It's not piracy, it's profit. The PC is not nearly as profitable as it once was, and development costs are going through the roof. The install base of consoles is much higher than the install base of gaming capable PCs. And with the PC's being sold shifting more and more to laptops and small desktops, which you couldn't even add a decent GPU to if you wanted to, the market is only shrinking more and more when it comes to high end AAA titles.Originally Posted by RaZz!
This wasn't the case back in the day when laptops were out of the reach of most people and everybody had desktops, and all you needed was a simple GPU upgrade and that was that. Oddly enough piracy was easier and more rampant back in those days, but nobody cared cause you'd still sell a metric ton of your game.
Take EPIC games who wisely quit the PC gaming scene rather than stick around on the Titanic. The first Unreal Tournament cost less to make than the later ones, sold more, and was pirated more. Why? People could run it and they were selling a game to a large install base. The last one, well most people can't run it because as soon as a laptop IGP won't do it or a low end desktop card you've just counted out almost all the PC's being sold in the world. So the game sold like ass.
Game devs aren't stupid, they care about PROFIT. And the PC is an extremely dumb platform to create an AAA title around because the install base sucks and is rapidly shrinking as computing moves towards smaller and more portable systems.
Piracy has always been around and rampant, but it didn't matter. With a shrinking base of people owning computing devices that can actually play a AAA game, and the amount of people with a console that can growing, all while the cost of making a game is skyrocketing, it's a no brainer. Piracy just makes the situation a bit worse.
You can pirate the hell out of portable systems, but those are still the most profitable because there are so damn many of them in the wild, it doesn't matter how many people steal the game, you're still going to sell enough for it to count.
It's simple, the PC is most powerful platform out there, potentially. But the amount of PCs actually out there capable of doing that isn't that much compared to the amount of consoles out there. And the more and more the difference between a gaming PC and your average laptop/small desktop grows, the greater this gap is going to be, and the less "gaming capable" PC's there are going to be out there.
This can only be changed two ways. Either software developers are going to have to start making software so bad you need a quad core, gobs of RAM and a high end GPU to run an OS, email, and word (not going to happen), or hardware makers are going to focus more and more on power efficient items that can be crammed into small boxes and game devs will focus on that, giving them a rather large install base.
Till then, it's just simply not profitable enough to bother with a PC game. Outside of making your cash on console and porting over a version in hopes of making a little extra.
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