THE PIRATES
Its Ironic PC Gamers are shafting PC GAMERS!
I think the main issue is all the pirating that goes on for PC. If you really want to fight give the Game Companies the PC sells they deserve. Buy any game for the PC instead of the Console Tell every Pirater to go out and buy the game shut down the torrents of ISO's. Then maybe we can see a steady incline in PC gaming instead of this Baby Sitting DRM stuff they do to make sure we actually give them the money they earned.
hardly.
According to Valve, pirates are under-served customers. Why does Valve not have these problems?
For one, they use the brilliant idea of MAKING THEIR STUFF AVAILABLE TO A WIIIIIDE ARRAY OF PEOPLE. L4D2 has had a couple 75% off sales already, hell, Valve has TONS of sales on their stuff.
Jerk McPiracy kinda wants to play the game but can't quite see it happening for $50, probably realizes a legit copy is more fun (real servers vs laggy cracked servers filled with other dopes who are probably cheating) Thankfully Valve is cutting costs by a huge amount and it all becomes that much more irresistible. Valve has already said that their sales spike an enormous amount when sales happen and that even though it's selling for a huge discount, they turn a PROFIT(!!). Suddenly tons more people are getting the game and Valve is actually making $$ despite selling it far cheaper. Win for gamers / Win for Valve.
Then comes their support. Patches, patches, patches, patches, PATCHES UPDATES EVERYTHING. I've seen their games patch multiple times in a single day before. They have the system in place, they can push updates easily to anyone at any time so even simple fixes don't have to sit there waiting to be deployed in a giant mass. They churn out huge amounts of content and hey, you're getting quite a lot of time out of that $10 purchase!
If anything, Valve has proven that piracy need not be an issue, you just have to know how to work the people.
Put out good games, give good support to them, give people a reason to buy it and like magic, it seemingly sells.
Look at MW2... STILL SIXTY DOLLARS... STILL the most expensive item on the front page of Steam. Ever notice how games tend to spike into the top sellers list when sales hit?
Then again, piracy is often way overblown. Check out Crysis, according to Crytek the amount of piracy was horrible! Too bad in reality it actually sold a couple MILLION. It actually sold VERY well despite whatever stupid spin people like to put on it. A bunch of titles have proven that PC gaming is perfectly fine, but I do think it's going through some changes at the moment.