Piracy has been the blame for a lot of PC games selling less units than expected. I do believe Piracy is hurting the PC market, but at the same time, I think some of those predicted big games, such as Crysis, has other problems that kept game sales back. I say this because of my PC gaming experience lately has really annoyed me. But I’m not going to get into that right now. After hearing the Game Theory Podcast this week where they talked about Crysis and piracy again, I was going to write about it, but instead I started thinking about the problems with PC gaming, beyond piracy. I then started to look at some of the numbers of the last year when it came to PC game sales and realized one thing. WOW looks like it has had almost 50% of the PC game sales in 2007.

Almost 50%!!!

Why is that so significant? Let me tell you a little story about my PC gaming habits / History. I’m 35 (will be 36 in another month). My first home video game experience was with Pong, the pair of “paddles” that connected to your TV and had several different versions of Pong. I then owned a Atari 2600, then the NES and I never went to the Super NES. About a year or 2 before the PS1 released, I finally bought a Sega Genesis then I got into PC gaming. I was really big on FPS’s, was into making maps for several games and loved online deathmatch. I use to play every FPS, Racing and Action game released for PC. Wasn’t into RPGs at all, even though I played Final fantasy VII and loved it. One day I read a really good article in a magazine previewing Everquest, the article sound so interesting that I bought the game, even though I thought it was completely silly to pay for a game and then pay a monthly fee to play it.

Needless to say, I really got hooked on Everquest, for about 9 months. Then I gave it up, sold my character on Ebay, and moved on. All I did was buy the game again a few months later and started playing again. I went through the quitting and restarting phase about 3 times total, with my total time playing being about a year and a half. In that year and a half, I didn’t play any other games. I didn’t buy any games and completely fell out of the PC gaming loop all together. My PC was really outdated, I missed out on some big games, and my FPS skills were all gone.

The key thing to look at here is that Everquest removed me from PC gaming for a year and a half. I was a PC gaming customer that for a short time, didn’t buy or cared about any PC game other than Everquest.

Back to 2007

WOW is a lot more popular than Everquest was, and if you use my Everquest experience, and elevate that to almost half of the PC gaming population, that drastically lowers the customer base for PC games. The kind of market domination that an MMORPG has was always one of the reasons I think Microsoft has canceled so many that were being developed for the Xbox. Imagine a game being released on the 360 that kept 50% of the Xbox 360 owners from buying any other games for a year or 2. That would look good for that game, but horrible for the 360 as a platform. I always figured the problem was Microsoft wants more of the monthly fee’s to make it worth sacrificing potential lose of other game sales.

With the PC, theres no one company that hurts if 50% of those games sales are being devoured by one game for a long period of time. If WOW has taken 10 million PC gamers out of the stores, the rest of the market will suffer. I think that is a really overlooked aspect of PC gaming. Not only do PC game developers have to worry about compatibility issues, DRM, Piracy (yes DRM and Piracy are 2 problems), and competing with other games, They are doing that after the fact that a whole lot of gamers are playing WOW and are taken out of the mix.

In this situation, There is nothing that can be done but to weather the WOW storm, But every thing else has to be almost perfect, which right now it isnt. Those other “worries” I mentioned above, Id say have gotten worse. Id dare say that the game developers on the PC platform has gotten really slack. Games aren’t optimized, they are buggy, there are too many DRM issues, and piracy is rampart.