The Glorious PC’s Greatest Shame!

As a PC man, this is hard for me to say, so listen carefully as I shall say it only once.

“Consoles might be a more popular gaming rig!”

Oh... I think I am going to be sick...

Well it’s true, while there are many benefits of all platforms, the PC has always been highly adaptable and versatile. It is even possible to use Wii remotes with a PC! But of course the main benefit is that a PC is graphically better in all respects, with the worst problem being the cost and complex nature of the machine.

But as a “sit down in your living room and help you relax”, you have to admit, Consoles win every time.  There is nothing better for many a hard worker around the world to come home. Switch on the Box, and the Console and start playing. Which would mean that consoles would be far more popular, right?

Some of the claims I hear from Pro-Pirates is that PC games are rubbish, they have no lasting content, and aren’t worthy of being bought. Gaming consoles are far more popular, but is piracy levels greater than the PC? No, deep down we all know that piracy is greater on the PC because it’s easier, and because it’s easier people pirate more!

What really amazes me about this kind of quote, that “PC Games are rubbish!” People don’t seem to understand that most games are released across the platforms. So if a game that does well in sales, then it can’t mean that the game is rubbish, as it will be the same content across the platform board. More often than not “rubbish” games do exceptionally well in console sales and exceptionally well in PC piracy.

This leads me to believe that pirates are lying! This is just an excuse, so pirates can justify not having to pay for a game. Games are expensive, and no one likes buying a product, and having the feeling they have just been ripped off. But how come we can understand that compensation fraud is driving up the costs of insurance, but not piracy driving up the costs of games. It’s killing the PC industry; just not kid yourself into believing otherwise!

There are some Good Games, Bad Games and Downright Ugly ones too; the platform has nothing to do with the quality. Actually the quality should affect the consoles versions even more, because you can always patch a PC game. A console game is much harder, unless you hold off, as the recently released Fallout: New Vegas stands testament to!

Watch this it’s very funny and scary (PC Version): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKIkw3LIoQ

On a PC game this can be patched and downloaded easily and quickly, as in the case for this Steam version.

One of the best was to judge piracy level is to look at the game releases on the PC and Console Gaming rigs. For the Consoles we have the Xbox 360, the PS3 (PlayStation), The Wii, PS2, and Hand Held Devises such as the PSP (PlayStation Portable). These are just to name a few, but in this test I have only looked for the main three XBox, PS3, and PC.

I have used a torrent search engine, because it makes life so much easier, and then searched for games that stretched the platform divide. The torrent search engine provides a static count of the Seed and Peers. I took those results and then divided up the torrent by the platform, either PC or Console, and counted the total seed and peers.

Image of the search for Call of Duty: Black OPS 

black ops 8-11-10

If we look at the table of all the torrent results we find some astounding results. We have all assumed that piracy for the PC was greater than the Console, but to find the huge gap between each level is shocking.

PCvsConsole4

The last two columns show the percentage increase between the Console and PC. So for Call of Duty Black OPS, you can see an increase of 146% (Seed) and 452% (Peer). As a ratio that would be nearly 1.5 and 4.5 greater than the console. Now consider the average illegal PC game will have 18 times more seeders and 20 times more peers than its console counterpart.

PCvsConsole1

The pie charts show the Console as red, the seed being dark read and the peers being light red, while the PC being in blue. Each individual game title shows a clear majority of blue compared to red sections.

But it is also worthy of note that of all the games displayed, there is a clear two tier piracy level. On the one hand you can see the 6 of the games clearly show a console minority of under 10%. While 3 games show a clear console minority of around 25%.

PCvsConsole3

This indicates that the 3 games (Call of Duty: Black OPS, Star Wars: Force Unleashed 2, and PES2011) are highly anticipated games. This allows you to draw a number of conclusions!

Either    (1) The PC platform is far more popular than Consoles!

Or         (2) That people really don’t want to pay for games, and the PC is the machine for the Job!

If you’d like to download the data sheet, that has all the names of the torrents and their counts, you can do so here.  (http://www.warfaceaps.com/files/PCvsConsole Data Sheet.pdf)

What should be taken away from this?

I think it is a good idea to note, from this experiment at least, it suggests there are two types of games. The ones that do well and the ones that do not, platform and cost does not decide. Of course there is probably a sliding scale of games ratings. But unpopular games don’t get pirated more, in fact, as suspected the more popular games are, funnily enough, pirated more.

But what is clearly stated here is that piracy on the PC is far greater than the Console. The lowest percentage being 72%, this shows a serious problem with releasing games on the PC. If you owned a gaming company, producing something that you worked hard on, no matter if it was rubbish. It doesn’t take a genius to realise that there is an awful gamble when it comes to the PC platform.

I know it’s probably not true, but I’d like to think that the PC catapulted gaming into the main stream. If I am honest, piracy probably had something to do with the widespread gaming situation we have today. But if I take that one step further, I believe that piracy will also have a hand in undoing all the great work it started.

A Great Shame!