Is the Game Industry Spending Itself to Death?

Is the Game Industry spending itself to death?

The key moment in that discussion on the podcast, and the moment that's really had me thinking was a thoughtful comment from Ryan Davis: Why can't this industry function with a used market in the same way other industry's can? Why is the used game market so out of control that it's actually hurting publishers and developers?

My Co-Hosts, Special Guest  and I talked about this for a bit on the BSHAF recording on Saturday, but I keep coming back to that comment, trying to work through why the used market has been so damaging to console game sales, why piracy has seemed to lay waste to PC game developers and sales. And make no mistake; the used game market and PC piracy are most definitely linked together; they both represent the consumer's (perfectly reasonable) desire to buy items for as cheap as possible (or free, as the PC case might entail). It doesn't have anything to do with supporting game developers or trying to put down a shady corporation like Gamestop. So why are developers and publishers panicked? It almost seems like this industry seems to be....tearing itself in half.

That's the thought I came to not too long ago. And I don't mean in the sense that all this economic dilemma threatens to destroy video games forever. Rather, it seems like this industry is still functioning like we were still in the 90's: when companies could outspend each other on more and more lavish games, when consumers were so focused on this resolution/texture/lighting/graphical effects war between games, when piracy wasn't nearly as easy as it was today, and the used game market didn't seem to pose much of a threat to the Software Developers/Publishers.


It all comes down to money, it seems. Players want games on the cheap. Publishers want to recoup their dev costs and make a profit. Developers want to hold a job, and certainly wouldn't mind a little kickback from a successful game sale. These interests seem to be in dialectic conflict with the "Bigger, Better, More Bad Ass" expectations that players crave, forcing publishers and developers to spend and work like crazy to meet. Meanwhile, development costs for the 360, PS3 and PC have skyrocketed, and here we are: game's are still so expensive that people will happily buy used products, and developers lose control of their product(as well as cash) to Gamestop and other used retailers.

The very gaming world seems to be trapped between the past expectations of gaming as entertainment, and the future realities of development. The Game business seems to be filled to brim with opposites, design criteria from a bygone age that doesn't in any way mesh with the current consumer market:

Take developer Crytek, which turned out an absolutely beautiful product in Crysis, a game that is still, probably the finest looking game ever released. That's the kind of statement that would have guaranteed game sales in the 90's.....However, what's the active percentage of people who could effectively play Crysis the way is was meant to be played? Brutal system specs guarantee that a $3000 computer investment was necessary to play this $50 game. How on earth could anyone justify that kind of purchase? Crytek shot themselves in the foot by trying to be the "Best Looking Game Ever", and ultimately reduced the number of people who could play their game in the process, on top of what must have been a ridiculously costly development cycle. They made a game that most people couldn’t run. How did they expect for Crysis to be a success?

Companies still feel like they need to produce visually stunning blockbusters at all times, forcing them either to create their own expensive engine tech, or go out and license, at the very least, a ton of different middleware products or, at most, someone else’s engine. Those licensing fees must sink into the development budget on a game, forcing the developers to depend on ridiculous new software sales. If the team decides to code their own stuff, they’re going to have to bring in a ton of new employees and workers to try and have the game live up to the unreasonable visual triumphs of this generation, which also eats into development costs and force them to depend on new software sales. Their “bleeding edge” design only forces them to rely more on a consumer base that has no problem paying less money for games, even if that cash doesn’t go to the people who made the game.

At the launch of the PS3 back in 2006, publisher Namco Bandai claimed that games would have to sell more than half a million copies to turn a profit. How many games ever come close to 500,000 sales? Plenty of the games that you and I love would be THRILLED to reach that many sales. How did we let development become so crazy that publishers can’t support the medium we love?

