dumb to start a game development company these days. It requires a ton of skill, dedication, risk, investment and time and a company gets little in return. I have worked in many different IT sectors and game development is by far the least rewarding in terms of revenue, but for me it is the most rewarding considering how fun it is to actually make games.
Sure, there are a hand full of companies that do manage to stay on top for a while. Someone mentioned Valve and Valve just has everything going for them, even though it is just a matter of time they make one product that is not perfect and get shit on. Look at Blizzard, one game, D3 does not live up to expectations and they take a massive hit in reputation that will have a major influence on future sales, even though they have been producing top quality games for decades.
It is like digging for gold or oil, there are a couple of success stories and a whole lot of failures. Also, the person who thinks the game development industry is run by greed is flat out wrong. Companies just want to stay in business so they can keep making games and one failure means bankruptcy and that can lead to very protective/safe game development with little innovation.
You're exaggerating the issues by a massive degree.
One failure only means bankruptcy when millions of dollars are spent on it. And for that matter, it has to be an absolutely spectacular failure to destroy a massive company.
Take a look at Gearbox. Duke Nukem Forever, complete flop...but it certainly didn't kill any hype for Borderlands 2. Aliens: Colonial Marines, a completely trash game that got brutalized by players and reviewers...no bankruptcy.
The only time a single game is going to destroy an entire company is when they overspend, devote almost everything they have into it, and fail to turn profit. Anything short of that means the CEO actually managed his resources properly.
Just to be clear, game developers don't want to integrate DRM solutions in their games, it is a major hassle. Does anyone think that DRM would be in if there would not be piracy? But if you build 10000 cars and put them in a holding area and 9000 get stolen, then at some point you are going to put a lock or a fence somewhere.
Car analogies are always so stupid...
If you build 10000 cars, find 20000 exact duplicates on the road the next day, but still sell 98% of your cars, would you keep every employee you have under complete security lockdown for the entirety of their employment? And when all of your employees quit, do you act as though it was the copycats that drove away your work force?
DRM is never about recovering losses. It's about pretending that potential sales are recoverable lost sales, and sacrificing reputation, customer rapport and real money and resources into the hopes that you gain enough of those potential sales to offset the differences.
No, I am not exaggerating at all. You thinking I am exaggerating shows that you don't know how bad it really is. Maybe there are a couple of companies from the 90's that still had some money. Back then 1 success could cover about 4 failures. But the newer game development studios really can't survive a single failure. Hell, the money even isn't at the game development studios anymore, it is at the publishers. Game development studios get "hired" to build a game by a publisher, if it fails the game development studio is done. The money a game development studio gets for making a game covers only that game, nothing more.
Like I said, DRM is stupid, but people spend more time blaming DRM than they spend actively speaking out against piracy, and that is what annoys me. DRM is there because if you don't you will get a 90%+ piracy rate, and again that is no exaggeration. I am not saying this means a company misses out on 90% of its sales, but it does make a big difference.
If that was the case then why did Valve experience a record 50% growth (2012) in a supposed bad period of the games industry. Not to mention that TF2 and Dota2 are free games, even on release TF2 was a fraction of the price of other retail games without micro-transactions.
Valve is growing faster now than EA did when EA didn't even have to compete with pirates.
It makes no sense for EA to be worried about losing money to piracy when overall revenue in the market is increasing.
If a games company is going to go bankrupt over one failed game (not to mention EA has several franchises to buffer its losses) then it is its own damn fault. DRM is just a stupid excuse for the fact that they waste so much money and blame it on piracy.
There is a transition from retail to digital. It is more of a shift than an increase, Valve is riding that wave. Also, Valve is more of a store owner these days than a game developer. They take about 30% of all sales on the Steam store. On the steam store a LOT of games are sold, but they are often also sold at bargain prices or in bundles which is bad news in the long run of the game development industry, but it is good for Valve in the short term.
A game company receiving 70% of a sale on a game that was discounted by steam is more than they would have received in the first place, so it is not necessarily bad. There are a bunch of games that I purchased on steam that I would not have if they weren't discounted, so again not necessarily bad. Also a cheaper end product isn't even bad. I would gladly sell a game I developed for 10 cents if everyone in the world bought it. Trust me I would
And I don't think that will or should be the case. This isn't directed at you because I don't think anyone supports DRM but I do disagree with the idea that publishers will continue this practice. Anyone who bought a piece of property should be entitled to play it at any time, anywhere. Piracy is a widespread issue that will never, ever be stop or be stopped - it's an issue that along with security, needs to be dealt on the company's end without affecting the average consumer. It's fascinating how forgetful some gaming companies are becoming of grade school level public-business relations.
When you're buying a game, you're not buying a piece of property (other than the actual DVD and the packaging). And I think SC2 and Diablo 3 have shown that always-on can be a great anti-piracy measure, even if you have to live with reddit shitstorms.
You earnestly think that purchasing a product doesn't entitle you to playing it whenever or wherever you want it? Wings and D3 are laughable in comparison to their predecessors - their perception far precedes just reddit.
If I buy a gameboy and pokemon red for 50 dollars, there should NOT be a stupid message popping up on the gameboy screen to say "Uh...you can't play", even if I'm on the fricking moon.
So what is your solution then? Games actually need to sell a LOT to earn back their investment. Game prices have been the same or even getting lower in the past 20 years, yet development costs have gone up by at least 10 times. With the rampant piracy and devaluation of games because of bundles and mobile/tablet platforms publishers and developers feel forced to do everything within their power to protect their games.
I agree, DRM does more harm than good, but the gamedev industry is a very tough and unstable industry. The animosity that game developers and publishers receive compared to how much effort they put in their games is mind boggling. It is like people have no clue how hard game developers work. It is quite incomparable to any other IT job I know, the crunches are brutal and you often have to relocate quite a bit and there are frequent lay offs after a game ships. How much cheers and praise piracy gets for essentially taking bread out of hard working peoples mouths is even more depressing.
If you only care about the bottom-line (Money), why would you get into the game industry? When you could save all that trouble and start a real estate agency or accounting company instead, and not have to struggle with small profit margins in an unstable industry. Its just insanity.
That's the problem with big game companies, they are unstable simply because they only care about the bottom-line. They only care about getting bigger and bigger, and then requiring more and more money to fill the needs of its ever increasing (and already absurd) size. This ends up becoming a huge bubble that the companies have to go into crisis mode when revenue stops increasing (which has to happen eventually).
Keep in mind that these kinds of greedy for-profit businesses work on the basis that they want more profit every year, to pay their shareholders/executives, that means less money proportionally goes into development each year as well. The problem is not piracy at all. In this industry companies are eventually going to hit a brick wall and stop making more money, and when that happens these companies that absurdly rely on positive forecasts every year are going to go into crisis mode. That's where the problem lies.
Note that Valve isn't having anything like the kind of problems that other big gaming companies have, its not to do with the business model, its that they basically don't have sponsors and shareholders to worry about, and act like a not-for-profit business. I'm pretty sure most if not all of the proceeds are directly invested straight back into Valve.
Even if piracy was as prevalent 20 years ago, game companies wouldn't need DRM because they didn't need to sell a million copies of a game just to break even, and didn't work on the same profit margins and greedy business models.
The fact that flat-lined revenue is a crisis for big game companies is their own damn fault, a game is a luxury not a necessity, we can't expect money to increasingly pour into game companies forever in an ever increasingly competitive market. If not for piracy, something else would have happened and these companies would have the same problem. A lot more revenue was generated from people playing cod, than first generation consoles, companies are making more money than ever before and are still complaining.
Its just dumb business logic to expect to run a business based on profit in the game industry, when there are much more viable markets to be conducting business in that way.
So that is your solution, stop making games because it does not make sense to make games? I agree with you though, it is simply dumb to start a game development company these days. It requires a ton of skill, dedication, risk, investment and time and a company gets little in return. I have worked in many different IT sectors and game development is by far the least rewarding in terms of revenue, but for me it is the most rewarding considering how fun it is to actually make games.
Sure, there are a hand full of companies that do manage to stay on top for a while. Someone mentioned Valve and Valve just has everything going for them, even though it is just a matter of time they make one product that is not perfect and get shit on. Look at Blizzard, one game, D3 does not live up to expectations and they take a massive hit in reputation that will have a major influence on future sales, even though they have been producing top quality games for decades.
