Sounds strange, doesn’t it? ”Pirating Video Games is Good Business for the PC Gaming Industry”. How in the world could ripping off someone else’s Intellectual Property and receiving digital content (a game…or two or three) for free rather than paying for it be a good thing for the PC Gaming Industry? I’m glad your inquisitive young mind is seeking answers to such deep questions in life, let me explain.
The artist behind Fallout 4’s Deathclaw reveals just how bad things got back when Bethesda took over the series
People are stupid I get it. No one should feel unsafe,
But I think they need to talk about why they cut so many corners during the development process and why none of their games ever look current. And why they think all of this is okay while they charge full price.
As much as Bethesda deserve criticism, that's not really relevant to the reveal of Fallout 3 in 2007.
The default angle Kotaku always go for is to highlight the worst in gaming.
I would’ve focused on the creative.
Bethesda's post-apocalyptic RPG remains an unabashed classic, more than a decade and a half on from its launch.
For me its the fact that I could put hundreds of hours into it and still find areas I missed in my earlier runs. It was also my first FO and despite what I had to put up with at times such as overall crashs and killing my orginal PS3 with the YLOD it's still my favorite entry to this day.
Tons of reasons
But my silly little one…hunting for unique weapons and armour
Something Fallout 4 just didn’t really have as much because they replaced most of it with randomly generated customised weapons. Even Elder Scrolla doesn't do it as well.
I remember during my first playthrough of Fallout 4 back in 2015 I somehow got an automatic combat rifle that shot explosive rounds by defeating a legendary creature. Unfortunately that was the only playthrough I ever got that weapon. It's a shame because it was absolutely epic!
Sense of exploration. That was why older Bethesda games were so good. They might have had glitches, broken mechanics, meh visuals, etc., but they were some of the best around when it came down to the sense of exploration. You could go wherever you wanted and you would find something cool; it might have been a faction, a weapon, an enemy and much more. And that is what they are lacking now. Skyrim still had a lot of that, but Fallout 4 dropped it by focusing on an interconnected world and more randomly generated rewards. Fallout 76 just kept that trend and added multiplayer, and Starfield went even further in killing it by creating a whole universe with parts completely isolated from each other.
I think the retrospective of Fallout: New Vegas' existence has somewhat diminished the view of Fallout 3 in the eyes of many, but it getting out of the vault in Fallout 3 was, for me, the most remarkable experience I've had in a videogame.
I was 12 when it came out, and I remember I just saw the score it got in Gamemaster magazine (remember those!? 😅), and I just went to the shop and bought it with my pocket money.
Not knowing anything about the game, I thought the whole thing was going to be about growing up in a vault, especially given that I'd spent about 2 hours in it....I literally could.not.believe it when you got out and it was just this wasteland on every direction. Amazing.
Probably because these Bethesda games were hand crafted so that exploration meant something. Unlike Starfield where this sense of exploration is replaced with the illusion of scope and procedurally generated worlds. A player can always appreciate when they wonder into an unforgettable new encounter by accident or stumble across a new questline that becomes their favourite. Just like a player can always tell when they're ploughing through filler on auto pilot, that they'll forget the moment some resource numbers go up and nothing worth remembering occurred.
I mean, in Fallout 3 you could nuke an entire town as a SIDE QUEST. In The Elder Scrolls Oblivion and Skyrim, the Dark Brotherhood questlines were my favourite in any RPGs and you could completely avoid them if you didn't care for them. In The Witcher 3 side quests take you on ridiculously dark and mysterious storylines that are some of the best I've played in RPG history. There's a reason why people still talk about KOTOR to this day. Difference between a developer creating something or just padding a game world with stuff.
There were some side quests that could yld have been developed into an entirely separate game. Some great writing there.
The Fallout Anthology Edition is coming to PC very soon, and is packaged with some very S.P.E.C.I.A.L. bonuses.
It’s an awful downgrade to the last one they did
They included physical disc back then
I would love the classic fallout games on console. Closest I could find was atom rpg, I liked that one a lot
LOL... the article claims there are no facts which clearly states that piracy is hurting the industry, yet he delivers no facts other than his own -personal- experience to back up his claim that piracy is good for the industry. What a complete and utter joke.
Pirate if you must for whatever reason you choose, if any. Just don't go claim it's good for the entire industry unless you can put some hard evidence down on the table with lots of solid numbers involving a lot of people that clearly shows it's good for the industry. Until then, I will believe neither side and follow my own moral compass which works entirely in shades of gray.
It's not definitively good. There are PLENTY of people who pirate games because they want to play a game without paying. This is likely the reasoning of the majority of gaming pirates.
It's not ALL bad, though. Some people pirate as a way to test a game and decide whether or not to buy it. Some also pirate to show that, while they are interested in a game, they're not interested in supporting the related publisher or developer, for whatever reasons.
Both of these groups, however, make up a rather small minority of pirates. So it's safe to say that, by and large, piracy is NOT good for business.
This argument is just as false as the argument that piracy reduces game sales.
Because you buy games when you pirate does not mean that if you didn't pirate that you wouldn't buy the same games, doesn't mean you don't pirate games that you don't end up buying, nor does it mean that the majority (let alone a noticeable percentage) of people who do pirate do it for the same reasons.
Both sides of this argument just don't have the information needed to make their claims. It's a grey area that just can't be identified in a single light or as a single cause to the overall effect.
I don't know, I agree with some of the articles points, but I wouldn't necessarily say it brings in more money to the industry, but it might divert where the money is going, especially if piracy is putting people off buying poor games and encouraging purchasing others - if that is true then it is a positive force - one that rewards quality.
People have a finite of disposable income, I reckon most gamers will spend most of it on that hobby, pirate or not. If someone buys all the games they can afford, and pirates those they can't, the industry as a whole doesn't suffer for it.
Besides, I think Steam has proven if a quality title is launched on a platform with low prices and good service with reasonable advertisement, it shifts units like hotcakes - just like any other industry. Blaming sheerly piracy for failure is just masking bad business.
See piracy like this:
Developers develop games, publishers give them money according to the game sales.
If no sales, no money.
I guess most pirates are jobless, but just imagine: you have a job, so you have a salary. Piracy is the equivalent of your boss saying "I'm sorry but I'm not going to pay you this month".
This is very exaggerated, but also close to reality. A video game is not just an entertainment for kids, it's the fruit of a labor, something that many people worked on for several years. Every work deserves salary, no matter how good or bad this job is done.
Developers are just workers like everyone else, they need money to live, and pirating a game is a way to not reward the people that worked on it.