It’s totally crazy that most developers are still trying to outspend the competition, especially when this generation of consoles has provided ample opportunity to make games cheaper, to sell them for cheaper, and to actually see a profit from sales. While most of the “hardcore” on high mountaintops are plenty happy to discourage the Nintendo Wii, it’s absolutely modest(backwards, in fact) hardware power means that games for the system are guaranteed to be made cheaper, and will probably have a better opportunity to make money. GameCube specs be damned, Nintendo proved that consumers would happily and gladly accept cheaper hardware and cheaper games. In fact, one could make a reasonable argument that the Wii’s lower price point was as crucial to its success as the Wii remote. I doubt that a single Wii game cost as much money as the majority of 360 and PS3 games. Developers didn’t need to go too crazy learning the ins and outs of the Wii, meaning games can be produced faster, sooner, for cheap, and for more people on the Wii. Why haven’t more companies jumped ship? Wii owners could use an influx of support from genuine 3 Party games to stop the rise of casual (crap not to say that casual games are crap, but to stop the influx of the crappy casual games). The Wii, every step of the way, has seemed to offer a ton of potential and reduced expenditures for all parties involved with the system.

Indeed, compared to the other two consoles, the Wii seems to offer less headaches for consumers overall. Anyone reading this blog is tech savvy enough to appreciate how much better 360 and PS3 games can look with the right setup. But step back for a moment, and think about what it takes to look its best: a $700 dollar or more High Definition Television. Why on earth does it cost that much to get these “Next Gen” games to look as intended? And how many people, really, are able to take advantage of that setup? Stories like the “too small” text in Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts seems crazy for someone that’s been playing 360 games on a proper HD screen…..but I felt that away about those same complaints made about Dead Rising and Lost Planet, and even worse cases like last year’s release of Pro Evolution Soccer, where the game actually had a worse framerate when played on a lower resolution T.V. These complains indicate, to me at least, that there is still a substantial portion of game players who are enjoying their HD outputting consoles and SD sets, and haven’t found enough of a reason to upgrade. Why does this industry seem to want and outspend its users? Why should players need to buy expensive T.V’s to enjoy their games? The Wii doesn’t need an HD signal to look it’s best, and the result is that more people can enjoy the game. Meanwhile, 360 and PS3 owners with SD sets are looking at blurry games that are sometimes bonedfor those who had the gall to not pony up an extra 600 bucks for a shinier window.

Hell, you don’t need to outspend the competition to make games period. Ironclad Games and Stardock made Sins of A Solar Empire for less than a million dollars. Would that kind of cash buy you an Unreal Development license? Meanwhile, the game has sold over 500,000 copies worldwide. The Witcher, an overlooked RPG delight from long time Polish Publisher/First Time Developer CD Projekt, is running on a modified version of the Aurora engine, the same tech that powered Neverwinter Nights 1 back in 2002. That 5 year old engine was still able to produce a stunning game that’s sold over 1 million copies to date. CD Projekt and Ironclad can handle the reality of game piracy, because they both went into development with lower development costs (The Witcher cost 11 million dollars to produce, meaning their 1 million sales covered their costs a few times over). Lower development costs and solid game design means a dev house is naturally going to make more money and it means they don’t need to rely on mass market sales to keep their business running.

And what about the slow, powerful rise of 2D development as a viable game format? As players have begun to look at 2D games not as a technical hurdle but a stylistic choice, 2D games have found a place on XBL and the PSN. Braid is the combined effort of one man under 200, 000 dollars of development cost. Sure, that game wasn’t a complete market success, but those who played that bundle of joy know, intrinsically, that the quality of the game is not equal to the size of its budget. Would the fine folks at The Behemoth find themselves successful 10 years ago as a 2D game going up against the 3D juggernauts? Their Brawl-RPG Castle Crashers, with its lavish 2D artwork and simple, fun gameplay proved beyond any shadow of a doubt that 2D is still a viable format for design, and that 2D games provide opportunities to programmers and artists to make games cheaply and easily (compared to pricy 3D engines).

