For those who didn't know, Iron Lore Entertainment, the maker of Titan Quest, closed its doors. Well, THQ creative director Michael Fitch is not a happy bunny about the situation, and he knows exactly who to blame for the downfall of the development house. He blames you. All of you.
"Trying to make it on PC product is even tougher, and here's why.
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."
In a very long rant posted on the Quarter to Three forums, Fitch goes to town on the multitudes of PC gamers who pirate their games:
"Titan Quest did okay. We didn't lose money on it. But if even a tiny fraction of the people who pirated the game had actually spent some god-damn money for their 40+ hours of entertainment, things could have been very different today. You can bitch all you want about how piracy is your god-given right, and none of it matters anyway because you can't change how people behave... whatever. Some really good people made a seriously good game, and they might still be in business if piracy weren't so rampant on the PC. That's a fact."
He also says that pirates giving bad word-of-mouth reviews about Titan Quest's bugs (apparently caused due to their piracy/lack of knowledge) didn't help matters, and then goes on to bemoan the difficulty of working with PC hardware, which he describes as a "freaking nightmare." Oh, but Fitch doesn't stop there -- he labels the majority of the game's audience "stupid" and then starts blaming bad reviewers just to add icing to the misery cake.
Altogether, it's a very bitter, very candid bucket of hate that Fitch has spilled all over the Internet, and one that is likely going to put him up there with Julian Eggebrecht and Jeff Minter. However, unlike those two, there is a very heavy element of justification in Fitch's words. In many ways ... this guy's right.
[With thanks to Boolean]
Contest:
10:14 AM on 03.04.2008
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I found Titan Quest to be kinda meh (wasn't a massive Diablo 2 fan either). Paying homage to and making your primary audience the players of an eight year old game wasn't probably the greatest move to ensure massive sales.
Grow a set, you fucking pussy.
Of course it’s all the pirates fault. Its DVD firmwares fault. Its one reviewers fault. It cant be their fault for making a crap game that has a style of gameplay that got old 6 years ago, oh golly no!
While I don't personally pirate games I do refuse to buy games that go so far as to violate my consumer-rights with their copy protection.
I don't buy games with a limited number of installs.
I don't buy games that REQUIRE me to connect to the internet for authenticication.
I don't buy games games that I can't touch; if it's not on physical media, forget it.
I will not support any company that requires "the ball" to remain in their court. Why should I spend my hard earned cash on "the right" to play a game when that right could be easily revoked (due to a bad business move or case of mistaken identity).
Gaming is a business buddy, and obviously your business model couldn't cope.
Grow a pair and welcome to the world of big boy free markets.
Just like when I bought Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, Troika goes belly-up.
Fact is, if you're going to release games into this market then they better have innovative, fresh ideas, great stories, flawless execution or a bloody big license behind them to bolster sales. From my perspective (and probably a few others), this game didn't offer anything that wasn't done better elsewhere and that's why they failed.
Yeah I downloaded it, but I deleted it after 45 mins playing it was that fun. Glad I didn't buy it as it would have been money wasted.
Pirating is rife, else things like torrents wouldnt exist. The internets not policed at all, thats the issue. Plus some people (Sony and Microsoft) charge really quite worrying prices for their games.
Yeah, that might have something to do with it. I never bothered to buy or play your game, or any of THQ's pieces of shit because of that.
THQ didn't even have the balls to pull an Activision and jack up the price, like they did with COD4 on Steam, and set the price at fucking $88.50, so that, with the rounding error, I would end up paying the full $100 anyway.
You want to make some money, get a decent publisher who knows how to work the fucking distribution system, you tard ass piece of shit. I'm not the only one who can blanket an entire arm of the media (consumer/developer/publisher) as pieces of shit for failing to understand how the people WHO ACTUALLY PAY YOU TO DO YOUR FUCKING JOB want their damn product.
Maybe people pirate so much because they hate dealing with you and your ass clown pimp daddies. Fuck you and the high horse you rode in on, except now the horse pulled up lame and had to be put down. But it made some nice glue.
P.S. Yes, I'm being way over the top. There is a reason for it. Also, WALL OF TEXT.
And no, I'm not on a high horse. I'm downloaded movies, music, and games for free before. But that doesn't mean this guy doesn't have a right to be pissed.
I'm gonna use his tone for a moment:
You know what drives people to piracy? Overly restrictive protection mechanisms and mediocre games offering little to no incentive to plop down some money for some 2-3 hours of gameplay(before you tire of the thing and store it in the closet or the DRM kicks you off for having the gall to actually change your fucking system name.)
