I just read a long, but very to-the-point, thread by Michael Fitch on the Quarter to Three forums. The latest blow in a seeming barrage against the state of PC gaming. Michael is the Director of Creative Management at THQ, the publisher for Iron Lore Entertainment’s PC game: Titan Quest. ILE, just last week, closed operations for good. Even after releasing a fairly critically acclaimed game. Although, a publisher would probably rarely shoulder the blame of a studio failing, he makes some points on the state of PC Gaming and why good games and good developers have a hard time succeeding on the platform.

He brings up many of the same points as have been addressed before, and that have been brought to the forefront especially in the last few months. Number one complaint from developers, publishers, and industry gurus?

Piracy. Yeah, that’s right, I said it. No, I don’t want to re-hash the endless “piracy spreads awareness”, “I only pirate because there’s no demo”, “people who pirate wouldn’t buy the game anyway” round-robin. Been there, done that.

This follows several other smacks upside the PC head:

• a report stating that PC gaming piracy could represent up to 90% of people playing the games.
• An interview with Chris Taylor, where he states the “old model” of PC gaming is dead, and that a new secure gaming model is needed for the future of the platform.
• CliffyB’s statement to MTV that PC gaming will become secondary to Epic games… a gaming company founded on PC games.
• Infinity Ward’s blog confessing their amazment at the amount of pirated versions they detected when gathering online player stats.

This is a disturbing trend. No, not the piracy, but the disheartening comments from PC game makers. Piracy on the platform is not a new concern by any means. I remember well the early days of PC gaming. Before most PC’s had hard drives, and we were lucky to play in 4 colors (CGA). Yes, I remember having to turn to page 34 in the game manual to type in the 13th word on the 27th line before I could continue on with my grand quest to kill the odd magenta sprites with my blue 3-pixel-long sword. I also recall going to PC user groups long before a public internet existed, where we traded BBS phone numbers, and people would sell dozens of game disks. Game disks were all the pirated versions of current games they could fit on one 5 1/4″ floppy. We’d visit those BBS’s and there we would log on and play our turns on a usually pirated version of Tradewars 2002. No, that wasn’t in the year 2002, it was just named that. It was in the late 80’s. And it wouldn’t be the users pirating, it would be the BBS owner. And finally I remember the “dark books”. The keyed books that were of a construction paper color so dark as to thwart people photocopying the thing. I’m pretty sure I owe my aging vision problems to the brown Keef the Thief dark book.

(I really love to show my age for some reason.)

Based purely on my “feel” of the past and current age of PC games, I thought piracy had improved. Honestly piracy was almost the accepted norm back then. I remember walking home with my $50 Hitchhiker’s Guide to the galaxy text based adventure. I had been saving for it, and bought it right when I saw it in the store. I come to find out that I may have been the only person I know that actually bought that game, and yet everyone had played it. The state of piracy, if anything, seems to have either stayed the same or slightly improved. And yet, PC gaming was still years from its golden years of Quake and Halflife… so how did upstarts like Id and Valve survive and thrive in such a hostile PC gaming market?

Just as I seek to delve headfirst into the gaming industry, with my goal of making PC games the rest of my life, now is the time I need more reassurance that the bottom will not fall out. Sure, I will always be there slogging away with my mouse and keyboard, but who will be with me?

There are a few rays of light. Shortly after CliffyB’s proclamation against PC development, he and his company became one of the founding members of the PC Gaming Alliance, along with Microsoft, Dell, AMD, Activision, Intel, Nvidia, Razer, Acer. This group vows to invigorate and revolutionize PC gaming, instead of allowing it fold into the chasm of consoles. In addition, the biggest game publisher, Electronic Arts, is testing the waters with a type of game immune to piracy: the free game. No one is more surprised than this former EA employee!

Besides, it’s not as if console games don’t have their own piracy problems.