My point is this; Game developers need to stop resisting the current state of the gaming culture. Yes, people are going to buy used games from crappy retailers like Gamestop. Yes, people are going to pirate games. Yes, people are jerks. The solution, it seems, isn’t to try and push gaming back to its previous “spend-a-thon” ways, hoping they can still spend a ton of money on games and recoup it in full. It just comes across as large corporations trying to beat back against the current, a futile excessive that refuses to see the current state of gaming for what it is: a large population of gamers who want to spend less on games. Instead, publishers need to take a step back and accept that the market isn’t going to change back to its 90’s era self right away and that means making games in a world where they can be bought used or stolen outright. That reality totally sucks, make no mistake, but companies need to start making games for this new era of development. They need to stop trying to outspend the competition, and start using more modest tech in more creative ways to keep players interested. They need to create more compelling, better designed artwork. The rapid growth of this industry in the last few years, and the major company’s devotion to turning a property into an annual franchise is going to drain those publishers entirely.

Adapt developers! Adapt to the new world and the new market! Accept that people are going to be jerks, and accept that they’re going to naturally want cheap games. Make cheaper games. Make games that don’t absolutely require a million sales to recoup their dev costs. Create a business model that understands that games will be misused by derelicts, and respond by making games that aren’t affected by those fools. Adapt to a model that can make money off of less game sales, or that can allow for cheaper games to be sold. License cheaper engines! Make Wii Games! Create smaller teams, and don’t stretch them to the breaking point. Because, as it stands, with ridiculous dev costs and unrealistic expectations for new game sales (amongst a game buying public that wants cheaper games), I think we all lose.

Except for Gamestop. Those Punks.

What do you guys think? What needs to happen to the game industry for developers and publishers to deal with the Used Game market and Piracy concerns?

Is the Game Industry spending itself to death?

The key moment in that discussion on the podcast, and the moment that's really had me thinking was a thoughtful comment from Ryan Davis: Why can't this industry function with a used market in the same way other industry's can? Why is the used game market so out of control that it's actually hurting publishers and developers?

My Co-Hosts, Special Guest  and I talked about this for a bit on the BSHAF recording on Saturday, but I keep coming back to that comment, trying to work through why the used market has been so damaging to console game sales, why piracy has seemed to lay waste to PC game developers and sales. And make no mistake; the used game market and PC piracy are most definitely linked together; they both represent the consumer's (perfectly reasonable) desire to buy items for as cheap as possible (or free, as the PC case might entail). It doesn't have anything to do with supporting game developers or trying to put down a shady corporation like Gamestop. So why are developers and publishers panicked? It almost seems like this industry seems to be....tearing itself in half.

That's the thought I came to not too long ago. And I don't mean in the sense that all this economic dilemma threatens to destroy video games forever. Rather, it seems like this industry is still functioning like we were still in the 90's: when companies could outspend each other on more and more lavish games, when consumers were so focused on this resolution/texture/lighting/graphical effects war between games, when piracy wasn't nearly as easy as it was today, and the used game market didn't seem to pose much of a threat to the Software Developers/Publishers.


It all comes down to money, it seems. Players want games on the cheap. Publishers want to recoup their dev costs and make a profit. Developers want to hold a job, and certainly wouldn't mind a little kickback from a successful game sale. These interests seem to be in dialectic conflict with the "Bigger, Better, More Bad Ass" expectations that players crave, forcing publishers and developers to spend and work like crazy to meet. Meanwhile, development costs for the 360, PS3 and PC have skyrocketed, and here we are: game's are still so expensive that people will happily buy used products, and developers lose control of their product(as well as cash) to Gamestop and other used retailers.