It is like digging for gold or oil, there are a couple of success stories and a whole lot of failures. Also, the person who thinks the game development industry is run by greed is flat out wrong. Companies just want to stay in business so they can keep making games and one failure means bankruptcy and that can lead to very protective/safe game development with little innovation.
You're exaggerating the issues by a massive degree.
One failure only means bankruptcy when millions of dollars are spent on it. And for that matter, it has to be an absolutely spectacular failure to destroy a massive company.
Take a look at Gearbox. Duke Nukem Forever, complete flop...but it certainly didn't kill any hype for Borderlands 2. Aliens: Colonial Marines, a completely trash game that got brutalized by players and reviewers...no bankruptcy.
The only time a single game is going to destroy an entire company is when they overspend, devote almost everything they have into it, and fail to turn profit. Anything short of that means the CEO actually managed his resources properly.
Just to be clear, game developers don't want to integrate DRM solutions in their games, it is a major hassle. Does anyone think that DRM would be in if there would not be piracy? But if you build 10000 cars and put them in a holding area and 9000 get stolen, then at some point you are going to put a lock or a fence somewhere.
Car analogies are always so stupid...
If you build 10000 cars, find 20000 exact duplicates on the road the next day, but still sell 98% of your cars, would you keep every employee you have under complete security lockdown for the entirety of their employment? And when all of your employees quit, do you act as though it was the copycats that drove away your work force?
DRM is never about recovering losses. It's about pretending that potential sales are recoverable lost sales, and sacrificing reputation, customer rapport and real money and resources into the hopes that you gain enough of those potential sales to offset the differences.
No, I am not exaggerating at all. You thinking I am exaggerating shows that you don't know how bad it really is. Maybe there are a couple of companies from the 90's that still had some money. Back then 1 success could cover about 4 failures. But the newer game development studios really can't survive a single failure. Hell, the money even isn't at the game development studios anymore, it is at the publishers. Game development studios get "hired" to build a game by a publisher, if it fails the game development studio is done. The money a game development studio gets for making a game covers only that game, nothing more.
Like I said, DRM is stupid, but people spend more time blaming DRM than they spend actively speaking out against piracy, and that is what annoys me. DRM is there because if you don't you will get a 90%+ piracy rate, and again that is no exaggeration. I am not saying this means a company misses out on 90% of its sales, but it does make a big difference.
If that was the case then why did Valve experience a record 50% growth (2012) in a supposed bad period of the games industry. Not to mention that TF2 and Dota2 are free games, even on release TF2 was a fraction of the price of other retail games without micro-transactions.
Valve is growing faster now than EA did when EA didn't even have to compete with pirates.
It makes no sense for EA to be worried about losing money to piracy when overall revenue in the market is increasing.
If a games company is going to go bankrupt over one failed game (not to mention EA has several franchises to buffer its losses) then it is its own damn fault. DRM is just a stupid excuse for the fact that they waste so much money and blame it on piracy.
It's easier for a small company to grow than it is for a large company, especially when that small company has a niche and is part of a fast growing market (digital distribution).
Valve release 1 or so games a year. They could potentially double their revenue by releasing 2 games. 50% more games.
If EA release 50 games a year, releasing an extra 1 or 2 games does next to nothing to increase revenues, that's 2 or 4% more games.
Not hard to grow when you are small, and stupid to compare large company and small company growth rates. Add in Valve being a digital publisher, and not being particularly active in the console market, where DD is less of a growth area currently, and you have even more differences.
Valve probably make more money taking a cut of everyone elses sales than they do from their own games. EA also has publishing agreements with some developers (including Valve) where they publish retail copies of games, but the margins are much smaller, and that area of business is declining.
What in the world makes you think Valve is a small company? They don't release many games, their income comes from Steam. Valve had the biggest income in the gaming industry in a year they didn't release a single game. They're not increasing by 50% because they make 2 games where they used to make one. They're doing it through steam, marketing and costumer service alone.
On March 19 2013 22:02 blackone wrote: [quote] When you're buying a game, you're not buying a piece of property (other than the actual DVD and the packaging). And I think SC2 and Diablo 3 have shown that always-on can be a great anti-piracy measure, even if you have to live with reddit shitstorms.
You earnestly think that purchasing a product doesn't entitle you to playing it whenever or wherever you want it? Wings and D3 are laughable in comparison to their predecessors - their perception far precedes just reddit.
If I buy a gameboy and pokemon red for 50 dollars, there should NOT be a stupid message popping up on the gameboy screen to say "Uh...you can't play", even if I'm on the fricking moon.
So what is your solution then? Games actually need to sell a LOT to earn back their investment. Game prices have been the same or even getting lower in the past 20 years, yet development costs have gone up by at least 10 times. With the rampant piracy and devaluation of games because of bundles and mobile/tablet platforms publishers and developers feel forced to do everything within their power to protect their games.
I agree, DRM does more harm than good, but the gamedev industry is a very tough and unstable industry. The animosity that game developers and publishers receive compared to how much effort they put in their games is mind boggling. It is like people have no clue how hard game developers work. It is quite incomparable to any other IT job I know, the crunches are brutal and you often have to relocate quite a bit and there are frequent lay offs after a game ships. How much cheers and praise piracy gets for essentially taking bread out of hard working peoples mouths is even more depressing.
If you only care about the bottom-line (Money), why would you get into the game industry? When you could save all that trouble and start a real estate agency or accounting company instead, and not have to struggle with small profit margins in an unstable industry. Its just insanity.
That's the problem with big game companies, they are unstable simply because they only care about the bottom-line. They only care about getting bigger and bigger, and then requiring more and more money to fill the needs of its ever increasing (and already absurd) size. This ends up becoming a huge bubble that the companies have to go into crisis mode when revenue stops increasing (which has to happen eventually).
Keep in mind that these kinds of greedy for-profit businesses work on the basis that they want more profit every year, to pay their shareholders/executives, that means less money proportionally goes into development each year as well. The problem is not piracy at all. In this industry companies are eventually going to hit a brick wall and stop making more money, and when that happens these companies that absurdly rely on positive forecasts every year are going to go into crisis mode. That's where the problem lies.
Note that Valve isn't having anything like the kind of problems that other big gaming companies have, its not to do with the business model, its that they basically don't have sponsors and shareholders to worry about, and act like a not-for-profit business. I'm pretty sure most if not all of the proceeds are directly invested straight back into Valve.
Even if piracy was as prevalent 20 years ago, game companies wouldn't need DRM because they didn't need to sell a million copies of a game just to break even, and didn't work on the same profit margins and greedy business models.
The fact that flat-lined revenue is a crisis for big game companies is their own damn fault, a game is a luxury not a necessity, we can't expect money to increasingly pour into game companies forever in an ever increasingly competitive market. If not for piracy, something else would have happened and these companies would have the same problem. A lot more revenue was generated from people playing cod, than first generation consoles, companies are making more money than ever before and are still complaining.
Its just dumb business logic to expect to run a business based on profit in the game industry, when there are much more viable markets to be conducting business in that way.
So that is your solution, stop making games because it does not make sense to make games? I agree with you though, it is simply dumb to start a game development company these days. It requires a ton of skill, dedication, risk, investment and time and a company gets little in return. I have worked in many different IT sectors and game development is by far the least rewarding in terms of revenue, but for me it is the most rewarding considering how fun it is to actually make games.
Sure, there are a hand full of companies that do manage to stay on top for a while. Someone mentioned Valve and Valve just has everything going for them, even though it is just a matter of time they make one product that is not perfect and get shit on. Look at Blizzard, one game, D3 does not live up to expectations and they take a massive hit in reputation that will have a major influence on future sales, even though they have been producing top quality games for decades.
It is like digging for gold or oil, there are a couple of success stories and a whole lot of failures. Also, the person who thinks the game development industry is run by greed is flat out wrong. Companies just want to stay in business so they can keep making games and one failure means bankruptcy and that can lead to very protective/safe game development with little innovation.
You're exaggerating the issues by a massive degree.
One failure only means bankruptcy when millions of dollars are spent on it. And for that matter, it has to be an absolutely spectacular failure to destroy a massive company.
Take a look at Gearbox. Duke Nukem Forever, complete flop...but it certainly didn't kill any hype for Borderlands 2. Aliens: Colonial Marines, a completely trash game that got brutalized by players and reviewers...no bankruptcy.
The only time a single game is going to destroy an entire company is when they overspend, devote almost everything they have into it, and fail to turn profit. Anything short of that means the CEO actually managed his resources properly.
