LATEST CHATTY HEADER
Subscribe to Shacknews Mercury starting at $1/month!
Chrome Shack Community Guidelines Chatty Search
Scroll down to join the conversation.
New to Shacknews? Signup for a Free Account
Already have an account? Login Now
Subscribe to Shacknews Mercury starting at $1/month!
Chrome Shack Community Guidelines Chatty Search
Scroll down to join the conversation.
tl;dr:
A pretty good series of games gets shelved because of piracy. :[
Thread Truncated. Click to see all 150 replies.
Mass-appeal games appeal to enough people that pretty much anyone will buy it. Piracy of these titles rarely matters because the tide of legal purchases outnumbers the numer of petty thefts.
Platform defining titles are generally tied to their platform, and tend to sell well not only because of word of mouth and platform support, but because of bundle deals. (I own five copies of "Myst," all of which came bundled with my machines over the years.)
The niche title are where piracy can start to hurt. Just as not every movie will be a Bruckheimer action blast or sappy ship-sinking chick flick, not all games are going to be cross-generation friendly or capable of defining a platform. There are games designed for certain audiences. I'm in the unenviable position of having worked entirely on games in this category. With "Links," the double-blow of competition with Tiger Woods and end-game franchise mismanagement led to the shift to the Xbox, and the killing blow came because not enough customers from our niche followed the game to the new platform. As for first-person shooters, well, I've spoken with enough people in the industry that I know the numbers...and I've lived the numbers. Hell, when a heavily anticipated AAA title with a $3 million ad budget gets popped up on some Russian BitTorrent servers a week before release and ends up only selling 60,000 copies during week one when pre-orders for that title were over 250,000, you can start doing the inferences yourself. These are the games that piracy hurts.
One only need look at the fate of Clover Studios and Looking Glass to realize that art games don't sell enough to make back their money, regardless of whether piracy enters into the equation or not.
The post has been reported. Thank you!
You must be logged in to post.
You must be logged in to post.