The very gaming world seems to be trapped between the past expectations of gaming as entertainment, and the future realities of development. The Game business seems to be filled to brim with opposites, design criteria from a bygone age that doesn't in any way mesh with the current consumer market:

Take developer Crytek, which turned out an absolutely beautiful product in Crysis, a game that is still, probably the finest looking game ever released. That's the kind of statement that would have guaranteed game sales in the 90's.....However, what's the active percentage of people who could effectively play Crysis the way is was meant to be played? Brutal system specs guarantee that a $3000 computer investment was necessary to play this $50 game. How on earth could anyone justify that kind of purchase? Crytek shot themselves in the foot by trying to be the "Best Looking Game Ever", and ultimately reduced the number of people who could play their game in the process, on top of what must have been a ridiculously costly development cycle. They made a game that most people couldn’t run. How did they expect for Crysis to be a success?

Companies still feel like they need to produce visually stunning blockbusters at all times, forcing them either to create their own expensive engine tech, or go out and license, at the very least, a ton of different middleware products or, at most, someone else’s engine. Those licensing fees must sink into the development budget on a game, forcing the developers to depend on ridiculous new software sales. If the team decides to code their own stuff, they’re going to have to bring in a ton of new employees and workers to try and have the game live up to the unreasonable visual triumphs of this generation, which also eats into development costs and force them to depend on new software sales. Their “bleeding edge” design only forces them to rely more on a consumer base that has no problem paying less money for games, even if that cash doesn’t go to the people who made the game.

At the launch of the PS3 back in 2006, publisher Namco Bandai claimed that games would have to sell more than half a million copies to turn a profit. How many games ever come close to 500,000 sales? Plenty of the games that you and I love would be THRILLED to reach that many sales. How did we let development become so crazy that publishers can’t support the medium we love?

It’s totally crazy that most developers are still trying to outspend the competition, especially when this generation of consoles has provided ample opportunity to make games cheaper, to sell them for cheaper, and to actually see a profit from sales. While most of the “hardcore” on high mountaintops are plenty happy to discourage the Nintendo Wii, it’s absolutely modest(backwards, in fact) hardware power means that games for the system are guaranteed to be made cheaper, and will probably have a better opportunity to make money. GameCube specs be damned, Nintendo proved that consumers would happily and gladly accept cheaper hardware and cheaper games. In fact, one could make a reasonable argument that the Wii’s lower price point was as crucial to its success as the Wii remote. I doubt that a single Wii game cost as much money as the majority of 360 and PS3 games. Developers didn’t need to go too crazy learning the ins and outs of the Wii, meaning games can be produced faster, sooner, for cheap, and for more people on the Wii. Why haven’t more companies jumped ship? Wii owners could use an influx of support from genuine 3 Party games to stop the rise of casual (crap not to say that casual games are crap, but to stop the influx of the crappy casual games). The Wii, every step of the way, has seemed to offer a ton of potential and reduced expenditures for all parties involved with the system.

Indeed, compared to the other two consoles, the Wii seems to offer less headaches for consumers overall. Anyone reading this blog is tech savvy enough to appreciate how much better 360 and PS3 games can look with the right setup. But step back for a moment, and think about what it takes to look its best: a $700 dollar or more High Definition Television. Why on earth does it cost that much to get these “Next Gen” games to look as intended? And how many people, really, are able to take advantage of that setup? Stories like the “too small” text in Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts seems crazy for someone that’s been playing 360 games on a proper HD screen…..but I felt that away about those same complaints made about Dead Rising and Lost Planet, and even worse cases like last year’s release of Pro Evolution Soccer, where the game actually had a worse framerate when played on a lower resolution T.V. These complains indicate, to me at least, that there is still a substantial portion of game players who are enjoying their HD outputting consoles and SD sets, and haven’t found enough of a reason to upgrade. Why does this industry seem to want and outspend its users? Why should players need to buy expensive T.V’s to enjoy their games? The Wii doesn’t need an HD signal to look it’s best, and the result is that more people can enjoy the game. Meanwhile, 360 and PS3 owners with SD sets are looking at blurry games that are sometimes bonedfor those who had the gall to not pony up an extra 600 bucks for a shinier window.

