.
That’s pretty arrogant, don’t you think? I’m pretty sure you can’t tell me WHY I’m writing reviews. I could be writing reviews, for all you know, cos some spaz comes into my house, puts a gun to my head, and tells me to write them. Ultimately, I’m NOT telling someone if something is worth their money; I’m letting them know how I liked the game. Whether or not they purchase it based on my review is a secondary effect. Better put, the secondary effect is whether or not they’ll play the game. It’s up to the player to take me at my word, or read other reviews to get more opinions. Some people I know don’t even regard the opinions in a review; they just look at what kind of gameplay elements exist in the game and decide if they want to try it based on that (I know GM does that, for example).
Even then…even if my review is influential enough to impact one’s decision…I’m only affecting whether or not they want to PLAY the game, not buy it. They might buy it. They might buy it when the price drops. They might borrow it, pirate it, steal it, rent it, trade for it on Goozex, or hold it for an indeterminate length when they get it from Gamefly or Gamerang. I can’t affect how they play it, so I’m not going to tell them if they should buy it. It’s up to them.
You’re also still splitting hairs about ‘art’ versus ‘entertainment’. We’re using different words, but we mean the same thing. If you’re really hung up on it, I can stop calling it art; it doesn’t change my argument in the slightest.
I didn’t find the wind temple that bad. It was long, but the fire temple was assinine with the blue-yellow tentacle things. Its the only temple where the “can’t attack because you’re in the door” phenomenon pissed me off. It was also assinine that you could be attacked while your screen was loading when changing stairs. I died right before I got to the boss. Ergh.
Oh yeah, those things could be annoying. I had the Holy Sword by then, and I spent pretty much all of my money in that game on sword upgrades. So, I could kill them in one hit from any entrance. If they spawned right in front of the doorway, I’d just exit and re-enter.
The wind temple was long as fuck, and the windblower things annoyed the hell out of me. I actually had to turn the game off because I was getting livid, and just try it later. Probly the only really hard thing besides the Dragon boss (who wouldn’t have been so hard if I hadn’t been lazy and got the flame shield first!).
I don’t think its fair to tell him why he’s writing reviews, but I think it’s fair to say that reviews are either an endorsement or not (regardless of why he’s writing them). I think the distinction between art and entertainment is a bit silly though… I should stop saying I think so much. Is it fair to assume that if someone is posting something they aren’t posting it as fact but rather as… what they think? I feel like people have issues with that a lot. Maybe that’s just Hades or something
I haven’t played or seen any of this game other than the screenshot posted in this thread, but as far as I can tell it sucks. I imagine it being incredibly easy, just filled with a lot of little stupid annoying things like your sword getting caught in a doorway because they didn’t know how to add actual difficulty… Figuring out how to make a game require a high level of skill and still appeal to the masses is probably much more difficult than one would think, though. Probably just not something this game was going for, but getting your sword caught all over the place is just silly.
edit: I do agree that money might not really have its place in reviews. I can buy pretty much as many games as I want while I know people who scrape by with no food in their fridge. How much a game “costs” is going to be different for everyone, and based on how they felt from reading your review the gamer will be able to make the call.
Nowhere did I claim I knew why he wrote review. What I claimed was that why he did it was meaningless because of the consequence of writing the review. Intent doesn’t matter. The result matters.Your strength of the impression you leave on the reader will influence what the readers chooses to do with his money, whether it be rental, purchase or otherwise. It influences the end decision. How far the reader will go.
The dragon boss isn’t really easier with the flame shield because some of the fireballs randomly explode, negating the bonus you get for using the shield. It pissed me off.
Ramza: the game generally has had positive feedback from the people in the thread, minus SG who menstruated all over it for whatever reason. The only annoying part really is the fire (or wind) temple, depending on who you ask, and its not constant. Granted, the old school crowd have a greater appreciation for it for obvious nostalgic reasons.
Maybe we just misunderstood you, but when you say “Regardless of what you believe your primary goal is, …” We assume the second half of the sentence will be you telling me what my primary goal ACTUALLY is. So, no, you’re not claiming you knew why I wrote the review, but you did insinuate that “even though I think I wrote it for THIS reason, I actually wrote it for THAT reason.”. Anyways, it was a misunderstanding, so I guess nevermind.
