Piracy is killing PC gaming - Id

Pirates making it 'aaaard work.

Id co-owners Kevin Cloud and Todd Hollenshead have rounded on video game pirates, describing piracy as "what’s killing PC games". The pair were responding to a query thrown Cloud's way during a Q&A panel at QuakeCon, the bring-your-own-computer event that's held annually in Texas. Cloud expressed his view after one member of the audience noted that some retailers had dramatically reduced the amount of PC gaming software they carried, while some have stopped selling PC software altogether.

"We're a PC developer,” said Cloud, who's currently working as executive producer on Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. "We love the PC. Not just for the game platform itself, but for the community it brings. I just don’t think you can get the same thing on a console." Despite Cloud's obvious fondness for PC gaming however, Id itself has been forced to dip its toes in the murky waters of console development recently - last year, Doom 3 was ported over to the Xbox just a few months after the original PC release, outselling its PC counterpart in the process.

"Piracy is hard," Cloud admitted, adding that, “It’s really - from my opinion - destroying the PC market. When you look out there at the number of games that are getting pirated, it is just devastating. It’s the primary reason retailers are moving to the console. It’s something that’s on every PC developer’s mind - on how to reduce [piracy]. Because, if you like the PC, you hate to see it fall lower and lower down."

However, it's not all misery and pessimism in PC land, with Cloud adamant that the industry would find a way to beat the pirates. "I think there are tons of people playing games on the PC - I think World of Warcraft is a good example," he argued. "The game has a massive audience on the PC because the game was based on subscriptions, and couldn’t be pirated. I think once we get that solved, you’re going to find a lot more PC titles not on the retail shelves."

At this point, Hollenshead took over the baton, pointing out that, "There is about seventy-percent of the landmass of the world where you can’t sell games in a legitimate market, because pirates will beat you to the shelves with your own game. And that is a serious problem. Even in the other percentage of the world: the United States, Europe, Canada, Japan, and some of the other Pacific Rim countries…we still have serious piracy rates among PC titles."

"Nobody knows," he continued, "but you may literally have more games being played illegitimately than being played legitimately. So when you’re giving up that much market to people who aren’t paying for the games, or who are buying the games in ways in which the developers aren’t getting paid for it, it creates a big challenge. Not only for the developers and publishers," pointed out Hollenshead, "But also for retailers, because they have to make bets when they buy their game inventory.” And this, argued Hollenshead, is where the real problem lies, with retailers understandably more willing to invest in console gaming, a market that's comparatively free of piracy.

"It's a very serious problem," concluded Hollenshead. "There isn’t any magical solution, or else we’d solve it." it."