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tl;dr:
A pretty good series of games gets shelved because of piracy. :[
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I'm going to take a different tack here and say that part of the problem in the game industry, and especially the PC industry (where "innovation" and so forth is, in theory, easier) is this - the consumer is not willing to pay what a game is worth. And I'm not just talking about those people who say "wah the game is expensive and I'm poor" - I think that part of the problem is that the maximum willingness to pay is set at or around $50 and no one's willing to pay more. So the industry is struggling with ways to try and make a game that's competitive but can possibly break even at the price point they're stuck with.
When I see lots of these "make a game that's worth it and we'll pay" posts, it reminds me of a local-to-my-town message board that has a thread start up every time a restaurant closes. There was one that closed recently and the owner hopped on the thread and blamed the closing on the new anti-smoking ordinance, local construction, and various other factors. People BLASTED him saying basically "yeah well if your food had been better you would still be in business - other restaurants are doing fine with the ordinances and construction!" (for the record, he had lots of facts to back his side of the argument up)
But restaurants have this interesting advantage in the marketplace where people are willing to pay more for better food and service/atmosphere. If you're content with McDonald's three times a day then you spend like $6 a meal, tops. If you eat at a decent chain restaurant then you pay $10-$15/meal. If you eat at the trendy place downtown you can pay $40+ per plate, and really the sky is the limit on how much you want to spend the higher you go.
But with the game industry, $50 is pretty much the max. It doesn't matter if the game was done with a middleware engine and so you just had to pay artists and level designers (yes I know it's not quite that simple but play along with me here) or if you spent over 10 years making the game (and it had better 0wn). Xbox 360 owners are only begrudgingly paying $60 per game (and, I'm betting, buying fewer because of it). When a game releases additional content via microtransactions, they catch holy hell over it (see: Oblivion).
So when some developers like Ritual and Valve had the bright idea of cutting down their development time (yes, EP2 is delayed but its still coming a lot quicker than HL2 did) and charging less to try and balance things out, they catch holy hell as well. When something like Steam comes along and cuts out some of the distribution costs, gamers bitch that those savings aren't passed on directly to them.
And as for GalCiv2 - as an owner of GalCiv2, I love the heck out of that game but honestly - it's a fluke. The game has, at best, Civ4 levels of interest (which is nowhere near, say, Quake2 levels of interest). I think it got a lot of "sympathy sales" from people who decided to get it to show support for copy protection-less games. I think if all games were released sans copy protection, the piracy problem would just become rampant again. The fact that Wal-Mart reported it as their #1 seller is an artificially high statistic since Wal-Mart only stocked collector's edition copies of the game for some reason.
Plus it's not like GalCiv2 is without copy protection entirely - you need to have a valid key in order to apply patches. It has "activation" similar to Windows XP. It's just that you could, if you wanted to, play 1.0 forever with no updates or patches (kinda like if Vista without a key just had an infinite "trial" you couldn't patch). Plus for all its sales, the makers of GalCiv2 still don't feel confident enough to release the expansion by itself at retail (they went the "gold edition" route).
Anyway, maybe if the "artsy" games like Okami or ICO charged more they would have made enough money to break even. Maybe if developers could make sequels to the games they want to but charge more (want NOLF3? It's going to cost more...) the market would work out a little better. Maybe if games didn't have such a fast route to the cheap bin. Maybe if Steam allows, long term, for games to have a much longer sales life than on a retail shelf.
Maybe if gamers were willing to pay what a game's worth the industry would be better off. Just a thought.
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