Anyways, I already demonstrated a variety of ways the person could play the game without money, both legally and illegally. Still, this has been all about purchasing the game to you (as far as I can tell) up til now. Now you’re saying that it doesn’t matter, it could be a rental, too. There’s all the other ways a person could get it for no money - borrowing, pirating, bartering (Goozex). Do you see where it gets complicated to tell someone “this isn’t worth your money”? Beyond different pricing for different reasons, there’s tons of different methods for acquiring a game.
If you think the way I write reviews is meaningless, that’s fine. People know how I feel about the game, now. That can influence decision to purchase. It can influence decision to play it without purchasing. It can inspire discussion (I mean, right? Look at this discussion we had), or even inspire someone to write something else based on the way they felt about my writing. It could make someone want to kill John Lennon and all the Phonies. Inspiring any sort of response from anyone is what I want - that’s more than meaningful to me.
A writing of any kind can cause a lot of effects. Just because 99% of game reviewers write it specifically to tell the reader whether or not they should PURCHASE it (not rent/borrow/barter/etc.), doesn’t mean that’s the only way, and all other ways are worthless. If anything, I hope my reviews inspire discussion; lots of people I know also admit to not reading reviews until they’re done playing a game, so do reviews get to be worthless to those people? They obviously just want to see what others’ opinions are. There’s a million reasons for writing a review - not one. If someone is reading just one review to make or break a decision on their purchase and for NO OTHER REASON, then let em. I don’t feel responsible if they make a gaming purchase they don’t like based on just my review; tough shit for them.
I didn’t say how you wrote the review is meaningless. Different places review games differently for obvious reasons. You have to distinguish yourself from the crowd to get people to come to you. For example, Zero punctuation needs to be taken with a grain of salt because part of the review itself is meant to be a form of entertainment. People don’t just go there to hear about the game. They go there to hear Yahtzee generally shit all over something. A bit like you did with the 3ddgh. The only criticism about how you review I can make is that you wrote your review menstruating all over the game and then in other posts, you claim that you didn’t really dislike the game. As it stands right now, I am confused as to what you really mean to say, what is true and what is not. I’m not saying you were misleading. I’m not asking you clarify. I’m trying to offer constructive criticism about how I feel you may have contradicted yourself. In all honesty and I mean this in the nicest way, you should probably refine the way you write reviews to more accurately convey your message because there is a disconnect somewhere.
THAT BEING SAID, back to the original topic: I have consistently formulated my argument around the idea of how MUCH money a game is worth varies, how there are all kinds of circumstances in which people choose how much money a given game is worth. I haven’t always said people buy games new, acknowledging Gamestop, and I haven’t made comments on piracy, although I think Gabe Newell made excellent points in regards to pirates and market size - I get the feeling you didn’t read the article and that disappoints me.
What I have claimed was that people will invest different amounts of money to purchase (or if you want to include rentals, that’s fine) based on the impression they are left with from different sources. IF someone is left with the impression a game is not worth 60 dollars, the price doesn’t need to be mentioned. He just needs to feel like the entertainment he is getting isn’t worth that money. Maybe its worth 10 dollars. Or not. It varies per person and per taste, as I have explained. I don’t believe its inappropriate to mention a game is available for less money, like 3DDGH, or that DLC available for a given game is not or is not worth the 10-20 dollars a company is asking because of how much variability there is in DLC quality, to use examples. When something doesn’t fit in the typical cost structure that is already established, it is unusual, and it reflects how companies are experimenting with costs to be able to reach different markets. As a reader, it is helpful to be informed about the entirety of the package which is offered to them. The nature of the industry means that pricing plays an important role in how publishers try to reach different markets with their products and in how customers will evaluate the value of what they are getting.
Actually SG, Sin makes a good point about how you wrote your review and how it may be confusing. For example, I asked you if you really thought it was that much harder without full health because that’s exactly what you wrote in the paragraph about not being able to do anything while in a doorway. You may want to change this to reflect what you meant more precisely. It’s obvious you disliked the game and it was a tremendous waste of your time, but you admit in your final paragraph that you had fun nonetheless (that’s how I interpret it). Perhaps it’s something you should explain at the beginning, if that’s really what you meant, before listing everything you disliked so much about it. It gives the impression you only paid attention to the negative aspects of the game, or at least, that you only talk about those in your review. In reply to my last post, you said you were expecting the game to be terrible, but it really wasn’t. The impression I got from your review, however, is that it truly was terrible (but that’s just my opinion) and it may be confusing for other readers as well.
