Renowned game designer Peter Molyneux says that despite a few high points, the PC game market is in “tatters.”
“If you look at the gamer market on PC, I’ll be quite honest with you, it’s in tatters,” he said in an interview with VideoGamer.com. “There aren’t that many releases on PC. There are some high points like Crysis and what Blizzard is doing, but other than that you are restricted to The Sims and World of Warcraft, they seem to be dominating the PC side.”
Perhaps a bit surprisingly, Molyneux said that efforts at developing successful DRM schemes for PC games could actually be beneficial to the industry in the long run. “I would say while me as a player hates any restrictions, I can understand that publishers need to do something to give them the confidence to make games for the PC, to spend the huge amounts of money necessary to spend on development and to get their return,” he said. “Anything that may give them more confidence on the PC means that ultimately we as gamers will come out better off because they will invest more in the game.”
“I don’t think three [Spore installations] sounds that bad,” he continued, touching on the recent backlash against Spore, which has been hammered by complaints about its restrictive DRM. “I’d prefer it not to be there but if it is going to be there then I think three is OK, but I can understand people being very upset. Personally I hate any copy protection. I hate typing in that number. I loathe it as a gamer. It just makes me feel insulted. And I always lose the blasted manual anyway. So if we can get away from that password protected side which is a waste of time then that would be great.”
Molyneux may or may not be right about DRM inspiring confidence in the PC platform among publishers, but it’s certainly not accomplishing anything else worthwhile: TorrentFreak.com reports that Spore has been downloaded over 500,000 times, a rate that exceeds any other pirated game in history, and is well on its way to becoming the most pirated game ever on BitTorrent.