Just to be clear, game developers don't want to integrate DRM solutions in their games, it is a major hassle. Does anyone think that DRM would be in if there would not be piracy? But if you build 10000 cars and put them in a holding area and 9000 get stolen, then at some point you are going to put a lock or a fence somewhere.
Car analogies are always so stupid...
If you build 10000 cars, find 20000 exact duplicates on the road the next day, but still sell 98% of your cars, would you keep every employee you have under complete security lockdown for the entirety of their employment? And when all of your employees quit, do you act as though it was the copycats that drove away your work force?
DRM is never about recovering losses. It's about pretending that potential sales are recoverable lost sales, and sacrificing reputation, customer rapport and real money and resources into the hopes that you gain enough of those potential sales to offset the differences.
No, I am not exaggerating at all. You thinking I am exaggerating shows that you don't know how bad it really is. Maybe there are a couple of companies from the 90's that still had some money. Back then 1 success could cover about 4 failures. But the newer game development studios really can't survive a single failure. Hell, the money even isn't at the game development studios anymore, it is at the publishers. Game development studios get "hired" to build a game by a publisher, if it fails the game development studio is done. The money a game development studio gets for making a game covers only that game, nothing more.
Like I said, DRM is stupid, but people spend more time blaming DRM than they spend actively speaking out against piracy, and that is what annoys me. DRM is there because if you don't you will get a 90%+ piracy rate, and again that is no exaggeration. I am not saying this means a company misses out on 90% of its sales, but it does make a big difference.
If that was the case then why did Valve experience a record 50% growth (2012) in a supposed bad period of the games industry. Not to mention that TF2 and Dota2 are free games, even on release TF2 was a fraction of the price of other retail games without micro-transactions.
Valve is growing faster now than EA did when EA didn't even have to compete with pirates.
It makes no sense for EA to be worried about losing money to piracy when overall revenue in the market is increasing.
If a games company is going to go bankrupt over one failed game (not to mention EA has several franchises to buffer its losses) then it is its own damn fault. DRM is just a stupid excuse for the fact that they waste so much money and blame it on piracy.
It's easier for a small company to grow than it is for a large company, especially when that small company has a niche and is part of a fast growing market (digital distribution).
Valve release 1 or so games a year. They could potentially double their revenue by releasing 2 games. 50% more games.
If EA release 50 games a year, releasing an extra 1 or 2 games does next to nothing to increase revenues, that's 2 or 4% more games.
Not hard to grow when you are small, and stupid to compare large company and small company growth rates. Add in Valve being a digital publisher, and not being particularly active in the console market, where DD is less of a growth area currently, and you have even more differences.
Valve probably make more money taking a cut of everyone elses sales than they do from their own games. EA also has publishing agreements with some developers (including Valve) where they publish retail copies of games, but the margins are much smaller, and that area of business is declining.
What in the world makes you think Valve is a small company? They don't release many games, their income comes from Steam. Valve had the biggest income in the gaming industry in a year they didn't release a single game. They're not increasing by 50% because they make 2 games where they used to make one. They're doing it through steam, marketing and costumer service alone.
According to Wiki Valve has only 400 employees. The US Small Business Administration (Valve is incorporated in the US) defines a small business as any company with less than 500 employees. So Valve is a small (and very very successful...) business. By contrast, EA has more than 9000....
On March 19 2013 22:02 blackone wrote: [quote] When you're buying a game, you're not buying a piece of property (other than the actual DVD and the packaging). And I think SC2 and Diablo 3 have shown that always-on can be a great anti-piracy measure, even if you have to live with reddit shitstorms.
You earnestly think that purchasing a product doesn't entitle you to playing it whenever or wherever you want it? Wings and D3 are laughable in comparison to their predecessors - their perception far precedes just reddit.
If I buy a gameboy and pokemon red for 50 dollars, there should NOT be a stupid message popping up on the gameboy screen to say "Uh...you can't play", even if I'm on the fricking moon.
So what is your solution then? Games actually need to sell a LOT to earn back their investment. Game prices have been the same or even getting lower in the past 20 years, yet development costs have gone up by at least 10 times. With the rampant piracy and devaluation of games because of bundles and mobile/tablet platforms publishers and developers feel forced to do everything within their power to protect their games.
I agree, DRM does more harm than good, but the gamedev industry is a very tough and unstable industry. The animosity that game developers and publishers receive compared to how much effort they put in their games is mind boggling. It is like people have no clue how hard game developers work. It is quite incomparable to any other IT job I know, the crunches are brutal and you often have to relocate quite a bit and there are frequent lay offs after a game ships. How much cheers and praise piracy gets for essentially taking bread out of hard working peoples mouths is even more depressing.
If you only care about the bottom-line (Money), why would you get into the game industry? When you could save all that trouble and start a real estate agency or accounting company instead, and not have to struggle with small profit margins in an unstable industry. Its just insanity.
That's the problem with big game companies, they are unstable simply because they only care about the bottom-line. They only care about getting bigger and bigger, and then requiring more and more money to fill the needs of its ever increasing (and already absurd) size. This ends up becoming a huge bubble that the companies have to go into crisis mode when revenue stops increasing (which has to happen eventually).
Keep in mind that these kinds of greedy for-profit businesses work on the basis that they want more profit every year, to pay their shareholders/executives, that means less money proportionally goes into development each year as well. The problem is not piracy at all. In this industry companies are eventually going to hit a brick wall and stop making more money, and when that happens these companies that absurdly rely on positive forecasts every year are going to go into crisis mode. That's where the problem lies.
Note that Valve isn't having anything like the kind of problems that other big gaming companies have, its not to do with the business model, its that they basically don't have sponsors and shareholders to worry about, and act like a not-for-profit business. I'm pretty sure most if not all of the proceeds are directly invested straight back into Valve.
Even if piracy was as prevalent 20 years ago, game companies wouldn't need DRM because they didn't need to sell a million copies of a game just to break even, and didn't work on the same profit margins and greedy business models.
The fact that flat-lined revenue is a crisis for big game companies is their own damn fault, a game is a luxury not a necessity, we can't expect money to increasingly pour into game companies forever in an ever increasingly competitive market. If not for piracy, something else would have happened and these companies would have the same problem. A lot more revenue was generated from people playing cod, than first generation consoles, companies are making more money than ever before and are still complaining.
Its just dumb business logic to expect to run a business based on profit in the game industry, when there are much more viable markets to be conducting business in that way.
So that is your solution, stop making games because it does not make sense to make games? I agree with you though, it is simply dumb to start a game development company these days. It requires a ton of skill, dedication, risk, investment and time and a company gets little in return. I have worked in many different IT sectors and game development is by far the least rewarding in terms of revenue, but for me it is the most rewarding considering how fun it is to actually make games.
Sure, there are a hand full of companies that do manage to stay on top for a while. Someone mentioned Valve and Valve just has everything going for them, even though it is just a matter of time they make one product that is not perfect and get shit on. Look at Blizzard, one game, D3 does not live up to expectations and they take a massive hit in reputation that will have a major influence on future sales, even though they have been producing top quality games for decades.
It is like digging for gold or oil, there are a couple of success stories and a whole lot of failures. Also, the person who thinks the game development industry is run by greed is flat out wrong. Companies just want to stay in business so they can keep making games and one failure means bankruptcy and that can lead to very protective/safe game development with little innovation.
You're exaggerating the issues by a massive degree.
One failure only means bankruptcy when millions of dollars are spent on it. And for that matter, it has to be an absolutely spectacular failure to destroy a massive company.
Take a look at Gearbox. Duke Nukem Forever, complete flop...but it certainly didn't kill any hype for Borderlands 2. Aliens: Colonial Marines, a completely trash game that got brutalized by players and reviewers...no bankruptcy.
The only time a single game is going to destroy an entire company is when they overspend, devote almost everything they have into it, and fail to turn profit. Anything short of that means the CEO actually managed his resources properly.
Just to be clear, game developers don't want to integrate DRM solutions in their games, it is a major hassle. Does anyone think that DRM would be in if there would not be piracy? But if you build 10000 cars and put them in a holding area and 9000 get stolen, then at some point you are going to put a lock or a fence somewhere.
Car analogies are always so stupid...
If you build 10000 cars, find 20000 exact duplicates on the road the next day, but still sell 98% of your cars, would you keep every employee you have under complete security lockdown for the entirety of their employment? And when all of your employees quit, do you act as though it was the copycats that drove away your work force?