That is pretty much what I was trying to say in my last post. I don’t necessarily expect reviewers to mention price, but in these cases, I see how that could be a good thing.
Regarding my review…I guess, to me, a ‘mundane’ game like 3D DGH can be just as bad or worse than a “bad” game. At least, when playing a bad game, there’s something inherently entertaining about how bad it is, even if it leaves you frustrated. But like, I would say, for example, I bet Golden Sun isn’t as bad as Infinite Undiscovery, but I bet I would be ultimately more entertained by the game.
In the case of this game, it was kind of neat for an hour or two where I was like “haha this sword is really big”, until it hit me that the whole game consisted of me running into a screen while mashing the Cross button and doing circles with the D-Pad, ad infinitum. The game wasn’t terrible, but there was nothing particularly wonderful about it, either, and as far as innovation goes, I think a lot of things about this game are way behind the times. Thanks for the constructive criticism though, Sin and Walhalla. That’s another good reason I still like to put reviews up here even though I write for two sites; I still get much better discussion here than anywhere else.
What I have claimed was that people will invest different amounts of money to purchase (or if you want to include rentals, that’s fine) based on the impression they are left with from different sources. IF someone is left with the impression a game is not worth 60 dollars, the price doesn’t need to be mentioned. He just needs to feel like the entertainment he is getting isn’t worth that money. Maybe its worth 10 dollars. Or not. It varies per person and per taste, as I have explained. I don’t believe its inappropriate to mention a game is available for less money, like 3DDGH, or that DLC available for a given game is not or is not worth the 10-20 dollars a company is asking because of how much variability there is in DLC quality, to use examples. When something doesn’t fit in the typical cost structure that is already established, it is unusual, and it reflects how companies are experimenting with costs to be able to reach different markets. As a reader, it is helpful to be informed about the entirety of the package which is offered to them. The nature of the industry means that pricing plays an important role in how publishers try to reach different markets with their products and in how customers will evaluate the value of what they are getting.
That’s fair, but one of the first things you said in this discussion was “The problem is that things like quality and length of games is extremely variable, yet the pricing for games is not.” My angle for the majority of this argument has been that ‘pricing’ is also extremely variable for someone who reads a review and is inspired to play the game. Very commonly, reviewers and readers alike operate with the assumption while reading a review that the ONLY way to play a game is to buy it at MSRP. Well, MSRP changes from region to region. Different stores will offer things at different prices. As you’ve mentioned, publishers are experimenting with finding prices to fit what they believe customers would like to pay for it. Beyond that, renting a game is FAR less money than a purchase, and trading/borrowing/pirating is EVEN less.
The reason this is important is because plenty of critics feel that their primary goal is to tell someone whether or not a game is worth purchasing. My roommate is one of the Senior Editors at VGChartz and he thinks this is true. Many people at the Gamer Limit staff write this way, too. This is a way of thinking that pervades the entire review process, and it’s a biased look. When people think of ‘bias’ in game reviews, they think of bias towards a genre, company, or console. But, there’s other ways of being biased, and having a ‘price bias’ is the biggest one. The entire time someone writes a review, they write it thinking “I paid X amount of money for this; was that worth it?” and they judge all aspects of the game based on that line of thought. But they don’t know how much money other people are going to pay for it, or if someone with more money than them will find the game worth X amount of money.
It can dirty the reputation of a new game which they felt should have been a LITTLE cheaper right out the gate. It also can easily cause a critic to look at a cheaper game with rose colored glasses, cos even if it’s not a GREAT game, it’s only $10, right? It also creates a bias towards games that are longer as being better, so there’s a natural bias towards games that give you the MOST fun and not the BEST fun.
These are basically the reasons I don’t mention price in my review; there are a ton of ways that ‘price’ (i.e the money someone pays to buy a game, or the amount of money that’s reasonable to spend on games) varies from game to game and person to person. It’s also an extremely biased way of looking at things, and it generally creates a lot of reviews on a game which look exactly the same. There’s plenty of good reasons to avoid that subject in a review altogether.