You CEOs and cantankorous business majors can stare at your spreadsheets all you want, saying that short term profits maximise future opportunities and all of it maters because you can legislate how people behave...whatever. You dropped the ball but you expected us to be there for you to keep you afloat.
Guess what: I'm fucking poor. I won't spend money on shit, especially if I can find better shit for the same or less money or I can find YOUR shit, less broken for lack of DRM, on a torrent site.
The game was pirated and released on the nets before it hit stores. It was a fairly quick-and-dirty crack job, and in fact, it missed a lot of the copy-protection that was in the game. One of the copy-protection routines was keyed off the quest system, for example. You could start the game just fine, but when the quest triggered, it would do a security check, and dump you out if you had a pirated copy. There was another one in the streaming routine. So, it's a couple of days before release, and I start seeing people on the forums complaining about how buggy the game is, how it crashes all the time. A lot of people are talking about how it crashes right when you come out of the first cave. Yeah, that's right. There was a security check there.
(I didn't paraphrase that last paragraph, That's straight from the post. Here's why: YOU MANUFACTURED A BROKEN GAME. I'm sure the pirates will fix it soon. Meanwhile, I'm sure legit users will experience that crash again come the next Windows Service Pack. Why am I paying money for that again?)
"About a week later, he realized that he'd forgotten to re-install his BIOS update after he wiped the machine. He fixed that, all his crashes went away. At least he was man enough to admit it." Again, not paraphrased. Little bit of a clue here: if his BIOS was to blame and that caused the exact same bugs as your DRM: your DRM is borked.
the numbers on piracy are really astonishing. The research you seem to quote, without referencing it or linking to it pegs the piracy rate at between 70-85% on PC in the US, 90%+ in Europe, off the charts in Asia. I don't believe it even now. It seems way too high. Then you saw that Bioshock was selling 5 to 1 on console vs. PC. And Call of Duty 4 was selling 10 to 1. These are hardcore games, shooters, classic PC audience stuff. Given the difference in install base, you can't believe that there's that big of a difference in who played these games, but you guess there can be in who actually payed for them. Nevermind that a console is usually subsidized and generally significantly cheaper then its PC counterpart. Even though all the DRM is stripped away with a soldering gun and 20 mins of the user's time.
Titan Quest did okay. You didn't lose money on it. So why'd the studio shut down?
Enough about piracy. Let's talk about hardware vendors. Trying to make a game for PC is a freaking nightmare when you forget about standards and scalability, and these guys make it harder all the time. Integrated video chips; integrated audio. These were two of our biggest headaches when you wish to target the minority with extraneous amounts of cash to blow on a 400$ video monster. Not only does this crap make people think - and wrongly - that they have a gaming-capable PC when they can only play WoW, Tetris, all games from last year, Bioshock on medium setting, Fear, Quake4, Doom3, Portal, Half Life2 et al., TF2 and Call of Duty 1, 2, 3 and 3.5(meaning for on medium), the drive to get the cheapest components inevitably means you've got hardware out there with little or no driver support because the developers appear to have ignored developing for the one OS you were targetting...wait, there were no Windows drivers??? Rethink that one. Marginal adherence to standards though I know no card that doesn't handle OpenGL in most of its glory and DX in all but a few functions that DX is readily able to ignore, and sometimes bizarre conflicts with other hardware like back in the DOS days when my Sound Blaster clone would steal my modem's IRQ address.
Oh wait, they don't do that anymore? Nevermind then.
And it just keeps getting worse. CD/DVD drives with bad firmware, made worse by hijacking DRM that swallows the ASPI layer and creates horrible CD mutants that eat your children...blah, blah, blah.
Even if you get over the hump on hardware compatibility - and god knows, the hardware vendors are constantly making it worse - if you can, you still need to deal with software conflicts. There are a lot of apps running on people's machines that they're not even aware of, or have become such a part of the computer they don't even think of them as being apps anymore. IM that's always on; peer-to-peer clients running in the background; not to mention the various adware and malware crap that people pick up doing things they really shouldn't. Trying to run a CPU and memory heavy app in that environment is a nightmare. But, again, it's always the game's fault if it doesn't work, even though you refuse to make Linux software that avoids at least 90% of that crap.
You're also forgetting that of the games you mentioned, they have a console release as well, skewing the numbers.
