Do not buy Gears of War 2

Posted by Michael Gaines
September 30, 2008

This morning, Maximum PC posted an article saying that Epic will not be releasing Gears of War 2 for the PC. The reason why? Frontman Cliffy B. said,

“Here’s the problem right now; the person who is savvy enough to want to have a good PC to upgrade their video card, is a person who is savvy enough to know Bittorrent to know all the elements so they can pirate software. Therefore, high-end videogames are suffering very much on the PC.”

Cliffy, here’s the problem with your statement: not all of us with high end rigs are pirates. Was there a time when I pirated games? Yeah, when I was 16 years old and was lucky to be making $3.35 an hour. That was back in 1984. Once I got a real job I started buying games and haven’t pirated a game since they were distributed on floppy discs.

I’m well aware of the rampant and easy piracy problem. I object to piracy because I’ve had something of mine blatantly stolen once many years ago and I can understand how it feels to have something copied for free. However, Cliff’s assumption that the people that can afford a high end gaming rig are the cause of piracy in the first place is a terrible insult to those of us that are honest and spent all this money on a rig just to have a game taken away from us because we’re guilty by association.

So here’s my solution to the problem: don’t buy Gears of War 2. Let these developers know that instead of working hard making a game for people, they’re instead NOT making a game for those of us that are appalled at what decisions are being made about the game’s distribution. Oh sure, it’ll sell well on the Xbox 360, but it won’t sell to an entire market because of some silly belief that high end gaming rig owners are all a bunch of pirates.

I’ll speak directly to Cliffy here: take the time and effort that you put into innovating your graphics engine and put it towards a system where you can sell the game to PC owners with little or no piracy issues. Innovate. Do something the industry as a whole can benefit from. Give the game away for $1 and sell a subscription model so that people are forced to log in. You can’t pirate World Of Warcraft because you need an account to play, so why not charge people to access a login server? This way there’s little-to-none DRM because without a login you can’t play the game.

Gaming

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  • Brad
    I don't think your suggestion is a very good one - I don't want to buy a game that I can play for as long as those servers are up and running...I still play games that are 7-8 years old like Diablo II for instance.
  • Well, in this case we're not getting a game at all. Regardless of the suggestion, I think lumping all high end PC owners as pirates is disrespectful.
  • I does suck that they feel forced to abandon a platform because of piracy but if they feel they are unable to make good money then I suppose I don't blame them.

    The PC gaming market seems to be dying. With the exception of some big MMO's its getting less and less exclusives and the consoles are taking over.

    As a PC gamer myself I play less on the PC. I used to play Battlefield and HL2 but games like COD:4 and Battlefield on the 360 are filling my time. The consoles were lacking the online aspects of PC gaming but that's now no longer the case.

    I think the lack of a Gears PC release is the first of many.
  • Bloodwin
    Aside from the piracy issue, many people who play on PCs will own an XBox as well and IMO that's where this kind of game belongs. Gears of War looked pretty but other than that there was no new gameplay. It didn't do anything significantly different or even better than Halo. There's also the thing that many PC gamers play MMOs on their PCs now. I know I haven't seriously looked at another game since playing WoW these last 3 years. Starcraft II will drag me away for a bit as will Diablo, but for me PCs means MMOs or RTS or RPGs. FPS games just feel better on a console with a controller. I know there are good FPS games on PCs but not being a huge fan of the genre those games pass me by.

    What also kills the PC market is that you often need a high spec machine which I just don't have the money for or the need. I play WoW on a mac mini, so I couldn't play these games if I wanted to. If companies want to get back to decent PC sales they need to create games with more reasonable requirements that have decent game play. That's why RTS games have longevity on PCs - you can mod your own levels even after you have played the retail scenarios.

    As I said I'm not a big player of FPS games, but I'd love to see one where you can design your own levels. Then you can make your own layouts and you could have fan submitted ones. This would then build a stronger community around the games.

    Also many people have a home computer for the internet and just in case they need to write official letters. They may not have or want a console game system in the house. By making good games for PCs they can tap into a market that doesn't buy lots of games but are very loyal to certain companies that keep making good games for them. This is where companies like Blizzard make a killing.

    Having said all that, this kind of PR is just plain bad for a company as most players who own high end rigs also own consoles and wont think favourably of that company. Getting personal about potential customers is really dumb in a luxury market that is going to see people cutting back on spending.
  • I don't think enough people listened to you ;)
    But that does suck that they would say that about high-end PC owners.
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