I love a long goodbye
"The person who is savvy enough to want to have a good PC to upgrade their video card, is a person who is savvy enough to know [BitTorrent] to know all the elements so they can pirate software," says Bleszinski. "Therefore, high-end videogames are suffering very much on the PC."
Now, I'm as much of a Dude Huge fanboy as the next Gears of War fan, and I've been a fan of his work since the original Unreal Tournament, but this statement is pretty absurd. Let me begin by saying that I have no interest in a PC version of Gears of War 2. I already have it pre-ordered for the X360.
First of all, I'm not going to suggest that he be loyal to the platform that made Epic and him. Times have changed and the business model on the PC is tough, rough, and all kinds of bumpy. And let's also assume that his statement is true.
From Epic's standpoint, any venture that makes a net profit is probably worth getting into, right? So let's examine if Epic can in fact make a profit on porting Gears of War 2 for the PC. Since I don't have any real numbers, I'm only appealing to reasoning and what one might think to be the case.
The primary concern for Epic must be the opportunity cost involved with having their developers make the port. This is offset by the fact that ports are easy to make, so they could probably hire some small team (of possibly co-op students) or another small studio to do this for them.
The cost of developing a port is miniscule compared to developing the original game. Often it is "gravy" on an already baked cake (yay mixed metaphors). Now, I've explored the issue of DRM before (maybe I haven't here, I will later!), but companies are convinced of the faulty premise that people would be buying their game if it couldn't be pirated, which is false. But, suppose Epic puts in an online validation for whenever you wanted to play multiplayer online, which is a really unintrusive and sensible thing to do. They could even use a great platform like Steam to do it. So then people pirating the game would only be able to play the single player. Let's face it, if you're playing Gears for the single player, you're probably not buying the game anyway. It's not like the single player campaign or style is completely revolutionary.
So then, can Epic sell enough copies to make a profit on the port? Consider that Sins of a Solar Empire sold half a million copies without any DRM at all. I realize that the higher requirements puts Gears into a smaller market, but the X360 is 3 years old. I can't imagine many gamers out there don't have a PC more recent that 3 years old. Also, with graphic options that you can toggle, you can reach a wider audience. So, are you seriously telling me that you don't think Gears 2 is a more enticing (or better) game than Sins of a Solar Empire?
I understand the issue of piracy, especially for developers. I can understand that it might not be smart to make an entirely new game targetted for the PC. What I don't understand is this seeming crusade against profit just to spite pirates.