Hell, you don’t need to outspend the competition to make games period. Ironclad Games and Stardock made Sins of A Solar Empire for less than a million dollars. Would that kind of cash buy you an Unreal Development license? Meanwhile, the game has sold over 500,000 copies worldwide. The Witcher, an overlooked RPG delight from long time Polish Publisher/First Time Developer CD Projekt, is running on a modified version of the Aurora engine, the same tech that powered Neverwinter Nights 1 back in 2002. That 5 year old engine was still able to produce a stunning game that’s sold over 1 million copies to date. CD Projekt and Ironclad can handle the reality of game piracy, because they both went into development with lower development costs (The Witcher cost 11 million dollars to produce, meaning their 1 million sales covered their costs a few times over). Lower development costs and solid game design means a dev house is naturally going to make more money and it means they don’t need to rely on mass market sales to keep their business running.

And what about the slow, powerful rise of 2D development as a viable game format? As players have begun to look at 2D games not as a technical hurdle but a stylistic choice, 2D games have found a place on XBL and the PSN. Braid is the combined effort of one man under 200, 000 dollars of development cost. Sure, that game wasn’t a complete market success, but those who played that bundle of joy know, intrinsically, that the quality of the game is not equal to the size of its budget. Would the fine folks at The Behemoth find themselves successful 10 years ago as a 2D game going up against the 3D juggernauts? Their Brawl-RPG Castle Crashers, with its lavish 2D artwork and simple, fun gameplay proved beyond any shadow of a doubt that 2D is still a viable format for design, and that 2D games provide opportunities to programmers and artists to make games cheaply and easily (compared to pricy 3D engines).

My point is this; Game developers need to stop resisting the current state of the gaming culture. Yes, people are going to buy used games from crappy retailers like Gamestop. Yes, people are going to pirate games. Yes, people are jerks. The solution, it seems, isn’t to try and push gaming back to its previous “spend-a-thon” ways, hoping they can still spend a ton of money on games and recoup it in full. It just comes across as large corporations trying to beat back against the current, a futile excessive that refuses to see the current state of gaming for what it is: a large population of gamers who want to spend less on games. Instead, publishers need to take a step back and accept that the market isn’t going to change back to its 90’s era self right away and that means making games in a world where they can be bought used or stolen outright. That reality totally sucks, make no mistake, but companies need to start making games for this new era of development. They need to stop trying to outspend the competition, and start using more modest tech in more creative ways to keep players interested. They need to create more compelling, better designed artwork. The rapid growth of this industry in the last few years, and the major company’s devotion to turning a property into an annual franchise is going to drain those publishers entirely.

Adapt developers! Adapt to the new world and the new market! Accept that people are going to be jerks, and accept that they’re going to naturally want cheap games. Make cheaper games. Make games that don’t absolutely require a million sales to recoup their dev costs. Create a business model that understands that games will be misused by derelicts, and respond by making games that aren’t affected by those fools. Adapt to a model that can make money off of less game sales, or that can allow for cheaper games to be sold. License cheaper engines! Make Wii Games! Create smaller teams, and don’t stretch them to the breaking point. Because, as it stands, with ridiculous dev costs and unrealistic expectations for new game sales (amongst a game buying public that wants cheaper games), I think we all lose.

Except for Gamestop. Those Punks.

What do you guys think? What needs to happen to the game industry for developers and publishers to deal with the Used Game market and Piracy concerns?

The Used game market can easily be fixed for the developers by making shops like GameStop pay a % royalty when they sell a used copy of a game, so that the developers get a bit of cash from it. Unfortunately, its Piracy that has just pwnt PC gaming, because of how easy it is to download and crack games. I do not know of a solution to this that would not majorly anger people, but if this online problem was embraced and tackled while it was developing to make it more pro-active to the industry, then PC gaming would be fine. However, we've gone too far with piracy, and software limitaions do not stop piracy, but infuriate paying customers, and I am out of ideas to suggest.

Well, game development does cost an exorbitant amount of money now a days, but really how did it become that way?

