14 DAY TRIAL // Piracy has and will be a very hot topic for the gaming industry. Despite the big number of measures that developers and publishers resort to in order to keep their titles away from the hands of pirates, sooner or later things go out of their reach and into the large file sharing networks across the world, where everyone can download them.
We've seen a lot of things done by developers in order to decrease piracy, but one of the hardest ones on the PC gamer, is that games that appear on consoles usually see their PC version gravely delayed, with the most recent case being Tom Clancy's EndWar, which will appear on PCs in March, after almost four months since its release for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
But such a thing only delays the inevitable, says the communications manager of Creative Assembly Australia, Vispi Bhopti, the developers of titles such as Medieval II: Total War and the studio behind the upcoming multi-platform RTS (Real Time Strategy) game Stormrise. He recently talked with Videogamer about piracy, stating that trying to combat it was simply pointless since, if the gamer wanted to pirate something, he would, and the fact that the game wouldn't appear at the same time for all platforms didn't mean a lot to him.
“That's not that much of an issue,” said Bhopti when asked about piracy and its relation to Stormrise. “There's no additional thing that we're going for with that sort of stuff. That's pointless. If people are going to pirate a game they're going to pirate a game. All you can do is delay the piracy, really. But that's just the nature of the beast. We are a PC developer, that's where we started, so you do what you gotta do. We've got Games for Windows Live activation, so it's pretty solid.”
While it seems that at least Creative Assembly is almost content with piracy, it might be good for it to learn a thing or two from Valve, which has a pretty effective way to lure in gamers to buy its titles, namely, via bigger value. Hopefully piracy will slow down this year, despite the recession and the impact it has on the gaming budget of a lot of people.