I know piracy is an issue, but is it really? Stanford released a study on the music piracy issue and found that piracy didn't drive sales down; crappy selection of music in the late 90s killed cd sales. Having too much selection leads to poor sales. Titan Quest had 3-4 versions of the game and expansions out in ~2-3 years. Maybe that hurt sales? Not everyone can be the Sims.
Piracy hurts, yes, but so does poor attitude from devs.
There are a few more major reasons that lead up to the studio's demise, but it doesn't surprise me that they don't want to talk about them...
1) Titan's Quest released along side Oblivion, and as WoW was hitting it's popularity stride and ramp up to BC. With such big name competitors of the same genre, is it that surprising it had problems selling?
2) Advertising was next to nil. I was a huge Diablo 2 fan, and I didn't even hear about the game until I saw it at a friend's house months after release, and he only bought it cause he saw it on sale on a store shelf.
3) The game was buggy as hell, and that can't be blamed on pirating. From corrupted to deleted saves, from broken to bugged quests, it was the perfect example of why games need good beta testing. Even with the most recent patches, I've still run into some bugs.
4) The expansion was less of a true expansion and more like a patch. One new mastery, one new act, and only 15 more levels to play, and it was also buggy as hell.
5) The studio failed to find funding for it's next project, and that doesn't directly relate to piracy. Yes, the publishers may have been dissuaded by the rampant piracy of TQ... but more likely Iron Lore's new project was another unimpressive "Diablo clone," or something else just as underwhelming.
Fitch, before you go blaming every problem your studio has developing a video game on piracy, maybe you should work on making a new and innovative game, and actually advertising it.
Piracy may be a problem, but this Fitch is acting just like the RIAA, blaming every one of his own failures on the pirates.
He didn't create a shirt that took his business to the next level. He created a shirt that was already created 6 years ago and just added some fancier colors.
Never really though of large selection of music driving sales down. I can see how it provides a daunting experience for people just trying to wade through the crap for some good music, and thus causes piracy (why buy bunch of crap to find some good songs when you can just download and run through CD's and put those songs on your ipod but then you already have the whole album dl'd so why go and buy it?) But then its the 90's, was piracy that bad then? I know i recorded episodes of Captain Planet off TV and Laser Disc onto VHS...
I wouldn't mind DRM or good copyright protection if the game was good. It's good to know that I can't enjoy a good game without having to buy it. Makes me feel better about my money spent. It's after the fact of already buying it though. The decision to pirate comes before purchase (or not purchase). And if I heard that the new *Insert 10/10 game here's sequel thats still pretty good* requires a security check to play online (what game doesn't nowadays) and i really want it, i'll buy it. I'll enjoy it more.
But in the long run I think PC companies might have to in some ways develop towards a different niche of casual gamers because I can't play COD4 or Bioshock on this laptop that I boguht 6 months ago. Easier to buy a Xbox360 than new graphics card and motherboard and all that good stuff.
He didn't create a shirt that took his business to the next level. He created a shirt that was already created 6 years ago and just added some fancier colors.
Anyone wanna comment on how that isn't worthy of someone losing their nerve and venting it out on those who he sees caused that? I'm not sure how many people here are actually working and supporting others but it can be a very very stressful thing to lose ones job.
The game wasn't shitty. There is a huge HUGE cry for a Diablo style game in the market. Not everything has to reinvent and be innovative and destroy all things. It's obnoxious and arrogant to demand that every product has to be the next holy grail. Apparently you all would like developers to fall to pieces if they 'fail' you in some way by not innovating something to your 'needs'.
Take a look at your entire life. Is everything innovative? Is everything to its top potential? I guarantee it isn't. "Well ya know... Lucky Charms would be good, but this milk isn't fucking innovative enough, it tastes like fucking milk...what idiot decided that would be good enough to sell! FUCK COWS THEY ARE BORING!"...yes that is how stupid you sound.
The guy lost his job, get off his dick...give him his due course to complain and let it all out. I assure you he is not coming to your house to punch you in the face. Rather he's probably pounding the cement trying to find another job.
Something I hope you guys never have to do in your careers...whatever innovative blockbusting miraculous brilliant careers you plan on doing...I'd love to come and see what the hell you've been up to.
Fuckin snot nosed brats man...not asking for much, just for you to be a little more gracious.
There's not a single criticism that he makes which is unreasonable or inaccurate. If you disagree, take a minute to actually read what he said.
