Chris Taylor the head honcho behind Supreme Commander has claimed that piracy on the PC is causing developers to turn over to consoles, and that is why we are seeing a spate of RTS games appearing on the 360 and PS3 in the coming year.

IGN: Recently there have been many attempts to bring the RTS genre over to the console. Do you think what people learn from that will affect how the PC RTS is made in the future?

Chris Taylor: Well, yeah, because if there’s success on the console, people are going to stop making them on the PC because of my earlier point, what’s happened on the PC with piracy. The economics are ugly right now on the PC. You’re not going to see these gigantic, epic investments of dollars on the PC when it just doesn’t work. The economics have to work. You’re going to see those investments made on the console side and it’s going to become a more console-centric investment. And then you’re going to see them ported back over to the PC and that creates a different experience on the PC.

Right now it’s up in the air, but right now the PC market is kind of voting with its dollars, if you will.

Read the whole thing here.

To see the humble RTS, a genre that is for me a core part of PC gaming, be predicted to follow the trend of console-led development is frightening and worrying. While I cannot agree that piracy is the sole reason for this shift, it has certainly played a large part in it. I would hate to see piracy being the cause of even more developers moving away from the PC, I really would.

The long-standing argument that games cost too much is really bull. PC games are now (in the UK at least) much cheaper than any of the games coming out on the 360/PS3. People can no longer argue that point. That people also claim to pirate then buy a game if they enjoy it or if it works on the PC, well fine, but the vast majority won’t even do that, they will just download the game and not bother to buy it even if it is a great game than runs perfectly on their PC. Really there is no basis in that argument either, demos are so prevalent nowadays and internet speeds are getting faster and faster that people should just grab the demo, see if it works on their PC and if they enjoy it. If they do then go and buy it.

It really disgusts me to think that piracy (among many other reasons) is causing developers to leave the PC in droves and focus on the consoles. Piracy is one of the few things we ourselves can control, we can’t control the rate and price of new PC components coming to market or crap games, but we can stop piracy ourselves, in the gaming world as it is today there is no need whatsoever to pirate. I may have pirated a few games in the past, but that was before I became aware of the wider impact it was having. These days I will go and grab a demo and gather my thoughts on a game before deciding whether to lay down the cash for it.

My simple message to pirates - don’t do it if you care at all for the PC as a platform and for many developers. I would hate to think that games like World of Goo, AudioSurf and hell, even Portal weren’t being made primarily for the PC, or even coming to the PC at all just because of pirates.

Give it up, you are killing the industry I, and many others love.

Tags: Chris Taylor, Piracy, RTS

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 20th, 2008 at 3:28 pm and is filed under General News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.