When you make a PC game the development tools are better, cheaper, and easier to use. All games are written and programmed ON a computer so making PC games is just easier. You also don’t have to give up 20-30% of your profits to MS or Sony for licensing. Add in some Digital Distribution to cut out Gamestop/WalMart and you can make a decent profit without selling a bajillion copies.

@skuphundaku

Thank you, that is a very good explanation. Movies, music, games, it’s all just data, which is infinite, when your supply is infinite prices have to drop, just as you said, DRM is an attempt to introduce artificial scarcity to the market. Prices either have to drop or DRM will have to become really ridiculous, wanna take bets on which one the suits like more?

I agree with you that not paying for PC games has damaged the PC games ecology (sorry if the metaphor is a bit over the top). BUT (and this is a big BUT) copyright infringement is not stealing. English law (Theft Act of 1968, Section 1) says: “A person is guilty of theft, if he dishonestly appropriates property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it”. To further quote from the Wikipedia article on theft: “The actus reus of theft is usually defined as an unauthorised taking, keeping or using of another’s property which must be accompanied by a mens rea of dishonesty and/or the intent to permanently deprive the owner or the person with rightful possession of that property or its use.”

As defined above, theft is defined by two parts of equal importance:
1) The act of taking someone else’s property;
2) The intent of depriving that entity of the use of that property.
Copyright infringement (and patent infringement, for that matter) fulfills the first part of the definition but not the second, thus, they are not theft. It is a very important distinction to make because they are virtual constructs which, from the economic point of view, makes them infinite.

What the publishers are selling is access to the content, not the content itself. Before the Internet distributing the content was difficult so their monopoly was de facto (they had the infrastructure to do the publishing) and de jure (they had the government granted monopoly of copyright). After the advent of the Internet they kept their de jure monopoly but they lost the de facto monopoly, which greately reduced their control. What we see now, with all this DRM madness and consolization of gaming is that the publishers try to regain the de facto monopoly on distribution. PS3 has fared pretty well but all the other consoles or the PC DRM schemes have fared, from case to case, from worse to much worse.

Another very important thing to take into consideration is that the purpose of copyright (and patents) was (and, at least officially, still is) to stimulate the creation and furthering of new content and technologies. Unfortunately that noble ideal has been thrown to the wolves in favor of the IP owners trying to extort the largest amount of money out of their clients and potential clients. It is very easy to be swayed by the IP industry’s “sweat of the brow” arguments. Nevertheless, those arguments are fallacious because, in the long run, they inhibit the development of new content and technology instead of stimulating it. I don’t have a link handy to further support my argument right now, but if I were to take some time to dig though my bookmarks and documents I would find more than just one study that supports what I’m saying.

The bottom line is that you need to look at all the facts and at the big picture in order to see how all this works. Just going with the gut feeling and your preconceptions that you (and the majority of all of us for that matter) have accumulated during an age in which physical property was the only type of property out there is detrimental to everybody.

I honestly can understand hacking, err modding a game for features and enhancments. But out right stealing it? If I was a game pub, I would stick with consoles. To hell with the PC market.