DRM is never about recovering losses. It's about pretending that potential sales are recoverable lost sales, and sacrificing reputation, customer rapport and real money and resources into the hopes that you gain enough of those potential sales to offset the differences.
No, I am not exaggerating at all. You thinking I am exaggerating shows that you don't know how bad it really is. Maybe there are a couple of companies from the 90's that still had some money. Back then 1 success could cover about 4 failures. But the newer game development studios really can't survive a single failure. Hell, the money even isn't at the game development studios anymore, it is at the publishers. Game development studios get "hired" to build a game by a publisher, if it fails the game development studio is done. The money a game development studio gets for making a game covers only that game, nothing more.
Like I said, DRM is stupid, but people spend more time blaming DRM than they spend actively speaking out against piracy, and that is what annoys me. DRM is there because if you don't you will get a 90%+ piracy rate, and again that is no exaggeration. I am not saying this means a company misses out on 90% of its sales, but it does make a big difference.
If that was the case then why did Valve experience a record 50% growth (2012) in a supposed bad period of the games industry. Not to mention that TF2 and Dota2 are free games, even on release TF2 was a fraction of the price of other retail games without micro-transactions.
Valve is growing faster now than EA did when EA didn't even have to compete with pirates.
It makes no sense for EA to be worried about losing money to piracy when overall revenue in the market is increasing.
If a games company is going to go bankrupt over one failed game (not to mention EA has several franchises to buffer its losses) then it is its own damn fault. DRM is just a stupid excuse for the fact that they waste so much money and blame it on piracy.
There is a transition from retail to digital. It is more of a shift than an increase, Valve is riding that wave. Also, Valve is more of a store owner these days than a game developer. They take about 30% of all sales on the Steam store. On the steam store a LOT of games are sold, but they are often also sold at bargain prices or in bundles which is bad news in the long run of the game development industry, but it is good for Valve in the short term.
A game company receiving 70% of a sale on a game that was discounted by steam is more than they would have received in the first place, so it is not necessarily bad. There are a bunch of games that I purchased on steam that I would not have if they weren't discounted, so again not necessarily bad. Also a cheaper end product isn't even bad. I would gladly sell a game I developed for 10 cents if everyone in the world bought it. Trust me I would
Yeah, maybe you are right. It depends on if the balance shifts away from people buying a game at full price to only buying it in the bargain bin. For the bigger titles the bargain bin alone will likely not be enough to cover expenses, but for smaller companies and indies Valve and Steam are a gift from heaven at this point in time. I am not sure if it will last.
And I don't think that will or should be the case. This isn't directed at you because I don't think anyone supports DRM but I do disagree with the idea that publishers will continue this practice. Anyone who bought a piece of property should be entitled to play it at any time, anywhere. Piracy is a widespread issue that will never, ever be stop or be stopped - it's an issue that along with security, needs to be dealt on the company's end without affecting the average consumer. It's fascinating how forgetful some gaming companies are becoming of grade school level public-business relations.
When you're buying a game, you're not buying a piece of property (other than the actual DVD and the packaging). And I think SC2 and Diablo 3 have shown that always-on can be a great anti-piracy measure, even if you have to live with reddit shitstorms.
You earnestly think that purchasing a product doesn't entitle you to playing it whenever or wherever you want it? Wings and D3 are laughable in comparison to their predecessors - their perception far precedes just reddit.
If I buy a gameboy and pokemon red for 50 dollars, there should NOT be a stupid message popping up on the gameboy screen to say "Uh...you can't play", even if I'm on the fricking moon.
So what is your solution then? Games actually need to sell a LOT to earn back their investment. Game prices have been the same or even getting lower in the past 20 years, yet development costs have gone up by at least 10 times. With the rampant piracy and devaluation of games because of bundles and mobile/tablet platforms publishers and developers feel forced to do everything within their power to protect their games.
I agree, DRM does more harm than good, but the gamedev industry is a very tough and unstable industry. The animosity that game developers and publishers receive compared to how much effort they put in their games is mind boggling. It is like people have no clue how hard game developers work. It is quite incomparable to any other IT job I know, the crunches are brutal and you often have to relocate quite a bit and there are frequent lay offs after a game ships. How much cheers and praise piracy gets for essentially taking bread out of hard working peoples mouths is even more depressing.
If you only care about the bottom-line (Money), why would you get into the game industry? When you could save all that trouble and start a real estate agency or accounting company instead, and not have to struggle with small profit margins in an unstable industry. Its just insanity.
That's the problem with big game companies, they are unstable simply because they only care about the bottom-line. They only care about getting bigger and bigger, and then requiring more and more money to fill the needs of its ever increasing (and already absurd) size. This ends up becoming a huge bubble that the companies have to go into crisis mode when revenue stops increasing (which has to happen eventually).
Keep in mind that these kinds of greedy for-profit businesses work on the basis that they want more profit every year, to pay their shareholders/executives, that means less money proportionally goes into development each year as well. The problem is not piracy at all. In this industry companies are eventually going to hit a brick wall and stop making more money, and when that happens these companies that absurdly rely on positive forecasts every year are going to go into crisis mode. That's where the problem lies.
Note that Valve isn't having anything like the kind of problems that other big gaming companies have, its not to do with the business model, its that they basically don't have sponsors and shareholders to worry about, and act like a not-for-profit business. I'm pretty sure most if not all of the proceeds are directly invested straight back into Valve.
Even if piracy was as prevalent 20 years ago, game companies wouldn't need DRM because they didn't need to sell a million copies of a game just to break even, and didn't work on the same profit margins and greedy business models.
The fact that flat-lined revenue is a crisis for big game companies is their own damn fault, a game is a luxury not a necessity, we can't expect money to increasingly pour into game companies forever in an ever increasingly competitive market. If not for piracy, something else would have happened and these companies would have the same problem. A lot more revenue was generated from people playing cod, than first generation consoles, companies are making more money than ever before and are still complaining.
Its just dumb business logic to expect to run a business based on profit in the game industry, when there are much more viable markets to be conducting business in that way.
So that is your solution, stop making games because it does not make sense to make games? I agree with you though, it is simply dumb to start a game development company these days. It requires a ton of skill, dedication, risk, investment and time and a company gets little in return. I have worked in many different IT sectors and game development is by far the least rewarding in terms of revenue, but for me it is the most rewarding considering how fun it is to actually make games.
Sure, there are a hand full of companies that do manage to stay on top for a while. Someone mentioned Valve and Valve just has everything going for them, even though it is just a matter of time they make one product that is not perfect and get shit on. Look at Blizzard, one game, D3 does not live up to expectations and they take a massive hit in reputation that will have a major influence on future sales, even though they have been producing top quality games for decades.
It is like digging for gold or oil, there are a couple of success stories and a whole lot of failures. Also, the person who thinks the game development industry is run by greed is flat out wrong. Companies just want to stay in business so they can keep making games and one failure means bankruptcy and that can lead to very protective/safe game development with little innovation.
You're exaggerating the issues by a massive degree.
One failure only means bankruptcy when millions of dollars are spent on it. And for that matter, it has to be an absolutely spectacular failure to destroy a massive company.
Take a look at Gearbox. Duke Nukem Forever, complete flop...but it certainly didn't kill any hype for Borderlands 2. Aliens: Colonial Marines, a completely trash game that got brutalized by players and reviewers...no bankruptcy.
The only time a single game is going to destroy an entire company is when they overspend, devote almost everything they have into it, and fail to turn profit. Anything short of that means the CEO actually managed his resources properly.
Just to be clear, game developers don't want to integrate DRM solutions in their games, it is a major hassle. Does anyone think that DRM would be in if there would not be piracy? But if you build 10000 cars and put them in a holding area and 9000 get stolen, then at some point you are going to put a lock or a fence somewhere.
Car analogies are always so stupid...
If you build 10000 cars, find 20000 exact duplicates on the road the next day, but still sell 98% of your cars, would you keep every employee you have under complete security lockdown for the entirety of their employment? And when all of your employees quit, do you act as though it was the copycats that drove away your work force?
DRM is never about recovering losses. It's about pretending that potential sales are recoverable lost sales, and sacrificing reputation, customer rapport and real money and resources into the hopes that you gain enough of those potential sales to offset the differences.