Get a clue, people lose their jobs all the time (what, you never lost a job)? We don't all start bitching about it and publicly decrying everyone who didn't love our product as an idiot and have a right old boo hoo. Stop being so melodramatic.
If there was a huge market for a Diablo clone, it would have sold better. It's that simple. People reading/commenting on gaming sites are not and generally don't represent the 'masses' so a bunch of fanboys fawning over it is meaningless.
Games like Crysis, CoD4, Bioshock et al. will always sell better on consoles because of the cost involved in getting a good experience with it from a PC. Look at older games like Half-Life. On release I bought a new GFX card to play it in all its glory, cost me £70. These days to play a new release in all its glory costs like £400+.
Average titles with exorbitant requirements and piss poor testing/optimisation hurt PC sales more than piracy and don't even get me started on this "We'll release it now and if it sells well patch the dozens of bugs later. Maybe." bullshit that high speed connections enabled.
Don't steal shit.
It's not that hard. The fact that a game has shitty DRM does not give you the right to play it without paying for it. If you don't want the DRM, you can't play the game. Too fucking bad. Don't steal the content and claim you have a right to just because that's what you want.
Wanting something does not give you the right to it.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say that there are no "rights," only privileges. If your internal locus of control is so weak that you're paranoid about someone revoking those privileges, my guess is that you've broken the social contract and it's tearing you up. The man is not out to get you. The man is out to feed his kids.
@LordRegulus:
Whether or not it's the right thing to do, when going against against 'free', you have to make sure your product is at least as easy to use as the pirated copy. If the pirated copy has all advantages and no disadvantages, it makes it likelier the game itself will be pirated by more people who don't want to risk throwing money down for a defective-by-design product.
While I don't disagree with your sentiment, I disagree somewhat with your conclusion:
If I bought something, I damn well better have the right to use it. This is enshrined in many laws. Hell, I have even more of a right then the pirate. So why does the pirate get to install it easier?
My last two big PC game purchases were Portal and Acquaria. Both games were easier to buy then pirate and also well worth their money. Even though pirated versions of both of these were available either on launch day or the day after. And I'm damn happy to have paid for both of these.
Have any of these prevented me in any from playing them? No. Even though Portal has DRM, it's very very noninvasive. But lets say for whatever reason, Steam doesn't work from my location such as my internet is borked or I'm in some country where Valve pissed off the local commie gov't. There is an incentive to go the less legit route as it is more available and easier in that circumstance.
Again, not talking about morality, just reality.
Now, on a side note, let's take the target audience into consideration:
Geeks like toys, shiny things and collectibles. These are things an iso search wouldn't provide you.
What amazes me is so few companies recognize this.
Slap on "Special Edition retail version" onto something with a 5 cent figurine in there and charge an extra 50$ and people will buy it in droves. Piracy be damned.
My feeling is that if a pirated game is easier to use than a legitimately purchased copy, the pirated version doesn't sudenly become acceptable. Under certain circumstances, I'd purchase a game that had restrictive DRM and just run a No-CD crack to circumvent the ass-backwards copy protection. Either way, if I'm playing the game, I owe the developer my money.
You make a great point about collector's editions, though.
I am pleased to see that my evil plans of ruining your life have finally come to fruition.
My mother always said I could make a difference in someones life.
Thank you for letting me be that person Mike.
<3
P.S. - Soulstorm better still be coming out or I'm gonna ruin your phace hole!!
After ten minutes I uninstalled it.
Is he saying it's okay to release games that are utter shit, for me to buy thinking they're not?
I'm kidding about it being shit, it just isn't my thing.
I've been following this topic over on the quartertothree forums for days now. I just wanted to let you know that Michael Fitch did NOT lose his job at THQ.
kthnxbye
My point is not that they made a piece of shit game or anything like that, although I will concede it could sound like it. Rather, I think that, if people is not paying for something you are doing, you have no right telling them they should. Move on, try to make a living doing something else. Is it unfair? Awfully unfair. Is there something you can do? Well, you could bitch about it. Oh wait, he's been there, he's done that.
The reality is however, many people do pirate. These companies need to figure out why that is. There will always be assholes who think that paying for a game is beneath them, but the reality is there are other reasons that people pirate. From release delays, to ease of access, to unnecessary censorship in certain regions (No More Heroes PAL edition), companies need to get on top of that problem before they blame it all on the pirates.
I am in full support of DRM if it doesnt impinge on my ability to use the game that I bought, the rediculous thing is that the DRM in a lot of cases only affects those of us who don't choose to pirate.