Along those lines, that is why I like reading reviews at Kotaku and why I think you should check them out. They appear to have a similar philosophy as yours when it comes to the content of what they want in a review. They do 2 things: they look at a gradient of reviews from a few other sites that typically have vastly different impressions and they have their own guy doing his own reviews. His reviews summarize what the experience was overall, what he liked and what he didn’t like. I think an important bias you didn’t mention, which I believe is very important, is the financial relationship between the company who provided the game and Kotaku. There were a few lengthy blog posts by the former EGM editor in chief, Dan Hsu I think his name was, that discussed the extensive investment companies made to provided the game media with goodies and it is very inappropriate. On top of that, they describe how much they played the game and what parts. These declarations very clearly tell everyone the context in which the game was played and the review was made.
Most fun vs best fun is a highly subjective and difficult thing to tease and impossible to really communicate consistently to an audience. The most a reader will expect is whether the person was happy playing it or not.
I don’t think reviewers directly claim “I paid X, was it worth it?” with a regularly priced game. I have seen people say “At x price, this is a bargain” because the game was not a regularly priced game. Its not the same message because the context is not the same. If a game is just as enjoyable as a 60 dollar game, but is for sale at 20 dollars less, it alters the market significantly. It doesn’t bias the reviewer unless the reviewer actually paid for it, which doesn’t happen often in the press, as you will know. Psychological studies on this phenomenon only influence a person’s impression based on what they personally invested or profited from.
And AGAIN I am disappointed you don’t read the article I posted because it is CLEAR you do not understand a core element behind piracy. YES a lot of people are douchebags, but Newel sells his point very well: pirates invest a lot of money in their machines and internet connections. Pirates that pirate games because something is not worth what they want to pay or because what they pay for is attached with a substandard experience, like DRM, should not be seen as pirates, but unhappy potential customers. The Steam sales data supports this point.
I’m of the belief that a review (of anything) should simply spell out the facts in a way the intended audience can understand it (avoiding spoilers if applicable of course) so that the reader can decide by himself if it’s something he wants to invest in. Things like numbered ratings are unfair because what the reviewer likes or dislikes may not apply to everybody.
Which is not to say that reviews shouldn’t contain personal opinions- in fact those are often part of the fun (I may not always agree with the Nostalgia Critic, for example, but watching him rant is amusing. 
) Such parts should always be clearly separated from the review proper, tho. (Simple headings such as “facts” and “my opinion” will do.)
I have always found SG’s reviews interesting and well-written, even when I disagree with them. I hope he keeps posting them here. 
They pirated a bundle of games that required a credit card (and giving its info) that you could buy for a cent. If nothing else, kids don’t have credit cards.
Sorry to have dropped out of this discussion so suddenly; I’m moving across the state…actually, like, today. So, I had to get a ton of stuff ready.
Basically, yeah, I’ve seen Kotaku’s reviews. While it’s a bit irrational, I don’t read Kotaku because I feel like they’re not a very respectable site because of their policy of posting anything and everything as news sources, along with the fact that they’ve been proven not to check their sources (people have leaked fake rumours just for the purpose of demonstrating this about Kotaku). So, while that’s irrelevant to their reviews, it’s just what I think about when I imagine reading them.
I’ve read that article by Dan Hsu and that was an excellent one.
Most fun vs. best fun really isn’t that hard to relay to an audience. I suppose it is for critics that try to pretend like they’re objective, but otherwise, it’s not that difficult.
Also, I’m not sure why you think I didn’t read the article just because I’m curious where that data was collected about pirates and their machines. Did they survey 1000 random pirates? Did a random sample of pirates just inform them of their system specs? It’s one thing to just state that and quite another thing to show your research. This article doesn’t even SAY that that comment was researched, so I’m not inclined to believe something just because Gabe Newell insists it’s true. I can tell you that every pirate I’ve ever known in my life does NOT spend lots of money on upgrading their computer systems and internet connections; they just buy computer parts because they can’t pirate 'em. And, this would be true, but it’s anecdotal, unscientific, AND I have no way of proving it.
I have never read anything in my entire life that even came close to a concept of best vs most fun. Re: Kotaku, I’ve found their information reliable. I’m not sure how far back what you’ve described happens.
I’m surprised you don’t understand the Newell interview. Basically, they use their sales data and Steamworks to collect information on the people who have Steam installed on their machines. In this fashion, they have extremely detailed statistics on how people are set up and what their purchasing habits are. This is very common knowledge. They have a fairly solid idea of how much money people need to put into their computers to run their games and who does what with their machines. Another reason that tells me you didn’t read the article is because what you’re saying is so completely away from everything he spoke of. It also helps to understand the context in which this debate is occurring.
