“PC gaming is dead” has been the mantra of hundreds of developers for the last 3 years now, and as more and more titles move on to consoles it seems like open platforms have been abandoned due to rampant piracy and non-existing demand… Wait! What am I saying? Rampant piracy AND non existing demand? Impossible. Rampant piracy can only exist with rampant demand, why else would anyone do it?

This week a couple of publishers/developers have gone on the record to say that, in fact, PC gaming isn’t dead… It’s actually at an all time high. With more then 20 million westerners playing MMO’s each week and a hell of a lot more then that playing online games in general PC gaming still far outnumbers all console platforms excepting the PS2.

So what the hell are developers whining about? The answer: non existent sales. Believed by many to be due to rampant piracy. But this is about as intelligent as a doctor that your hair falling out is due to lack of calcium (or whatever) while he’s blasting you with radiation.

Let’s analyse what the hell is happening with piracy and see if we can find any advantages that may sway the public away from buying games:

Non pirate game:

• It will cost you $50.
• it will (with a massive margin compared to DLs) cost you a trip to a store or a few days while you wait for the game to arrive.
• It will take time and irritation to install (install, serial, download patches)
• You’ll need the damn CD/DVD to play it (does everyone even have an optical drive nowadays?)

Pirated game:

• It will cost you very little (Internet bandwidth mostly)
• It will take less time then a trip to the store
• It will install easily
• You’ll never wait in line or be left without it on launch day
• It’ll be easy to install
• Once installed you can play it whenever you feel like it by just clicking the icon.

I don’t even know what to say to this. This is the dumbest way to market something, ever. It’s like selling coke is 1CC bottles that require tools to open them. And what do publishers do to stop piracy? They either hunt down the END USERS of the products and slap them with subpoenas or they install ever worse DRM software making games even harder to use.

Now, I’m not a genius in any way. But anyone can see where this is heading. Piracy will never end while publishers continue this crazy blitzkrieg against their customers.

Hey publishers, need ideas about how to make money from games again? These are just some short idea, I bet a lot of smart people can think of even more ways:

Tips for publishers:

• Only sell high value content in stores (boxed content with extras, more content or just a really nice box)
• Sell ALL games online. There are already services for this, all you need to do is give them a master copy of the game.
• Let gamers register their games for something worthwhile (all multiplayer require an account, don’t be asses though, let customers be able to use their google accounts, open ID accounts and so on. Oh, and make games available for re-download to those accounts)
• Don’t go after end user pirates, that just sows seeds of distrust. When a pirated version of a game is logged online, email the customer informing them that their issue is illegal and give them a credible reason, and easy way, for buying the real thing. How about they cash in but don’t need anything else, they’ll just get an automatically updated serial and the optional box in the mail.
• Learn from other entertainment industries. There are hundreds of possible tie-in products available from toy makers, novelists, children book writers, painters, t-shirt producers and so on. Sign on with a few, it doesn’t matter if you don’t make enormous amounts on the first deal, get the ball rolling and the cash will start flowing.
• Open API for your games information. Most of the successful web apps available today use open API’s so that other services can exchange information with them. Why not in games? Should I, as a player, really need to find my online friends AGAIN for every single online game I play? They all use the same mail addresses anyway. And I can’t even search through my Gmail contacts damn it.

These are just a few suggestions, feel free to pitch in with even more and send this to a publisher near you. Maybe someone will have an epiphany and realise “ooh, keeping customers happy is a good thing!“.