Will Piracy Kill PC Gaming?

“Frankly, piracy is the reason why retail games are falling in popularity. Right now there is a mental shift in people about how they consume media, and if you think about the problems with piracy in light of this, inevitably you find that there needs to be a solution that requires people to look at PC gaming differently.”

Those are the words Cevat Yerli used to describe today’s way of gaming on a PC in a recent interview. For those of you who don’t know who Cevat Yerli is, he is a computer game developer who is co-founder and President of Crytek in Germany, one of the largest independent game developers in the world.

So in the past 5 years the PC has lost many fans due to gaming developers releasing better games onto consoles then PCs.

All because of piracy, for example when a game comes out only on PC such as Crysis then the game ends up making 25 % of what it could have made if people would have bought the game instead of downloading it illegally. Recently game developers discovered that 90% of the people playing World of Goo illegal downloaded the game. So that means that the game only made 10% of what it could have, I think that as more people continue to download games the more game developers start to turn to consoles for money. Yes I do know that there are Xbox 360 and PS3 games on Pirate Bay. But a lot less compared to PC games, the reason for this is control.

Take Xbox 360, for example; if you want to play a burned game on it then you have to flash it which is basically editing the software on the Xbox 360. So the question is: what stops PC users from downloading games illegally? For the 360 it’s Microsoft’s hardware and software. Do you think there is a solution to piracy? Will piracy kill PC gaming? Comment.