Sales of PC games have gradually gotten worse in the past decade thanks to the advent of high speed internet and bit torrent sites. Companies like Ubisoft will look at how many times a game has been downloaded across different torrent sites and invent a magical value of how many sales that should have been and thus how much money it is that they lost because of it. They use this information to promote DRM software, which in the end just serve to piss off legitimate customers more. That being said, if you look at sites that discuss sales, specific types of games follow specific types of patterns with a logarythmic drop in sales over time. Typically you can expect sales to drop by 50% each successive week for core games because the pool of interested buyers diminishes at at that rate. The pool diminishes because there are fewer and fewer people willing to pay what the game is being sold for.
Enter Valve and Steam. They experimented with different prices and discounts and as Newell claimed, sales went up 100s if not 1000s of percent, proportionally to the size of the discount. What this demonstrated was that the available market of PC gamers was much greater than people everywhere otherwise knew. Of all people, PC gamers know how to pirate things, yet here they are purchasing a game at a discount when they could’ve gotten it for free on bit torrent. Since Steam essentially dominates the downloadable gaming arena, their data is representative.
And I think Rig very clearly explained the torrent phenomenon with the Indie bundle. I’m not saying all these people were kids, just that you yourself made a blanket, unsupported statement about it.
Well sure, yeah I know about how devs can collect info on people who have Steam and yadda yadda. Here’s the problem: it still doesn’t tell them whether they’re pirating stuff of not, or is that a statistic I didn’t know about? 
Sales of PC games have gradually gotten worse in the past decade thanks to the advent of high speed internet and bit torrent sites. Companies like Ubisoft will look at how many times a game has been downloaded across different torrent sites and invent a magical value of how many sales that should have been and thus how much money it is that they lost because of it. They use this information to promote DRM software, which in the end just serve to piss off legitimate customers more. That being said, if you look at sites that discuss sales, specific types of games follow specific types of patterns with a logarythmic droesn’t op in sales over time. Typically you can expect sales to drop by 50% each successive week for core games because the pool of interested buyers diminishes at at that rate. The pool diminishes because there are fewer and fewer people willing to pay what the game is being sold for.
Enter Valve and Steam. They experimented with different prices and discounts and as Newell claimed, sales went up 100s if not 1000s of percent, proportionally to the size of the discount. What this demonstrated was that the available market of PC gamers was much greater than people everywhere otherwise knew. Of all people, PC gamers know how to pirate things, yet here they are purchasing a game at a discount when they could’ve gotten it for free on bit torrent. Since Steam essentially dominates the downloadable gaming arena, their data is representative. [/QUOTE]
Yeah, I know all this because I read the article. I really don’t get what makes you think I didn’t. Another funny thing about this experiment is that that they performed it with Left 4 Dead, a virtually unpiratable game on PC. I mean, wtf are you gonna do if you pirate L4D? Play single player? I’m not saying I support DRM either - far from it - but L4D is an extremely poor game to use as an example. Are there any other games this experiment can be performed with which are actually able to be played effectively when pirated?
And I think Rig very clearly explained the torrent phenomenon with the Indie bundle. I’m not saying all these people were kids, just that you yourself made a blanket, unsupported statement about it.
Sure, I made a blanket, unsupported statement about it. Rig did, too. Which one do you think was honestly more likely to be the predominant scenario? How many of those people had no possible way of asking their mom or their friend to pay 1 frickin’ cent on a credit card and pay them back? It’s still a very flimsy excuse.
Steamworks doesn’t tell us who’s pirating and not pirating games. It tells us what the market is. The point about steamworks is making the case for how much money specific groups of gamers invest in their gaming rigs.
Man, how far are going to keep digging? Another example of how you didn’t read the article is how _I_picked L4D as an example when Newell uses multiple examples. The trend has since been repeated and proven with countless other Valve sales. L4D is a good example because it is clearly aimed at core pc gamers.
I think you’re overly optimistic about how understanding most people are about video games and internet game purchasing.
They may ask their mom, but their mom will not always want to give the details of her credit card to an unknown site for a cent. You can get 20 dollars for poker if you register at a site where they play for cash but not many people do, because they value their personal data more than a cent or $20. I know the USA is a far more credit-based economy, but people care about their data as the negotiators for the US find out when the Europarliament blocks their data agreements with the Commission time and time again.