Simply, it is the people who push for better and better graphics, and could care less about the game play. Which, is a rather large portion of people who fancy themselves "real gamers". Those aforementioned individuals would toss a game aside if it didn't look "omg amazing" even if  it was incredibly entertaining. Game companies worked more and more to satisfy this demographic, and competed with each other, to make the best looking games. Which cost more and more, even if game play did suffer.

Stop humping your shitty Braid.

There's going to be a time where the money spent on games will drop dramatically, and it will only happen once the game market crashes, it seems.

EA made loads of money off of Crysis. And Crytek themselves put together a $900 dollar computer that could run Crysis on High settings, for the sole reason that ignorant non-PC players were complaining that it costs "$3050 dollars" to play Crysis. SImply not true.

The point of Crytek's advancements in the graphical department is to advance the industry as a whole. When the Xbox360 was coming out everyone was saying "It'll look as good as Far Cry" and now the next consoles are expected to look as good as Crysis, or better. If nobody pushed these limits we'd be very slowly increasing the visual amazement for each indivdual game. Crysis was made for a reason, and it wasn't to be the next Mario. Sure it's supposed to make a profit, and it did, but there are other motives being put to work here.

I want to read your blogs Bodega, I really do. But the weird font disparities and images messing with the formatting hurt my eyes.

Gears2 already went Double Platinum in its first weekend. 99.99% of them were new copies.

Bodega my man.  Reading this blog really left me confused as to what the hell you were trying to say @.@.  Just saying...

I once heard someone say that buying used games is the same as being a pirate, at least in the eyes of developers, and unfortunately that statement is true. While I have purchased used games and will continue to do so in the future, I think GameStop's profit is way too much and they are "stealing" more from the industry than over used game retailers. It's ridiculous that I can walk into a GameStop and find a used game that's only three dollars off the price of a brand new sealed copy. It should be way cheaper than that.

Regarding your question about why more developers don't go to the Wii, I believe it's because they don't think "hardcore" games will sell well on there, which has been partly proven by past sales of games on there. If they can just make a crappy casual game and sell tons, why take the time and effort to make a great game that won't sell much at all?

Unfortunately, I think there will come a time when most games will no longer come to shelves and will only be available through digital downloads. I say this is a bad thing simply because I love having physical media. However, this would be great for developers because it would cost them less money in the long run and potentially make more profit. I really don't know how combat piracy, or if there's even a way to do so, but I do know that DRM is not the answer. It is silly to punish consumers and treat them as a potential pirate and lock them from accessing their game sensibly.  There have already been PC developers who have stopped using DRM and have come to terms that they cannot stop pirates, such as Brad Wardell, who says the pirates don't matter and that his company does not put copy protection on their games.

Anyway, to the real argument of this blog: I think developers should, foremost, make the games fun to play. Stop worrying about technical limitations, stop trying to cram so much into one game that just becomes filled with glitches and technical problems that it results in being unplayable, focus on making a good game first. Get the mechanics of the game right before worrying about how graphically intense the game will be. Make sure new features will be accessible and will work properly. Don't throw something in at the last minute and expect players not to notice. Above all, make the games fun!

Anyway, great blog post Bodega!

First of all that was a great read.

As a PC gamer i think a big way piracy could be lowered on the platform is to allow PC games to be traded in and sold as second hand. I can't think of a single retail outlet that will accept second hand PC games or sell them. Sure you could search on eBay or other sites but that has the added issue of unreliable sellers, extra postage costs and sometimes just damn right bad quality second hand games (scratched discs?). A lot of PC games stay at full retail price for a long long time where as console games can be bought second hand from stores at a much more reduced price. People don't want to pay to the same price a PC game had at release when they go to buy it a year later.

