Excelent Qt3 post

Here is a post that every indie developer should read. It's from the one of the producers of Titan Quest, whose company just shut down because they do not have the funds to continue in the industry. He rails on piracy, reviewers who don't do their job, and the overall difficulties of creating a PC game.

http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?t=42663

[edit] Yeah, I know how to spell "excellent". I just missed that typo before I submitted the post. :P

So making a sh*te Diablo clone had nothing to do with their failure? Buck. Passing.

Indeed - the game was pretty boring.

As a side note, this has been (so far anyway), the only item I've (or rather the Post Office) has lost in the post, when I sold it on eBay...

I did get compensation from them, by the way...

the 'crack check bug' was a double edge sword
pirate gamers crashed without warning
potential gamers dithered over buying due to bugs

if they said "this game is quitting cos its a pirate"
then the crackers would then fix said bugs as and when found

in the end though no crack check would have been better

im bored with reading the "i use nocd cos i bought it and get penalised yet pirates dont"
just ditch the fing policy and accept that people would copy your game / album / dvd

with dvd's im also sick to death with the unskippable warnings and some dvd's dont allow the "you wouldnt steal a car hand bag mobile phone" movie to be skipped either

but i would think about killing the entire film crew and cast

im always swearing at the dvd
"no i wouldnt you fing c*** do i have to install a fing webcam and show you the fing box you stupid piece of shit"

The best way to sell your game is make it not suck.

Also console games are pirated too. I don't know if all of this generation has been cracked yet, but the last certainly was. If you want to make a connection between PC sales and console sales, remember consoles are strictly for playing games on. PCs are more often for work, research, porn, Facebook, etc.

Not everyone thinks of a PC as a gaming machine, otherwise there'd be way less of those $400 crap-tastic Dells on the market.

I'd say that was the second best. The best is it to make it work. I tried two or three different patches for Titan Quest, and it crashed after ten minutes of play no matter what. Fortunately, it was boring, so I didn't miss much, I guess.

Crashing is definitely part of sucking. Anyway, if you're making a PC game, you're pretty much required to accept that piracy will happen, no matter how many hours and dollars you sink into stopping it. So the best thing to do is make it good enough that enough honest people are willing to pay for it.

I don't see why PC developers should feel they're in some special kind of world where they can expect zero risk. Any kind of producer of product risks losing out, whether you're a farmer facing the drought or crop failure or a music producer gambling on the re-emergence of Polka as a popular genre.

You examine the risk and decide whether it's worth it, and if it's not, you go do something else. Then again, if you're really smart you'll just find a new business model that works.