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Capcom Blames Piracy for Poor DMC4 PC Sales
by Aaron Linde, Aug 01, 2008 8:00pm PDTCapcom corporate officer Christian Svensson revealed that the PC edition of the company's demon-slaying action title Devil May Cry 4 (PC, PS3, 360) saw poor sales since it debuted early last month, owing in some part to rampant piracy of the game.
"It's not doing as well as I would like in the US at retail," Svensson wrote on Capcom's official blog. "It's such a good version and it really deserves better sales. I know it's getting pirated to hell and back (it was up on torrents literally the day it shipped)."
The executive added that he had pushed for more prolific digital distribution of Devil May Cry 4's PC incarnation, but was stonewalled by Capcom Japan. Despite the frustration, Svennson reiterated his commitment to bringing more Capcom titles to digital distribution outlets.
"For the record all CEI-developed titles will be distributed extremely widely via digital channels... I've spent the last year building up that channel," Svennson stated, noting that GRIN's downloadable side-scroller Bionic Commando Rearmed (PC, PS3, 360) would see "broad digital distribution for PC."
"I have a presentation I'm making shortly that I'm hoping will make that approach something we do with all of our PC content, even those developed in Japan, but no promises. It might not happen," he added.
Comments
No, not everyone who pirates a game would have bought it. But when you can go to any torrent site at any given moment and see thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people downloading a game, even weeks after it came out, how can any reasonable person not accept that there were lost sales there?
Sure, we don't know what percentage of those pirated copies are lost sales, but just because we don't have that figure, does anyone truly believe that means the potential sales are negligible?
We know from firsthand statements that Ritual saw considerably more technical support requests from pirates than from legitimate customers on Sin Episodes. Does it matter if you thought that game wasn't good? No. Clearly, those pirates thought it was good ENOUGH to try to get it to work right.
It would be absurd to think that's an isolated example. Because every time anyone brings this up--be they a top-shelf developer, or a less prominent one--people think of a million reasons why that particular game or that particular developer just don't DESERVE the support of the discerning PC gamers. At that point, they stop being isolated examples, and they become part of a very clear trend.
Arguments like "Nobody wants to play this on PC" or "PC software is buggy" are ridiculous. If people genuinely didn't want to play it or already played it on consoles, they wouldn't pirate it. If PC software is too buggy, they shouldn't be pirating all those PC games.
The really sad and frustrating part is, the only effect this shit has is that more and more developers and publishers are just going to stop bringing their games to the PC. Why even bother, if the system is already such a pain in the ass, and the community is full of so many stubborn idealogues?
I'm not even accusing anyone here of BEING a pirate, although doubtless there are some. People just have this incredibly quick-tempered reaction as soon as piracy comes up, citing all these other potential factors, always the same ones--too buggy, game sucks, not right for the PC, etc. It doesn't matter. At the end of the day, if lots of people are still pirating it, those arguments are basically meaningless.
Sure, console piracy exists. But I would bet real actual dollars it's not remotely as much of a problem on home consoles as it is on PC. I mean, look at the PSP--there's a system where piracy is known to be considerably more widespread, and unlike the home consoles it's pretty easy to see the effect. Maybe it's because it's harder on home consoles (I haven't tried on either, so I wouldn't know), maybe it's just a psychological thing where people don't associate those systems with piracy.
But again, when it comes down to it, regardless of those factors, if PC software is consistently pirated more than console software, and it clearly is, it's going to continue to be a disincentive for full-scale game developers to put their games on the system.
And yes, you can point to Blizzard and Valve all you want. Not every developer is, or can be, a Blizzard or a Valve. In the real world, that's just how it is. Other companies can't really afford to sit around and generate twelve years of goodwill while they hope that their games turn out to be some of the best-selling titles of all time--not everyone is actually capable of that, and you shouldn't have to be stacked up against two of the top few companies in the entire industry every time this shit comes up. It's completely unrealistic.
So people can be self-righteous and smug until the cows come home, but it's not going to be doing anything good for the platform long-term.
I love the smaller, more niche, lower-budget PC titles, the ones like Stardock's that are less affected by this type of thing. Those are great. But I ALSO like the bigger-budget ones that just by virtue of how the world works need to sell more to make it worthwhile to put them on PC. I like being able to use my PC for a wide range of gaming. I like that companies are starting to take more chances on the PC again, finally. I don't like that when they do, and they run into the sad reality of rampant piracy, they're met with nonstop snarkiness.
I'm not even going to get into arguing against people who defend the piracy itself (rather than just attacking the developers who cite piracy), because those arguments seem self-evident. Fortunately I don't see much of that here to begin with, which is at least something of a good sign.
I can already envision what all the responses to this post are going to be, if this thread stays active! We'll see how it goes.
Thread Truncated. Click to see all 214 replies.
So, the game sold ok. It was insanely more popular on torrent sites. Don't tell me that's an issue of "the game looked like shit or ran like shit so naturally people didn't buy it". It's also not an issue of people not knowing what they were getting into, there was a demo that clearly showed how the game would run, look and play. You claim that Crysis would have sold better if it ran better, I'm not so sure. The other issue is, CryTek obviously didn't expect it to sell 4 millions but the amount of piracy implied to them a lot of people played it despite of your issues with the game yet didn't wanna pay for it. THAT's what they were disappointed with.
Blizzard's and Valve's goodwill is tied to the quality of their games and the fact that they address a very large user base with them (and that includes hardware, sure technically it's not the lowest common denominator, thank you for being anal about it, but they definitely don't aim for the current top hardware either), with their reputation and money they can afford to postpone games until they're virtually bug free and near perfectly optimized, few other companies can afford this and CryTek certainly isn't one of them.
You imply that if everyone made stuff like Blizzard and Valve do, more people would buy those games. I challenge that as well, because it's not realistic to expect every single dev and publisher to I for one do not WANT everyone to make games like Blizzard and Valve do, I want variety. That includes making games with lower potential sales in mind maybe because the concept of the game is somewhat arcane, or because the game won't run on Joe User's hardware. There's a lot of games who run well and don't get bought, and still get pirated a lot. They can afford to maintain this goodwill because their success builds on good games that sold well when you couldn't download any game without leaving the house. You can't expect everyone else to miraculously achieve the same.
Devs usually complain about their games' sales in relation to the piracy (however they count the latter), hence why I say you blame the devs - you're using the same classic "make better games then they sell" fallacy all pirates use to excuse their habits. A game that doesn't run well won't sell nor get pirated much, but if it sells ok but gets pirated like mad, ie. when people find it perfectly viable to pirate what they claim plays and runs like shit, I doubt a more bugfree, less demanding game would have sold significantly better.
Oh, and another thing. Developers (or rather, publishers) aren't defenseless against piracy. Why do you think Mass Effect did well on the PC? Might it have something to do with their much-critiziced activation DRM and the fact that although there was a torrent quickly, the crack wasn't working for days (at least)? Or the fact that, again, we're talking about the game from an established developer, a dev that has the hype and fanbase (and with that a lot of sales) already built in? A game that already had it's praise and hype on another platform half a year earlier?
I'm simply saying, you can't make subjective statements like "Crysis either ran or looked like shit" to claim "therefore sales had to suck", you can't expect every single developer to be Valve or Blizzard, especially not new ones, and you can't detach the whole piracy problem from certain games by saying "tough luck, should have made this game run better" because pirates pirate, whatever, whenever, because they can, and the quality of the game they pirate is often just mentioned as an excuse for their action.
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