Then there is the issue that a lot of games on the PC seem to be released in a "just out of beta but not really refined much" state where bugs and issues from the Beta stage of the game are still there in the retail version. People don't want to wait weeks or months for patches to allow them to continue and finish the game after they have already paid for it with the money they've earned. Sure it seems like a really stupid reason to pirate a game but there is some logic to it in a strange way, why should people pay to play a game thats broken? Why should consumers put up with half assed releases of a game and put up with having to wait for patches to fix issues with it, Why should consumers be forced to pay for games that are in some cases broken, Why do developers and publishers feel the need to release a game with bugs?

All these questions and very few answers from the people who make and publish the games. If developers focused less on trying to create a game that essentially rapes a players PC and focused more on creating a game that is fun, enjoyable and has a player wanting to load up a new game we wouldn't have these issues. Quality > Quantity in this case is what i say. I don't want to play a game that lets me do everything i could ever want to in a game if it can barely run for more than 5 minutes without crashing or breaking. I'd much rather have a game thats a little linear, less ground breaking but more stable and fun to play.

Like you said Valve have been using the same old Source Engine for a number of games now and each of those games has been awesome to play. Sure they aren't ground breaking compared to some games but they run well, they play great and Valve have kept ontop of them by using Steam to continually add extra content and improvements to the games they release. And in the case of CDProjekt and The Witcher well that was a true triumph from a first time developement team. Using the old NWN engine, tweaking it and producing a 50+ hour RPG of great quality that sold over a million copies and then releasing an Enhanced Version of the game for free and for retail was even better. It was a great sign from the developer that "hey you all made this game a success for us by buying it, here is what we're using that profit for, to make the game even better for you all".

But then you have Crytek and the issue they had with PC gamers, accusing us all of being pirates and blaming piracy for the poor sales of their "golden" child of a game Crysis. I admit Crysis was and still is the BEST looking game ever made and you can't deny that was really all Crytek were pimping about the game during its developement. But when it sold poorly they instantly blamed the consumers and PC gaming community instead of actually looking at the situation in a mature manner. Crysis was a system hog that either required you to spend a small fortune to buy a new PC or spend a smaller but still significant amount to upgrade your current one. And when you consider they released the game at Christmas time, the most expensive season of the year for everyone, amongst a bunch of other great games releases (COD4, The Witcher, Orange Box, Gears on the PC etc) you can see why the game sold so poorly.

Why would anyone spend the price of a new PC or upgrades on one game when they could buy the Orange Box (5 games in one box) and all the other great titles for around the same price as upgrading their PC yet still be able to play all these games perfectly on their PC without the need to upgrade? Crysis to me is like that hot blonde at the end of the bar, shes beautiful, you want to "play" her, but when you go up to chat to her you realise there is very little substance behind all her make-up. The excuse that piracy destroyed sales for Crysis is poor, especially when hardly anyone could run the game anyway but it should of been a message to Crytek that yeah they focused too much on making a visually amazing game but focused too little on optimising it and making the gameplay worth the purchase.

As for second hand game sales hurting developers and publishers i think those two groups should be asking themselves why their consumers feel the need to trade their games in after buying them, the same applies to piracy aswell. They need to ask why do players feel they have to pirate or trade in games instead of pay for them and keep them. I think demanding a share of profits from retail stores who sell second hand games is wrong. Its like saying you demand every teenager who sold the copy of a game to a friend or traded it for some beer share part of that profit. If i sold my copy of Rise of Nations to a friend for £5 or a packet of cigarettes should i split that with the developers and publishers?....

I think if developers and publishers actually made good games they wouldn't worry. But all i keep seeing is developers of mediocre games complain while EA, its always EA for fuck sake, keep complaining aswell. While Valve and Activision / Blizzard (or Blizzvision as i call them) are pulling in the money by creating good games, providing good support for them and not treating all their possible consumers as pirates and criminals. The big problem is the industry NEVER seems to want to accept failures caused by themselves and how they acted, they always want to blame outside sources whether its consumers or retailers for poor sales of the games they created or published.

The industry needs to take responsibility for its actions instead of playing the "pass the blame game". Because while they continue to be dicks, they will be treated like dicks.