No, I am not exaggerating at all. You thinking I am exaggerating shows that you don't know how bad it really is. Maybe there are a couple of companies from the 90's that still had some money. Back then 1 success could cover about 4 failures. But the newer game development studios really can't survive a single failure. Hell, the money even isn't at the game development studios anymore, it is at the publishers. Game development studios get "hired" to build a game by a publisher, if it fails the game development studio is done. The money a game development studio gets for making a game covers only that game, nothing more.
Like I said, DRM is stupid, but people spend more time blaming DRM than they spend actively speaking out against piracy, and that is what annoys me. DRM is there because if you don't you will get a 90%+ piracy rate, and again that is no exaggeration. I am not saying this means a company misses out on 90% of its sales, but it does make a big difference.
If that was the case then why did Valve experience a record 50% growth (2012) in a supposed bad period of the games industry. Not to mention that TF2 and Dota2 are free games, even on release TF2 was a fraction of the price of other retail games without micro-transactions.
Valve is growing faster now than EA did when EA didn't even have to compete with pirates.
It makes no sense for EA to be worried about losing money to piracy when overall revenue in the market is increasing.
If a games company is going to go bankrupt over one failed game (not to mention EA has several franchises to buffer its losses) then it is its own damn fault. DRM is just a stupid excuse for the fact that they waste so much money and blame it on piracy.
It's easier for a small company to grow than it is for a large company, especially when that small company has a niche and is part of a fast growing market (digital distribution).
Valve release 1 or so games a year. They could potentially double their revenue by releasing 2 games. 50% more games.
If EA release 50 games a year, releasing an extra 1 or 2 games does next to nothing to increase revenues, that's 2 or 4% more games.
Not hard to grow when you are small, and stupid to compare large company and small company growth rates. Add in Valve being a digital publisher, and not being particularly active in the console market, where DD is less of a growth area currently, and you have even more differences.
Valve probably make more money taking a cut of everyone elses sales than they do from their own games. EA also has publishing agreements with some developers (including Valve) where they publish retail copies of games, but the margins are much smaller, and that area of business is declining.
So EA is not a digital publisher? That's a first.
You make it seem as if Valve is cheating somehow because they make money off Steam. Why doesn't EA do the same thing if its so profitable and would mean you only needed to make 2 games a year?
oh wait they did, with Origin, and it fucking sucks.
A game company doesn't need over 9000 employees and punch out a hundred games a year to be successful, or put their entire company on the line every time they want to release a big game. It is simply unsustainable and extremely wasteful.
There's an engineering joke about the follies of trying to solve problems with manpower. It takes many forms, but the general idea is "If one chef can make a cake in an hour, then twelve chefs should be able to finish the cake in five minutes!" The big publishers keep complaining about the rising cost of game development. But why are costs going up? We've been stuck in the same graphics generation since 2005 or so. Since we're not chasing new graphics, games should be getting cheaper.
Valve only needs to make 2 games a year because, they keep their company small and their business practices are sustainable. Its the reason they can sell games at a 1/3rd of the price of most retail games, if EA had Steam, they would still sell it at full price, I am certain of that.
On March 20 2013 20:37 Lonyo wrote: It's easier for a small company to grow than it is for a large company, especially when that small company has a niche and is part of a fast growing market (digital distribution)
Bullshit. How many indie game developers even make it off the ground, I'd say less than 0.1 percent. 9 out of 10 small businesses fail, and in the games industry, its even higher by a substantial number.
Its actually much harder for Valve to grow than EA, so if anything, Valve should have sunk, and EA should have grown.
Like I said before, Steam isn't cheating. Its called good business. There's no rule that says if you are a game developer, you are only allowed to make games. Besides EA used to be the biggest "abuser" of digital publishing, only they did it in the stupidest and most arcane way possible, its called buying out. Then they created Origin, and we all know how that went.
On March 19 2013 22:02 blackone wrote: [quote] When you're buying a game, you're not buying a piece of property (other than the actual DVD and the packaging). And I think SC2 and Diablo 3 have shown that always-on can be a great anti-piracy measure, even if you have to live with reddit shitstorms.
You earnestly think that purchasing a product doesn't entitle you to playing it whenever or wherever you want it? Wings and D3 are laughable in comparison to their predecessors - their perception far precedes just reddit.
If I buy a gameboy and pokemon red for 50 dollars, there should NOT be a stupid message popping up on the gameboy screen to say "Uh...you can't play", even if I'm on the fricking moon.
So what is your solution then? Games actually need to sell a LOT to earn back their investment. Game prices have been the same or even getting lower in the past 20 years, yet development costs have gone up by at least 10 times. With the rampant piracy and devaluation of games because of bundles and mobile/tablet platforms publishers and developers feel forced to do everything within their power to protect their games.
I agree, DRM does more harm than good, but the gamedev industry is a very tough and unstable industry. The animosity that game developers and publishers receive compared to how much effort they put in their games is mind boggling. It is like people have no clue how hard game developers work. It is quite incomparable to any other IT job I know, the crunches are brutal and you often have to relocate quite a bit and there are frequent lay offs after a game ships. How much cheers and praise piracy gets for essentially taking bread out of hard working peoples mouths is even more depressing.
If you only care about the bottom-line (Money), why would you get into the game industry? When you could save all that trouble and start a real estate agency or accounting company instead, and not have to struggle with small profit margins in an unstable industry. Its just insanity.
That's the problem with big game companies, they are unstable simply because they only care about the bottom-line. They only care about getting bigger and bigger, and then requiring more and more money to fill the needs of its ever increasing (and already absurd) size. This ends up becoming a huge bubble that the companies have to go into crisis mode when revenue stops increasing (which has to happen eventually).
Keep in mind that these kinds of greedy for-profit businesses work on the basis that they want more profit every year, to pay their shareholders/executives, that means less money proportionally goes into development each year as well. The problem is not piracy at all. In this industry companies are eventually going to hit a brick wall and stop making more money, and when that happens these companies that absurdly rely on positive forecasts every year are going to go into crisis mode. That's where the problem lies.
Note that Valve isn't having anything like the kind of problems that other big gaming companies have, its not to do with the business model, its that they basically don't have sponsors and shareholders to worry about, and act like a not-for-profit business. I'm pretty sure most if not all of the proceeds are directly invested straight back into Valve.
Even if piracy was as prevalent 20 years ago, game companies wouldn't need DRM because they didn't need to sell a million copies of a game just to break even, and didn't work on the same profit margins and greedy business models.
The fact that flat-lined revenue is a crisis for big game companies is their own damn fault, a game is a luxury not a necessity, we can't expect money to increasingly pour into game companies forever in an ever increasingly competitive market. If not for piracy, something else would have happened and these companies would have the same problem. A lot more revenue was generated from people playing cod, than first generation consoles, companies are making more money than ever before and are still complaining.
Its just dumb business logic to expect to run a business based on profit in the game industry, when there are much more viable markets to be conducting business in that way.
So that is your solution, stop making games because it does not make sense to make games? I agree with you though, it is simply dumb to start a game development company these days. It requires a ton of skill, dedication, risk, investment and time and a company gets little in return. I have worked in many different IT sectors and game development is by far the least rewarding in terms of revenue, but for me it is the most rewarding considering how fun it is to actually make games.
Sure, there are a hand full of companies that do manage to stay on top for a while. Someone mentioned Valve and Valve just has everything going for them, even though it is just a matter of time they make one product that is not perfect and get shit on. Look at Blizzard, one game, D3 does not live up to expectations and they take a massive hit in reputation that will have a major influence on future sales, even though they have been producing top quality games for decades.
It is like digging for gold or oil, there are a couple of success stories and a whole lot of failures. Also, the person who thinks the game development industry is run by greed is flat out wrong. Companies just want to stay in business so they can keep making games and one failure means bankruptcy and that can lead to very protective/safe game development with little innovation.
You're exaggerating the issues by a massive degree.
One failure only means bankruptcy when millions of dollars are spent on it. And for that matter, it has to be an absolutely spectacular failure to destroy a massive company.
Take a look at Gearbox. Duke Nukem Forever, complete flop...but it certainly didn't kill any hype for Borderlands 2. Aliens: Colonial Marines, a completely trash game that got brutalized by players and reviewers...no bankruptcy.
The only time a single game is going to destroy an entire company is when they overspend, devote almost everything they have into it, and fail to turn profit. Anything short of that means the CEO actually managed his resources properly.
Just to be clear, game developers don't want to integrate DRM solutions in their games, it is a major hassle. Does anyone think that DRM would be in if there would not be piracy? But if you build 10000 cars and put them in a holding area and 9000 get stolen, then at some point you are going to put a lock or a fence somewhere.
