A good article on PC game piracy:
Anyone who keeps track of how many PCs the “Gamer PC” vendors sell each year could tell you that it’s insane to develop a game explicitly for hard core gamers. Insane. I think people would be shocked to find out how few hard core gamers there really are out there. This data is available. The number of high end graphics cards sold each year isn’t a trade secret (in some cases you may have to get an NDA but if you’re a partner you can find out). So why are companies making games that require them to sell to 15% of a given market to be profitable? In what other market do companies do that? In other software markets, getting 1% of the target market is considered good.
This tells me:
- Copy protection is worthless and every minute you spend making the most complex anti-copy mechanism possible is a minute you’re not filling your game with awesomeness.
- Total user base is irrelevant and you need to think only of the people, in that userbase, who will buy.
- I really should consider trying out Sins of a Solar Empire using CrossOver Games