m3thod wrote:
Not my words. Written by Jonah Falcon of alt.games.pc.action (i buy games for MP, i don't play SP because if i wanted to play by myself i would have a wank instead)
1. PC sales are going to be dwarfed by console sales. For example, while Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare sold almost 8M on the Xbox 360 and 4.6M on the PlayStation 3, the PC version came in 6th on the most purchased game of the year, barely beating 1M. If you're going to threaten a boycott, you better have the purchasing power to make a dent. MW2 is projected to have 200% more sales on the PS3 version and 140% more sales on the 360 version. Infinity Ward and Activision aren't going to feel the bite of a few thousand bitter fanboys not purchasing a copy.
.2. However, CoD4 was also one of the most pirated games of 2008, with 860K estimated illegal copies. IWNet is Infinity Ward's version of Steam or BattleNet. There's no problem with user-generated content on Steam games like Left 4 Dead or Half-Life 2, either.
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_i … tory=25691* * *
Let's say Activision loses 150K sales from grumpy fanboys. They get back 860K in non-pirated sales. They're already expecting 8M sales from PS3 owners and 12M sales from 360 owners.
Face it, the honor system doesn't work in PC gaming - pirates blew it for the rest of you.
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You think guy has a point?
Well first of all, he's saying "150K." At worst, (the petition is at 10800 now) at $60 a game, they lose $648,000. I mean sure, there's people on there who signed multiple times, or weren't going to buy it, etc. But they can put
at least 500k down the drain when you count in all the people who didn't sign, but still canceled.
Then you've got people on Consoles who stood up against them, on principle (like my brother) and canceled their preorder too.
Then you've got the fact that if you make a shit multiplayer, like they have done with no dedicated server support, people are not going to pay for the (awesome though it may look) single player, and a shit multiplayer that they'll never play. They're
more inclined to pirate it, I know I am.
So their "No dedicated servers party because of Piracy" argument is completely void and invalid.
Activision, like all multi-national companies, have the "We care about the consumer" front. So they're going to have to do something about it to prove they ain't all talk.
If their reasoning was for the alienation of PC gaming, then they've fucked up, yet again. The reason we'd be buying on PCs is due to the fact that we don't like Console gaming, so making a game consolised (with dumbing down or dedicated servers or whathave you) isn't going to make us change platforms, it's going to make us
not buy the game.
Their "Less hacks on our servers" is also bullshit, as I've heard nothing positive of VAC over Punkbuster. Well, I've heard of less innocent kicks/bans, but I've heard of people taking weeks, or even months, to get banned.
Moving servers to IW.net isn't going to solve hacking, getting a better anti-hack program would.
That aside I regret to say that I think the PC gaming world peaked at games like Quake 3, BF2, CoD2 and suchlike. It's just a shame that my favourite pastime is circling the drain, and I'm afraid this move from IW is the doctor telling me to pull the plug.
Should I take up photography?
