u do make a compelling argument and yes..both console and pc game markets have piracy(for lack of a better word)..but pc has more. what pc game makers don't seem to understand is the price difference between duplicate copies and originals is so huge so as to make duplicate copies more desirable. reduce that gap substantially and u'll deal a death blow to piracy. simply abandoning a game platform because of it seems very escapist to me. another good way of generating more income is to explore new markets. simply giving priority to a handfull of countries is not going to do it. take India for instance with its 1 billion plus population. the computer market here is huge and its growing rapidly and so is the game market. and gamers here r still waiting for their copies of James Cameron's The Avatar(the legal copy) which was released weeks ago and the last time i checked with the store i was told i'd have to wait for a week or so more. and this is the case with just about every game release. how long do the game companies expect gamers here to wait. game companies need to get their act together rather than looking for an easy way out.
[Edited by saurabhfzd, 1/24/2010 6:10:26 AM]
Back in the 8bit days, games where cheap to start with, then they were copied and sold left right and centre, forcing the infamous protections to be born, but how can you do that for Tape Based games?
Lenslock was the more unique, a plastic lens cut in ways for a particular game so when held up on the screen on some generated blocks it will show text. Cost of games went up due to this. Those things were not cheap to make and had to be specifically made. Didnt work of course with larger TV's and hurt the consumer.
The olde Word from a book, had to have the original to have the manual to pick a word from. This was easily cracked with people who knew how to. And the worst case scenario for the legit buyer was loss of manual.
Colour coded card, again easy for to be cracked to accept only 1 colour sequence no matter way, Jet Set Willy being the first I believe to use this. Again loss of Key Card was bad for consumer.
Others had a free phone service (free to consumers but not to the publisher so prices had to be higher for that). Where the consumers would phone up to get an activation key for their particular copy. Still used today of course :P
So prices went up, to protect their investments. Then Datel the makers of Action Replay's (yes they did exist way back then) had released the Multiface, able to use multiple joystick ports, specific multiface's could read ram drives, and the main thing it could debug games real time and be able to dump working memory dumps so you could backup games that had Speedlock loaders onto tape to replay them. Many market stalls sold these in that form (dual tape decks didnt really show up until later).
So developers then moved to multiple level loading to combat the Multiface, but as said by then the dual tape decks appeared and people played on one and recorded on the other.
So warez was started really far back then.
And even SNES's were not immune, you could back up SNES games onto multiple 3.5 FD's with a Game Doctor and it could play different region games also.
This is surely untrue if you look at steam and a lot of direct download site that are expanding. A lot of mmos who will be PC exclusive are announced to and don't forget that mmos are the most played games.
i'm actually more worried about offline SP campaigns etc.