Car analogies are always so stupid...
If you build 10000 cars, find 20000 exact duplicates on the road the next day, but still sell 98% of your cars, would you keep every employee you have under complete security lockdown for the entirety of their employment? And when all of your employees quit, do you act as though it was the copycats that drove away your work force?
DRM is never about recovering losses. It's about pretending that potential sales are recoverable lost sales, and sacrificing reputation, customer rapport and real money and resources into the hopes that you gain enough of those potential sales to offset the differences.
No, I am not exaggerating at all. You thinking I am exaggerating shows that you don't know how bad it really is. Maybe there are a couple of companies from the 90's that still had some money. Back then 1 success could cover about 4 failures. But the newer game development studios really can't survive a single failure. Hell, the money even isn't at the game development studios anymore, it is at the publishers. Game development studios get "hired" to build a game by a publisher, if it fails the game development studio is done. The money a game development studio gets for making a game covers only that game, nothing more.
Like I said, DRM is stupid, but people spend more time blaming DRM than they spend actively speaking out against piracy, and that is what annoys me. DRM is there because if you don't you will get a 90%+ piracy rate, and again that is no exaggeration. I am not saying this means a company misses out on 90% of its sales, but it does make a big difference.
If that was the case then why did Valve experience a record 50% growth (2012) in a supposed bad period of the games industry. Not to mention that TF2 and Dota2 are free games, even on release TF2 was a fraction of the price of other retail games without micro-transactions.
Valve is growing faster now than EA did when EA didn't even have to compete with pirates.
It makes no sense for EA to be worried about losing money to piracy when overall revenue in the market is increasing.
If a games company is going to go bankrupt over one failed game (not to mention EA has several franchises to buffer its losses) then it is its own damn fault. DRM is just a stupid excuse for the fact that they waste so much money and blame it on piracy.
It's easier for a small company to grow than it is for a large company, especially when that small company has a niche and is part of a fast growing market (digital distribution).
Valve release 1 or so games a year. They could potentially double their revenue by releasing 2 games. 50% more games.
If EA release 50 games a year, releasing an extra 1 or 2 games does next to nothing to increase revenues, that's 2 or 4% more games.
Not hard to grow when you are small, and stupid to compare large company and small company growth rates. Add in Valve being a digital publisher, and not being particularly active in the console market, where DD is less of a growth area currently, and you have even more differences.
Valve probably make more money taking a cut of everyone elses sales than they do from their own games. EA also has publishing agreements with some developers (including Valve) where they publish retail copies of games, but the margins are much smaller, and that area of business is declining.
What in the world makes you think Valve is a small company? They don't release many games, their income comes from Steam. Valve had the biggest income in the gaming industry in a year they didn't release a single game. They're not increasing by 50% because they make 2 games where they used to make one. They're doing it through steam, marketing and costumer service alone.
Just because a game company doesn't release a game doesn't mean they didn't make money of it.
In late 2011, TF2 moved to micro-transactions, and a linux port was created in 2012. As you know, micro-transactions are ongoing and not restricted to its release only.
Dota 2 was "released" in 2012, many bought beta keys, and it is making a ton of money off micro-transactions. It had more than a million members by June 2012. Hundreds of thousands of people are buying in game items.
Where as Madden 2012, only expects to make sales in 2012, people are still buying Valves older games, like Portal and HalfLife, because they are good games that stand the test of time.
doubt that it really changes much but this was at least 2-3 years in the making considering the bullshit ea customers have to put up with for everything
On March 19 2013 05:35 Taekwon wrote: That's the spirit! Now start doing better practices - like maybe no DRM?
Hmmmmmm?
Always on is not the same as DRM, and as long as people pirate video games, publishers will try to stop them.
I don't recall saying it was.
And I don't think that will or should be the case. This isn't directed at you because I don't think anyone supports DRM but I do disagree with the idea that publishers will continue this practice. Anyone who bought a piece of property should be entitled to play it at any time, anywhere. Piracy is a widespread issue that will never, ever be stop or be stopped - it's an issue that along with security, needs to be dealt on the company's end without affecting the average consumer. It's fascinating how forgetful some gaming companies are becoming of grade school level public-business relations.
When you're buying a game, you're not buying a piece of property (other than the actual DVD and the packaging). And I think SC2 and Diablo 3 have shown that always-on can be a great anti-piracy measure, even if you have to live with reddit shitstorms.
You earnestly think that purchasing a product doesn't entitle you to playing it whenever or wherever you want it? Wings and D3 are laughable in comparison to their predecessors - their perception far precedes just reddit.
If I buy a gameboy and pokemon red for 50 dollars, there should NOT be a stupid message popping up on the gameboy screen to say "Uh...you can't play", even if I'm on the fricking moon.
So what is your solution then? Games actually need to sell a LOT to earn back their investment. Game prices have been the same or even getting lower in the past 20 years, yet development costs have gone up by at least 10 times. With the rampant piracy and devaluation of games because of bundles and mobile/tablet platforms publishers and developers feel forced to do everything within their power to protect their games.
I agree, DRM does more harm than good, but the gamedev industry is a very tough and unstable industry. The animosity that game developers and publishers receive compared to how much effort they put in their games is mind boggling. It is like people have no clue how hard game developers work. It is quite incomparable to any other IT job I know, the crunches are brutal and you often have to relocate quite a bit and there are frequent lay offs after a game ships. How much cheers and praise piracy gets for essentially taking bread out of hard working peoples mouths is even more depressing.
If you only care about the bottom-line (Money), why would you get into the game industry? When you could save all that trouble and start a real estate agency or accounting company instead, and not have to struggle with small profit margins in an unstable industry. Its just insanity.
That's the problem with big game companies, they are unstable simply because they only care about the bottom-line. They only care about getting bigger and bigger, and then requiring more and more money to fill the needs of its ever increasing (and already absurd) size. This ends up becoming a huge bubble that the companies have to go into crisis mode when revenue stops increasing (which has to happen eventually).
Keep in mind that these kinds of greedy for-profit businesses work on the basis that they want more profit every year, to pay their shareholders/executives, that means less money proportionally goes into development each year as well. The problem is not piracy at all. In this industry companies are eventually going to hit a brick wall and stop making more money, and when that happens these companies that absurdly rely on positive forecasts every year are going to go into crisis mode. That's where the problem lies.
Note that Valve isn't having anything like the kind of problems that other big gaming companies have, its not to do with the business model, its that they basically don't have sponsors and shareholders to worry about, and act like a not-for-profit business. I'm pretty sure most if not all of the proceeds are directly invested straight back into Valve.
Even if piracy was as prevalent 20 years ago, game companies wouldn't need DRM because they didn't need to sell a million copies of a game just to break even, and didn't work on the same profit margins and greedy business models.
The fact that flat-lined revenue is a crisis for big game companies is their own damn fault, a game is a luxury not a necessity, we can't expect money to increasingly pour into game companies forever in an ever increasingly competitive market. If not for piracy, something else would have happened and these companies would have the same problem. A lot more revenue was generated from people playing cod, than first generation consoles, companies are making more money than ever before and are still complaining.
Its just dumb business logic to expect to run a business based on profit in the game industry, when there are much more viable markets to be conducting business in that way.
So that is your solution, stop making games because it does not make sense to make games? I agree with you though, it is simply dumb to start a game development company these days. It requires a ton of skill, dedication, risk, investment and time and a company gets little in return. I have worked in many different IT sectors and game development is by far the least rewarding in terms of revenue, but for me it is the most rewarding considering how fun it is to actually make games.
Sure, there are a hand full of companies that do manage to stay on top for a while. Someone mentioned Valve and Valve just has everything going for them, even though it is just a matter of time they make one product that is not perfect and get shit on. Look at Blizzard, one game, D3 does not live up to expectations and they take a massive hit in reputation that will have a major influence on future sales, even though they have been producing top quality games for decades.
It is like digging for gold or oil, there are a couple of success stories and a whole lot of failures. Also, the person who thinks the game development industry is run by greed is flat out wrong. Companies just want to stay in business so they can keep making games and one failure means bankruptcy and that can lead to very protective/safe game development with little innovation.
Just to be clear, game developers don't want to integrate DRM solutions in their games, it is a major hassle. Does anyone think that DRM would be in if there would not be piracy? But if you build 10000 cars and put them in a holding area and 9000 get stolen, then at some point you are going to put a lock or a fence somewhere.
