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In what is surely to be one of the most hilarious interviews made this year, Crytek and Epic Games explain why their games have fallen to low sales.

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Said Yerli, “We are suffering currently from the huge piracy that is encompassing Crysis. We seem to lead the charts in piracy by a large margin, a chart leading that is not desirable. I believe that’s the core problem of PC Gaming, piracy, to the degree [that PC gamers who] pirate games inherently destroy the platform. Similar games on consoles sell factors of 4-5 more. It was a big lesson for us and I believe we won't have PC exclusives as we did with Crysis in future. We are going to support PC, but not exclusive anymore."

This statement confirms the attitude a lot of game developers discussed earlier this year at the 2008 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, CA. We spoke with Mark Rein, VP of Epic Games, and learned that the Unreal Tournament 3 servers received over 40 million attempts at illegitimate access using pirate keys. That number is huge, and the real magnitude comes when you calculate the retail price of $49.99 (59.99 for Collector's Edition).

If those 40 million players actually paid the full price, it would have been nearly $2 billion more in Epic’s pocket book. That is more than the quarterly sales results from Nvidia or AMD. To add another perspective, the government lost out as well, because no sales tax is earned on pirated copies.

When you take into account that Crytek saw similar levels of pirated copies, it is easy to see how big of a deal gaming piracy is. Between two games there were billions of dollars of lost sales. The natural instinct is of course to hit the platform(s) where they can actually earn money, which is looking less and less favorable for PC gaming.

Crytek's problem is that they have built a game that has so much hype surrounding the amazing graphics struggling to pull 60 FPS on top of the line graphics cards that it has lead 90% of the PC gaming public to essentially say "why bother when I can't play it?" Whether that is Crytek's fault or not is up in the air, but they certainly took no measures to prevent such thoughts.

Epic, on the other hand, simply needs to STFU. They have made the exact same game for the past 4 years now, with each one being more reliant on graphics than gameplay as the years past, that people aren't bothering with UT anymore. You wanna know why Epic is facing financial problems with each passing game? Because their entire company is run by complete d-bags. They make Gears of War, it goes on to sell millions until people begin to realize how little it achieved, so Epic somehow think that they are able to be able to make relevant comments about the industry; completely ignoring the fact that most everything they have made in the past 5 years was shallow crap in a really nice wrapper and that they represent everything that is wrong with the industry all by themselves. Furthermore, there is no way to even prove anything related to such a number in sales revenue lost, because it implies that that many illegitimate server connection attempts are all separate people; which is nowhere near the truth.

PC gaming is dead (and console gaming is beginning to be), but it isn't because of piracy. Its because of crappy, unfinished releases; companies like Epic; and strong arm bull like this.
Besides, here is the alternative.

The entire industry is in dire need of a major, 1983-like crash simply because thoughts of companies like Epic that are so widespread and narrow-minded. The domination of the "Graphics first" mantra has made the whole industry a rotting corpse of itself, a blame which I place squarely on the heads of Sony. Sooner or later, PC gamers are going to realize that most of the next big amazing graphical showcases are just 10 year old gameplay with really pretty paint (Doom 3, for example), and they will stop bothering. PC games won't take that much of a hit as graphics card producers will. However, it will then destroy the console market.

A court asks the RIAA to justify its fines based around legal fees for music. This is a clear step in the right direction for big companies not hurting little people.

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A US COURT is forcing the Recording Industry of America to explain why it charges people it catches pirating $750 a single rather than the 70 cents they flog them to retailers for...


...The RIAA fought to prevent the amendment to Ms Lindor's case, claiming it was not up to her to decide damages. They said that her complaint about the level of damages was without merit and if the amendment went ahead it would prejudice them.
Of course it would. If the RIAA was forced to claim back the real market value of the music that was nicked by pirates it probably would not be worth the effort. It also looks better on a press release if they can claim that a pirate stole $7,000 worth of music when they actually only stole $7...

When you read article after article about how piracy is not what companies tell you, you have to wonder why we need these crazy IP laws.

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The most recent locally commissioned study was in the late 1990s, Mr Macnamara said. Many copyright holders claimed links between piracy and organised crime, but AIC researcher had found nothing to support that view. "Either there is no evidence of any links between piracy and organised crime or it is simply beyond the capacity of rights holders to identify these links," he wrote, adding that he was concerned about the way piracy figures were being used.

UK group wants CDs to have DRM logo. I agree, this would make people aware they are buying crap.

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For instance, a DRM system may allow a CD to be played on a PC but would not let tracks from that album be copied so they can be listened to on a portable player such as an iPod. The MPs' report made several recommendations and called on the Office of Fair Trading hasten the introduction of labelling regulations that would let people know what they can do with music and movies they buy online or offline.

What is Web2.0. ASE is already at 3.0!

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The term is audacious: Web 2.0. It assumes a certain interpretation of Web history, including enough progress in certain directions to trigger a succession. The label casts the reader back to Sir Tim Berners-Lee's unleashing of the World Wide Web concept a little more than a decade ago, then asks: What forms of the Web have developed and become accepted enough that we can conceive of a transition to new ones?

Swedish government website goes down. The pirates fire back? http://www.thepriatebay.org is back up as well.

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Sweden's domestic intelligence agency said it would probe why the government's Web site crashed on Sunday amid reports hackers had sought revenge for a crackdown on alleged online piracy. The government Web site went off line in the early hours of Sunday. The Internet home page of the national police crashed in similar fashion on Thursday.