Gears of War 2 - not coming to PC

This is truly a sad day indeed. I do agree with him (here we go again) that piracy does hurt game sales but I cannot believe that people dont pirate Xbox games. What is stopping people from pirating console games in general that he goes ahead and makes a statement like that? Reason I ask is because the first ever console I purchased was only a month ago and it was a PS3 which I went ahead and left at my house in California while I am here out in Atlanta. So why does Cliffy say that? Surely its just a matter of making an ISO and slapping it onto a torrent site?

 

People do pirate the games but it involves getting the 360 modded. Easier with older consoles, a little more difficult with revisions. Not a good idea with console software updates. You're essentially buying the Xbox to play offline.

Now... as to how many people do that compared to PC... *shrug*.

 

Hmm I always took a console to be like a PC. Except without the Xbox Live and all that. So if they can effectively prevent the console from piracy why cannot they apply the similar principles the PC?

 

I'm fairly certain their anti-mod/hack updates just prevent the users from accessing Gold membership components i.e. online play. Even then, it's not 100% foolproof - Silver membership (no online gaming, just access to XBLM or game updates) may work just fine. The specific XBL account might be disabled permanently though.

For 360, each console has a unique ID that gets banned, so the console is effectively offline, but it's still functional. But then again, MS etc may require OS updates installed with the latest games that prevent the game from running... not sure if it's really a big issue though.

For one thing, the platform is closed and fixed. Microsoft/Sony/Wii can focus efforts for specific software exploits as they become known and roll out updates appropriately (through online or on-disc with the latest games).

The actual anti-piracy measures are done in hardware revisions, be it a new DVD drive with custom firmware or other. It's not invincible of course, but past DVD drives have been known to be the main deterrent i.e. finding third-party supplies of the vulnerable DVD drive. It's not insurmountable, but... IMHO, it's a lot more effort than just going online and finding a disc crack.

 

Hmm I wonder then why one of these big optical driver manufacturers just release such dedicated drives with that kind of firmware/drivers that act as a deterrent. That will probably be a better approach than having to resort to DRM in the traditional sense as we PC users have come to know it and this situation with the PC gaming industry can be avoided? Perhaps I am oversimplifying things...

 

I don't believe UT3 has sold all that well even on consoles. The UT name is not only not established there, but it just doesn't seem to be that good of a game anyway.

 

Well I won't be getting it on the 360 EPIC (even though I did with the original Gears) so thats one lost sale.

 

Ah fair point Richard didnt think about that

 

*Yawn* when they stopped putting energy into making good games and instead redirected it to over-warp their gibberish talk comming from their mouths it just..... went downhill.

*EPIC R.I.P We wont remember you tomorrow*

 

While UT3 didn't sell well on any platform and GeoW1 was a year late, that doesn't negate the point that piracy is a problem, especially in the enthusiest PC segment... oh, and they sold like 5M copies of Gears of War on the 360 and get a huge marketing push from MS which has helped them move their middleware into dozens of studios and has put them in a position to do the same in the future. You may not be remembering them, but I don't think they even care at this point as they are having more success on the consoles than most PC devs ever dream of.

 

Well then don't pretend it's about piracy. Come out and say it's about chasing the middleware cash with MS help (so MS can sell consoles), and that they prefer to make dumbed down glossy games rather than have to do annoying stuff like following up on great games.

It's like watching George Lucas go from the Original Trilogy to the prequels.

 

Whoa, now! Let's not get ahead of ourselves there! At least UT3 looks passable. The PT is total shit.

 

Hype sells...

 

It was also an inferior game in many ways.

A 2007 multiplayer only game released with basically deathmatch and capture the flag? The loss of the massive amounts of customization, maps, and modes the previous games supported? Yah, way to go. (gameplay wise, I think it was fine, a carbon copy of ut2004 with hover boards and better physics)

BTW, Gears of War wasn't a bad game. Had some clever gameplay moments, decents amount of suspense, and was graphically very wowing and immersive. Well, minus the horrible animation, animation needs a HUGE increase in quality before I'll even care about moving graphics beyond the gears of war level. Multiplayer would have been fun too, had it not felt so consolized. (limited number of players, small maps, few game modes, limited customization)

Because then your PC could only run code authorized by Microsoft.


UT3 was to UT2004 what Quake N64 was to Quake PC (or Doom 64 to Doom 2). The only thing the release of UT3 did was convince me to reinstall UT2004, and I bet it could be modded to bring its graphics more on par with UT3's than UT3 could be modded to match UT2004's features and mods.

 

Mark Rein commented at VE3D:

 

Does everyone at Epic now spend their time at PR-Speak lessons instead of polishing gameplay?

 

It's about piracy too.

Just look at the sales of Crysis and the drastic change in Crytek's development approaches...

 

Was that about piracy, or about no one thinking they had the hardware to run such a monster game? Or the fact it was very short? AFAICT, Cryteks response was to re-launch Crysis as Warhead, but with better multiplayer, and better able to run on most systems. They gave the game more longevity, and optimised it so it ran acceptably on a much wider range of machines. Even they've said they did themselves no favours by marketing the ultra-uber settings that no one could run, and this is what became the perception of the game - something that looked great but that anyone without a $3000 PC couldn't see or play.

The thing is, there arn't any reliable figures about piracy. No one knows how many game should have been sold if there was no piracy. The figures quoted make no sense, and are really nothing more than pulled out of the air. It's just an easy scapegoat for a poor selling game without true evidence behind it. It's a perception, not a reality. In a recent thread, when we looked at how many copies of Crysis that Crytek think they should have sold, it comes out to more than the number of people that play WoW! You really think that Crysis was good enough to sell more than WoW?

Even EA recently said a a download isn't a lost sale, so you can't even make that kind of link reliably:

Daniel James also take a more stoical and realistic stance over at Penny Arcade recently:

I've said it before: good games/movies/music sell. Bad ones do not, regardless of DRM. The reason why Epic is leaving the PC platform is not because their games are pirated, but because their games don't sell. Epic look at that and say their games would sell well if it wasn't for all that piracy. I look at those same reasons and say their games would sell if they made PC games, instead of console games that the PC gamers don't want to buy.

I've bought all the UT games, but I didn't buy UT3. I'm sure Epic, in their state of denial count me as a lost sale due to piracy, but in fact it is purely down to the shortcomings of the product they offered me. I declined to accept their product in a state that I considered to be unfinished and incomplete, and spent my money elsewhere. Ultimately, who's fault is that lost sale?

 

1.5 million for months ago? And multiplatform? They announced that like 2-3 years ago that CryEngine would also support the consoles.