Face it, the gaming industry is one of the worst in terms of business practices. They competed based on features that are either very expensive to do, superfluous or both. Cutting-edge graphics, voice acting, realistic background physics, all that jazz that come with modern AAA games are very expensive. There were plenty of good games in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s that did not have those and the gameplay did not suffer one bit. The industry competed based on them and made them standard in the eyes of gamers. It's similar to how the airline industry competed based solely on prices. The PC industry also competed solely based on prices.
Some industries are just messed up because of the way they competed for their customers' money. It's important to manage customers expectations, to manage the value proposition you are giving your customers. It's nobody's fault but the game industry's that their value proposition is too much on the expensive, cutting-edge graphics side of things.
I just hope EA gets better. I'm going to be blatantly optimistic and hopeful here and say that I think that not only is this a step in the right direction, but I think the legion of pissed off gamers uniting to bash EA has finally created palpable results. I don't think Riccitiello is the only culpable person here, but I do think that dropping stocks and people not wanting to work with EA has finally brought enough woe to them to make them change. Here's hoping that they become a respectable market competitor and not what they have been for a long time now.
You earnestly think that purchasing a product doesn't entitle you to playing it whenever or wherever you want it? Wings and D3 are laughable in comparison to their predecessors - their perception far precedes just reddit.
If I buy a gameboy and pokemon red for 50 dollars, there should NOT be a stupid message popping up on the gameboy screen to say "Uh...you can't play", even if I'm on the fricking moon.
So what is your solution then? Games actually need to sell a LOT to earn back their investment. Game prices have been the same or even getting lower in the past 20 years, yet development costs have gone up by at least 10 times. With the rampant piracy and devaluation of games because of bundles and mobile/tablet platforms publishers and developers feel forced to do everything within their power to protect their games.
I agree, DRM does more harm than good, but the gamedev industry is a very tough and unstable industry. The animosity that game developers and publishers receive compared to how much effort they put in their games is mind boggling. It is like people have no clue how hard game developers work. It is quite incomparable to any other IT job I know, the crunches are brutal and you often have to relocate quite a bit and there are frequent lay offs after a game ships. How much cheers and praise piracy gets for essentially taking bread out of hard working peoples mouths is even more depressing.
If you only care about the bottom-line (Money), why would you get into the game industry? When you could save all that trouble and start a real estate agency or accounting company instead, and not have to struggle with small profit margins in an unstable industry. Its just insanity.
That's the problem with big game companies, they are unstable simply because they only care about the bottom-line. They only care about getting bigger and bigger, and then requiring more and more money to fill the needs of its ever increasing (and already absurd) size. This ends up becoming a huge bubble that the companies have to go into crisis mode when revenue stops increasing (which has to happen eventually).
Keep in mind that these kinds of greedy for-profit businesses work on the basis that they want more profit every year, to pay their shareholders/executives, that means less money proportionally goes into development each year as well. The problem is not piracy at all. In this industry companies are eventually going to hit a brick wall and stop making more money, and when that happens these companies that absurdly rely on positive forecasts every year are going to go into crisis mode. That's where the problem lies.
Note that Valve isn't having anything like the kind of problems that other big gaming companies have, its not to do with the business model, its that they basically don't have sponsors and shareholders to worry about, and act like a not-for-profit business. I'm pretty sure most if not all of the proceeds are directly invested straight back into Valve.
Even if piracy was as prevalent 20 years ago, game companies wouldn't need DRM because they didn't need to sell a million copies of a game just to break even, and didn't work on the same profit margins and greedy business models.
The fact that flat-lined revenue is a crisis for big game companies is their own damn fault, a game is a luxury not a necessity, we can't expect money to increasingly pour into game companies forever in an ever increasingly competitive market. If not for piracy, something else would have happened and these companies would have the same problem. A lot more revenue was generated from people playing cod, than first generation consoles, companies are making more money than ever before and are still complaining.
Its just dumb business logic to expect to run a business based on profit in the game industry, when there are much more viable markets to be conducting business in that way.
So that is your solution, stop making games because it does not make sense to make games? I agree with you though, it is simply dumb to start a game development company these days. It requires a ton of skill, dedication, risk, investment and time and a company gets little in return. I have worked in many different IT sectors and game development is by far the least rewarding in terms of revenue, but for me it is the most rewarding considering how fun it is to actually make games.
Sure, there are a hand full of companies that do manage to stay on top for a while. Someone mentioned Valve and Valve just has everything going for them, even though it is just a matter of time they make one product that is not perfect and get shit on. Look at Blizzard, one game, D3 does not live up to expectations and they take a massive hit in reputation that will have a major influence on future sales, even though they have been producing top quality games for decades.
It is like digging for gold or oil, there are a couple of success stories and a whole lot of failures. Also, the person who thinks the game development industry is run by greed is flat out wrong. Companies just want to stay in business so they can keep making games and one failure means bankruptcy and that can lead to very protective/safe game development with little innovation.
You're exaggerating the issues by a massive degree.
One failure only means bankruptcy when millions of dollars are spent on it. And for that matter, it has to be an absolutely spectacular failure to destroy a massive company.
Take a look at Gearbox. Duke Nukem Forever, complete flop...but it certainly didn't kill any hype for Borderlands 2. Aliens: Colonial Marines, a completely trash game that got brutalized by players and reviewers...no bankruptcy.
The only time a single game is going to destroy an entire company is when they overspend, devote almost everything they have into it, and fail to turn profit. Anything short of that means the CEO actually managed his resources properly.
Just to be clear, game developers don't want to integrate DRM solutions in their games, it is a major hassle. Does anyone think that DRM would be in if there would not be piracy? But if you build 10000 cars and put them in a holding area and 9000 get stolen, then at some point you are going to put a lock or a fence somewhere.
Car analogies are always so stupid...
If you build 10000 cars, find 20000 exact duplicates on the road the next day, but still sell 98% of your cars, would you keep every employee you have under complete security lockdown for the entirety of their employment? And when all of your employees quit, do you act as though it was the copycats that drove away your work force?
DRM is never about recovering losses. It's about pretending that potential sales are recoverable lost sales, and sacrificing reputation, customer rapport and real money and resources into the hopes that you gain enough of those potential sales to offset the differences.
No, I am not exaggerating at all. You thinking I am exaggerating shows that you don't know how bad it really is. Maybe there are a couple of companies from the 90's that still had some money. Back then 1 success could cover about 4 failures. But the newer game development studios really can't survive a single failure. Hell, the money even isn't at the game development studios anymore, it is at the publishers. Game development studios get "hired" to build a game by a publisher, if it fails the game development studio is done. The money a game development studio gets for making a game covers only that game, nothing more.
Like I said, DRM is stupid, but people spend more time blaming DRM than they spend actively speaking out against piracy, and that is what annoys me. DRM is there because if you don't you will get a 90%+ piracy rate, and again that is no exaggeration. I am not saying this means a company misses out on 90% of its sales, but it does make a big difference.
If that was the case then why did Valve experience a record 50% growth (2012) in a supposed bad period of the games industry. Not to mention that TF2 and Dota2 are free games, even on release TF2 was a fraction of the price of other retail games without micro-transactions.
Valve is growing faster now than EA did when EA didn't even have to compete with pirates.
It makes no sense for EA to be worried about losing money to piracy when overall revenue in the market is increasing.
If a games company is going to go bankrupt over one failed game (not to mention EA has several franchises to buffer its losses) then it is its own damn fault. DRM is just a stupid excuse for the fact that they waste so much money and blame it on piracy.
There is a transition from retail to digital. It is more of a shift than an increase, Valve is riding that wave. Also, Valve is more of a store owner these days than a game developer. They take about 30% of all sales on the Steam store. On the steam store a LOT of games are sold, but they are often also sold at bargain prices or in bundles which is bad news in the long run of the game development industry, but it is good for Valve in the short term.
A game company receiving 70% of a sale on a game that was discounted by steam is more than they would have received in the first place, so it is not necessarily bad. There are a bunch of games that I purchased on steam that I would not have if they weren't discounted, so again not necessarily bad. Also a cheaper end product isn't even bad. I would gladly sell a game I developed for 10 cents if everyone in the world bought it. Trust me I would
Yeah, maybe you are right. It depends on if the balance shifts away from people buying a game at full price to only buying it in the bargain bin. For the bigger titles the bargain bin alone will likely not be enough to cover expenses, but for smaller companies and indies Valve and Steam are a gift from heaven at this point in time. I am not sure if it will last.
