Randy Stude, president of the PC Gaming Alliance, seems perfectly willing to cut right through the video game industry's party line on piracy.
Gotta love that.
In separate interviews published today, Stude dismissed dire industry claims that publishers would give up on PC games over the piracy issue. Then he slapped LucasArts for its approach to PC gaming.
On the piracy issue, Stude told Gamasutra:
The [online game] revenues being generated [in China and Korea] just blow the mind. You're talking almost 5 billion dollars. Almost half the world's PC software revenues are coming from marketplaces that have almost no retail at all...
You look at a game like Spore… despite the fact it's pirated out there on torrent networks, its selling great by any standard... it sort of bucks the notion that all games are going to be destroyed because of piracy. That's not the case...
I'm not saying that the [PC gaming] industry needs to accept piracy. I'm saying that if there’s nothing that can be done, the assumption that gaming will die on a platform is ridiculous.
LucasArts was taken to task over a producer's comment that Star Wars: The Force Unleashed wouldn't be ported to PC due to the challenge of developing for a broard range of PC configurations. Stude told gamesindustry.biz:
That's not an educated answer. In the last several years there have been at least 100 million PCs sold that have the capabilities or better of an Xbox 360. It's ridiculous to say that there's not enough audience for that game potentially and that it falls into this enthusiast extreme category when ported over to the PC. That's an uneducated response...
LucasArts hasn't made a good PC game in a long time. That's my opinion... I think the last good PC game they made was probably Jedi Knight 2... So I can understand why they would make that call.
Comments
Re: Some Refreshing Straight Talk on Piracy from PC Gaming
It was almost refreshing until he lashed out at LucasArts. It turned ranting and fanboyish at that point.
Also, comparing radically different markets to eachother (slumping PC Retail sales in the US vs. successful MMO Microtransaction Sales in Asia) to determine that PC gaming isn't in troubled waters is insulting to the unique qualities in both markets.
Re: Some Refreshing Straight Talk on Piracy from PC Gaming
What do you mean its pretty true, though I would say KOTOR was the last. In general though Lucas Arts has been getting shitty. Anyone would say that. KOTOR was done by Bioware, and not only that but Lucas Arts outsources its coding now so what he's saying is pretty true. There not outsourcing because their doing really great.
Re: Some Refreshing Straight Talk on Piracy from PC Gaming
I'm pretty sure Bioware did KOTOR, and I agree witht his guy, Force Unleashed was pretty boring and poorly made imo.
Re: Some Refreshing Straight Talk on Piracy from PC Gaming
Refreshing Straight Talk. Good title, tagline, and article. This guy knows his stuff!
Re: Some Refreshing Straight Talk on Piracy from PC Gaming
I think it's interesting that his response (as posted in the GP article) doesn't address the issue that LA is talking about. LA aren't saying that there is no PC market for the games - they're saying that tailoring the game for numerous PC platform configurations is too difficult. To be frank, with all the problems I've had with games failing to work due to incompatible software and hardware on my PC, I can see LucasArts' point.
Re: Some Refreshing Straight Talk on Piracy from PC Gaming
maybe i'm confusing issues, but isn't he referencing when LA said they wouldn't put it out on PC for a while, due to the rampant piracy?
Re: Some Refreshing Straight Talk on Piracy from PC Gaming
But that's not what GP was saying. The article says that a LA producer said "Star Wars: The Force Unleashed wouldn't be ported to PC due to the challenge of developing for a broard range of PC configurations" and then GP quoted Randy Stude arguing that "It's ridiculous to say that there's not enough audience for that game" as if it were a counter-argument to what the producer said. I guess my point is that GP is getting lazy recently. Numerous 'slow news day' articles and then articles in which the arguments cited just don't make sense unless you go to the source? News articles are supposed to - at the very least - be internally consistent.
Re: Some Refreshing Straight Talk on Piracy from PC Gaming
You're right, but the original comment by LucasArts actually made two separate points. Randy Stude is only commenting on one of them. LucasArts first said that there aren't enough high-end PCs in the marketplace to justify creating a high-end game (with all of the cool physics engines enabled). LucasArts went on to say that they also didn't want to port the low-end PS2 version to PC, because all of the high-end PC gamers would be livid. Then they finished by saying that it would be very difficult to create a version of Force Unleashed which would run well on both high-end and low-end systems. (I'm not quoting LucasArts: this is just what I remember reading).
Randy Stude is arguing against LucasArts' first point: that there aren't enough high-end PCs in the marketplace. Unfortunately, the article that GP mentions does not include this information. It's bad reporting in the original article, and I wish GP had cleaned it up a bit.