this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2024
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I saw a thread last week of PC gamers saying red dead for PC is gonna cost too much so they will just pirate it.
Honestly as a dev I would avoid PC as a platform, the fanbase is unpleasable and no matter how much they argue that it's not true, 1 third of PC gamers openly admit to pirating instead of buying.
I also find PC gamers are becoming a toxic group, they hate everyone
Source? My sample size is small, but out of my entire group(maybe 11 people) exactly one pirates PC games. I'd be shocked if 1/3 of gamers in general were pirating stuff with any kind of regularity.
If you're including pirating console games to play via emulation that number jumps drastically, though.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/745996/gamers-pirating-video-games/
https://www.pcgamer.com/pc-piracy-survey-results-35-percent-of-pc-gamers-pirate/
I just don't see how this type of statistic is attractive to a company who wants to sell games. Gamers may not like it but to a business executive, that's a scary number. consoles have pretty much eliminated pirating. It's certainly not as easy to do as it was back in the pre online days with a PS1 PS2, etc. I get downvoted but I'm trying to look at this through the eyes of capitalism and it doesn't work. Lemmy likes to shoot the messenger. PC gamers asked why devs ignore them, here's why.
I'm just looking at the PCGamer article- I don't have a Statista account and I'm guessing the only source for that is the PCGamer article anyways because the numbers are the exact same.
There's ~46,000 response that reported income there, and 22217 of them reported making less than $10,000. Another 9179 said less than $25000. I don't think this is going to be indicative of gamers in general based off of just that.
Across the board the most common reasons were 'demo game', which would likely end up resulting in a sale anyways, and 'can't afford' which would likely not result in a sale regardless of the ability to pirate.
But you're right that I could absolutely see an exec reading that article, looking at a chart and losing his mind.
Honest explanation of perspective from a PC gamer deciding weather or not to buy a game I think a dev should know:
I don't think a game I played over 10 years ago is worth paying $40 again without some good value added to it. What makes this worth $40 to me as a consumer who enjoyed the original? I don't see enough value to justify it.
It's also a coin flip if the port is good, functional, or will have arbitrary technical limitations like no modding. I also don't want to get screwed over and inconvenienced like the last time I gave them money. They are removing value from an over priced product by slowing it down and treating you like.
If I think a game is worth pirating, I am most likely willing to buy it or a future product from that dev if the situation was different or the product was better. Hell, I pirate games I intend to buy to make sure there not absolute dog shit and technically functional. I personally don't thing its worth pirating Red Dead even without DRM, I already played it years back and I suspect Rockstar will make this version worse than the original knowing how they done things in the past.
I'm assuming I'm going to have to create an account, consent to spying, not own anything, install additional software to allow me to login and launch the game since they don't like the one I choose, figure out compatibility, be exposed to predatory monetization, install a root kit to make sure I'm not bypassing monetization or cheating, worse performance, wave legal rights to contracts, deal with too little or too much moderation, and it still may be a turd that disappears 5 years alter after all of that. None of this is fun and removes value form the fun I would expect to purchase. I'm offended they think any of this shit is good. This is what will get PC players to hate your business. If you do this crap and you can only justify it to share holders and not customers, I want you to fail.
Corporate developers make games as an investment product and not a creative product. Denuvo is in the business as a designated ball squeezer that takes the reputational heat for a greedy dev that needs 0.3% on profit chart. We are not Denuvos customers. Denuvos customers are soulless board members creating investor profit by betting their reputation is still good enough to start enshitifying without immediately getting customers to jump ship.
Having a talking head come out once a week to make an offical statement calling people literally every insult in the book for saying "Game looks like shit and this dev has a track record of being shitty, save your money" is going to start a fight.
Nah, they should ditch consoles, the money is in PC anyways...
Sounds stupid, doesn't it?
This is depressing.
Isn't it though?
Especially knowing mobile revenue is all just pay to win whale hunting and gambling addiction. There's no reason games like Pokémon can't exist on mobile. But they'll never do it. And if they do it's gonna have in game currency.
Is this saying the most money is in vr? That's the only part of this that is surprising to me.
Edit: Wait no, I think it's just a confusing graph. It's definitely all in mobile
No, majority of the money is in Mobile is how I read it... size of the spreads and all.
As a PC gamer, I only pirate games I don't know whether I'm going to like or not. And even then, most of the time I'll probably end up buying the game later if it's available on Steam or GoG if I actually like the game, so I can support the devs. I personally don't have the time to buy a game on Steam, play for less than 2 hours to find out whether I like it, and get a refund if I don't.
User Nuke_the_whales doesn't like how toxic PC gamers are.