There have been numerous reports from game companies saying that their total revenue increases by 200%+ when their games go on sale for 50% or more off from Steam.
"Bargain bin" implies that the optimal price for big games is actually $60, but there's a lot of evidence saying that such a high price point drives off a large part of the market. It's simple Supply and Demand, you have to set a price point that maximizes profits.
So what is your solution then? Games actually need to sell a LOT to earn back their investment. Game prices have been the same or even getting lower in the past 20 years, yet development costs have gone up by at least 10 times. With the rampant piracy and devaluation of games because of bundles and mobile/tablet platforms publishers and developers feel forced to do everything within their power to protect their games.
I agree, DRM does more harm than good, but the gamedev industry is a very tough and unstable industry. The animosity that game developers and publishers receive compared to how much effort they put in their games is mind boggling. It is like people have no clue how hard game developers work. It is quite incomparable to any other IT job I know, the crunches are brutal and you often have to relocate quite a bit and there are frequent lay offs after a game ships. How much cheers and praise piracy gets for essentially taking bread out of hard working peoples mouths is even more depressing.
If you only care about the bottom-line (Money), why would you get into the game industry? When you could save all that trouble and start a real estate agency or accounting company instead, and not have to struggle with small profit margins in an unstable industry. Its just insanity.
That's the problem with big game companies, they are unstable simply because they only care about the bottom-line. They only care about getting bigger and bigger, and then requiring more and more money to fill the needs of its ever increasing (and already absurd) size. This ends up becoming a huge bubble that the companies have to go into crisis mode when revenue stops increasing (which has to happen eventually).
Keep in mind that these kinds of greedy for-profit businesses work on the basis that they want more profit every year, to pay their shareholders/executives, that means less money proportionally goes into development each year as well. The problem is not piracy at all. In this industry companies are eventually going to hit a brick wall and stop making more money, and when that happens these companies that absurdly rely on positive forecasts every year are going to go into crisis mode. That's where the problem lies.
Note that Valve isn't having anything like the kind of problems that other big gaming companies have, its not to do with the business model, its that they basically don't have sponsors and shareholders to worry about, and act like a not-for-profit business. I'm pretty sure most if not all of the proceeds are directly invested straight back into Valve.
Even if piracy was as prevalent 20 years ago, game companies wouldn't need DRM because they didn't need to sell a million copies of a game just to break even, and didn't work on the same profit margins and greedy business models.
The fact that flat-lined revenue is a crisis for big game companies is their own damn fault, a game is a luxury not a necessity, we can't expect money to increasingly pour into game companies forever in an ever increasingly competitive market. If not for piracy, something else would have happened and these companies would have the same problem. A lot more revenue was generated from people playing cod, than first generation consoles, companies are making more money than ever before and are still complaining.
Its just dumb business logic to expect to run a business based on profit in the game industry, when there are much more viable markets to be conducting business in that way.
So that is your solution, stop making games because it does not make sense to make games? I agree with you though, it is simply dumb to start a game development company these days. It requires a ton of skill, dedication, risk, investment and time and a company gets little in return. I have worked in many different IT sectors and game development is by far the least rewarding in terms of revenue, but for me it is the most rewarding considering how fun it is to actually make games.
Sure, there are a hand full of companies that do manage to stay on top for a while. Someone mentioned Valve and Valve just has everything going for them, even though it is just a matter of time they make one product that is not perfect and get shit on. Look at Blizzard, one game, D3 does not live up to expectations and they take a massive hit in reputation that will have a major influence on future sales, even though they have been producing top quality games for decades.
It is like digging for gold or oil, there are a couple of success stories and a whole lot of failures. Also, the person who thinks the game development industry is run by greed is flat out wrong. Companies just want to stay in business so they can keep making games and one failure means bankruptcy and that can lead to very protective/safe game development with little innovation.
You're exaggerating the issues by a massive degree.
One failure only means bankruptcy when millions of dollars are spent on it. And for that matter, it has to be an absolutely spectacular failure to destroy a massive company.
Take a look at Gearbox. Duke Nukem Forever, complete flop...but it certainly didn't kill any hype for Borderlands 2. Aliens: Colonial Marines, a completely trash game that got brutalized by players and reviewers...no bankruptcy.
The only time a single game is going to destroy an entire company is when they overspend, devote almost everything they have into it, and fail to turn profit. Anything short of that means the CEO actually managed his resources properly.
Just to be clear, game developers don't want to integrate DRM solutions in their games, it is a major hassle. Does anyone think that DRM would be in if there would not be piracy? But if you build 10000 cars and put them in a holding area and 9000 get stolen, then at some point you are going to put a lock or a fence somewhere.
Car analogies are always so stupid...
If you build 10000 cars, find 20000 exact duplicates on the road the next day, but still sell 98% of your cars, would you keep every employee you have under complete security lockdown for the entirety of their employment? And when all of your employees quit, do you act as though it was the copycats that drove away your work force?
DRM is never about recovering losses. It's about pretending that potential sales are recoverable lost sales, and sacrificing reputation, customer rapport and real money and resources into the hopes that you gain enough of those potential sales to offset the differences.
No, I am not exaggerating at all. You thinking I am exaggerating shows that you don't know how bad it really is. Maybe there are a couple of companies from the 90's that still had some money. Back then 1 success could cover about 4 failures. But the newer game development studios really can't survive a single failure. Hell, the money even isn't at the game development studios anymore, it is at the publishers. Game development studios get "hired" to build a game by a publisher, if it fails the game development studio is done. The money a game development studio gets for making a game covers only that game, nothing more.
Like I said, DRM is stupid, but people spend more time blaming DRM than they spend actively speaking out against piracy, and that is what annoys me. DRM is there because if you don't you will get a 90%+ piracy rate, and again that is no exaggeration. I am not saying this means a company misses out on 90% of its sales, but it does make a big difference.
If that was the case then why did Valve experience a record 50% growth (2012) in a supposed bad period of the games industry. Not to mention that TF2 and Dota2 are free games, even on release TF2 was a fraction of the price of other retail games without micro-transactions.
Valve is growing faster now than EA did when EA didn't even have to compete with pirates.
It makes no sense for EA to be worried about losing money to piracy when overall revenue in the market is increasing.
If a games company is going to go bankrupt over one failed game (not to mention EA has several franchises to buffer its losses) then it is its own damn fault. DRM is just a stupid excuse for the fact that they waste so much money and blame it on piracy.
There is a transition from retail to digital. It is more of a shift than an increase, Valve is riding that wave. Also, Valve is more of a store owner these days than a game developer. They take about 30% of all sales on the Steam store. On the steam store a LOT of games are sold, but they are often also sold at bargain prices or in bundles which is bad news in the long run of the game development industry, but it is good for Valve in the short term.
A game company receiving 70% of a sale on a game that was discounted by steam is more than they would have received in the first place, so it is not necessarily bad. There are a bunch of games that I purchased on steam that I would not have if they weren't discounted, so again not necessarily bad. Also a cheaper end product isn't even bad. I would gladly sell a game I developed for 10 cents if everyone in the world bought it. Trust me I would
Yeah, maybe you are right. It depends on if the balance shifts away from people buying a game at full price to only buying it in the bargain bin. For the bigger titles the bargain bin alone will likely not be enough to cover expenses, but for smaller companies and indies Valve and Steam are a gift from heaven at this point in time. I am not sure if it will last.
There have been numerous reports from game companies saying that their total revenue increases by 200%+ when their games go on sale for 50% or more off from Steam.
"Bargain bin" implies that the optimal price for big games is actually $60, but there's a lot of evidence saying that such a high price point drives off a large part of the market. It's simple Supply and Demand, you have to set a price point that maximizes profits.
good points. in regards to the 60 dollaars i think the industries been used to it for so long that now that there's a market shift towards cheaper games the companies are all getting hit by it cause their entire budgets are still based around the way it was a couple years ago
EA is getting really close to achiave something marvelous, they have the NEXT BIG THING in esport called FIFA. Also they should lower their price, ppl cant afford buy EA game every 2 months
This video is a great argument why EA will never change - granted it was created in a different context, but it clearly spells out the effects of institutional momentum. Simply put, EA can't change, no matter who is the figurehead.
EPT![[image loading]](http://v.cdn.cad-comic.com/comics/cad-20130320-c775d.png)
. Good fucking games
