Piracy has ALWAYS been easy, yet pc gaming has been thriving since its inception, these days the major demographic for gaming is children, and children own consoles..
THATS why everything is a console port these days, its easier to market to kids, and the drm is built in.
Piracy is helping the pc gaming market by forcing innovation, the console gaming market is stale as fuck and gets more boring by the day, i am going to sell my ps3 and 360 and not buy the next gen consoles.

I own those games on PC, they're no worse than the console versions. GTA IV on the other hand, is much worse. Rockstar gave up because of piracy. GTA V will be easily the best game that comes out this year, and it will not be on the PC because of piracy. The PC industry is dying because of piracy. It's a serious problem, and the old excuses that it doesn't hurt have been proven wrong so hard in the last couple years. Why do big budget games have to appeal to a wider audience now? Because piracy will sap your revenues so you need to sell more copies. Bioware fell victim to this big time. Call of Duty 4 sold massive amounts, and they could have done so much with the series, but the threat of piracy forced them to keep throwing out the same game year after year.

One of my favourite series of all time, Mechwarrior should have been revived into a real series, but piracy means publishers are afraid of signing developers on. This meant instead of MW5, we got an online game in the mold of World of Tanks. Still a good game, could have been so much more if we didn't live in the Age of (Digital) Piracy. Jordan Weissman has had to resort to Kickstarter to fund his games now (Which he's doing with Shadowrun), but he shouldn't have to do that. He should be able to get a publisher to help him. But it won't happen when the threat of piracy makes it non-viable.

There is some "artists" who make films who encourage piracy, but universally, every person who works in the video game industry condemnns piracy. Doesn't matter if he works for a mega publisher like EA with thousands of employees, or indie developers with two people. All think piracy is damaging the industry. And they're right, all the facts support this.

The arguments for piracy rely on cases within the film, music and TV industry, but forget that the industry most affected is video games.

Bullshit.

The internet, especially high-speed internet, has made it thousands of times worse.

No worse than the console versions?
Nonsense.
You just lost any chance of me listening lol.

My 8x burner in the 90's could pretty much burn any game on the market in around 30 minutes..
And games were a LOT smaller back then..
Whats the difference between 20 meg adsl 2 now and 2.5 meg adsl 1 back then when you are downloading 400 meg as opposed to 17 gig?
I have been involved in pcs since 1990, you cant bullshit me.
Commander keen was able to be sent in about 2 minutes on a 56k connection.

This post was edited by Lifebane99 on May 3 2013 08:28pm

It's absolutely not. Controls are harder because they are geared for console but that's about it. The conteast between GTA IV and the GTA's of the HD era on PC are striking. Back then, the PC versions were still made by Rockstar North (Glasgow). Now they won't even touch the PC version,

So you're saying GTA3/Vice City sucked on the console?

I rather kickstarter, publishers fuck games.

As for "All devs hate piracy"
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130212/10325521952/game-developer-connects-with-pirates-sees-massive-support-deletion-torrents.shtml
"Yeah, piracy is inevitable so it's better to embrace it – plus, it gives lots of people who couldn't normally afford the game the opportunity to play it – and I think when you're a small group of developers (only my friend Jon and I made Anodyne), it's better to have lots of people able to experience your game," he wrote.

This post was edited by Lifebane99 on May 3 2013 08:41pm

So you admit we got a console port instead of a pc built game, this is why rockstar got shit on for pc, because no one wants that shit.
Do you also admit that gta 1 and 2 were pretty much popular BECAUSE of piracy?
Word of mouth is what made those games huge, most of it due to piracy.

Yea and did you deliver CDs to all your friends? Of course not. With the internet you could upload files to millions and millions of people.