Also, I didn’t say “poor pirates don’t want to surrender their data; of course they had to pirate the games”. They could have not played them.
Are we reading the same article, here!? Because here’s the one I’m reading: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=22378
There are only four games mentioned here:
- Rock Band
- Guitar Hero
- Team Fortress 2
- Left 4 Dead
Rock Band and Guitar Hero can be pirated, but you can’t pirate the DLC; you’re left with no choice but to buy it. While it’s not DRM in the conventional sense, it IS a failsafe that makes sure any consumer who uses those games has to pay money. Even if you pirate the game, you can only play with the selection of songs available with the retail game unless you pay money. So, the majority of the content of these games are unpiratable.
Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead can’t be played online without buying the game properly, because you need to play them through Steam. Sure, you can technically pirate them, but what are you going to do? Play TF2 by yourself? Play L4D single player? Again, they’re using anti-piracy measures that aren’t DRM, because the game essentially assures that you can’t have any fun with it unless you purchase the game.
Left 4 Dead was the biggest example in the article, and the biggest one you used, so I went with it. I didn’t realize I had to cite the whole fuggin article every time I referenced it. In any case, the bottom line is that these examples do not give us any relevant data on pirates’ habits. They’re not buying these games because they think the quality is worth the price; they’re buying it cos they can’t have fun with the game when it’s pirated.
Furthermore, until we have any sort of source which detailed how Gabe Newell knows any of the things he’s saying about pirates’ spending habits beyond these games cited in the article, then his whole “Oh pirates would dish out the money if they felt the price met the quality” is completely unfounded and without any real data support the claim.
"When Valve held its recent holiday sale, titles discounted by 10 percent (the minimum) they saw revenue (not unit) increases of 35 percent. At a 25 percent discount, revenue was up 245 percent.
At 50 percent off, revenue was up 320 percent, and at a 75 percent discount, revenue was up an astonishing 1470 percent. Newell stressed again that those revenue boosts represent actual revenue dollars, and not unit volumes."
Its safe to assume that Steam players are representative of the available pool of PC Gamers/Pirates.
I would hesitate to concede any games mentioned in the Holiday sales if they can’t be purchased anywhere but the Steam platform, for the simple fact that they can’t be pirated. You can’t use unpiratable games as proof that pirates will buy games if the price is right, because there’s no way of pirating them in the first place. Think really hard about why these deals are available on Steam or other Direct Download services, rather than on their console counterparts.
Also:
Its safe to assume that Steam players are representative of the available pool of PC Gamers/Pirates.Its safe to assume that Steam players are representative of the available pool of PC Gamers/Pirates.
No, it’s not. Nevermind the reasons I just explained about how games available through only Steam can’t be pirated in the first place; saying “Oh pirates love to spend money on their hardware and internet” and their best evidence is “Our Steam data shows that these users have high end PCs” doesn’t mean shit. They don’t know how many of those gamers are pirates, how many of them WOULD pirate their games if they had the chance, and they can’t even make detailed conclusions about buyer trends for computer hardward for pirates, because they don’t know who is pirating and who isn’t based on their data.
There is absolutely no empirical evidence backing up that statement, and even if there was? How many of those people do you think buy top-of-the-line computer hardware because they find it worth the asking price, and not because it’s impossible to illegally download it off of the internet?
My god, where do you keep coming with this stuff?!
You can pirate things that’s available on Steam. I once played a hacked version of Half Life 2 a long time ago. The Steam platform is not exclusive as games there are available on different online networks. Its not because something is on Steam its not on bit torrent. Claiming that its not piratable because its on Steam is the most ridiculous thing you’ve said yet. Its impossible to take anything you say seriously if you’re going to make comments like that.
Steam has a stranglehold on the online gaming market. To claim they have competition with the other online services is a joke. They know who buys what. Its easy to analyze the market and that’s how companies like Valve and Blizzard direct how they make their games, unlike Crytek. They study who they’re going to sell their product to and aim the specs at that to maximize the number of people who will buy their products…
Nowhere did I or anyone claim that people knew precisely who was a pirate. PC gamers are a specific demographic and they use the same machines as everyone else to run games like Call of Duty and other highly pirated titles. To pirate these games and play them successfully requires a substantial hardware investment to begin with. When your sample size is in the 10s of millions, you establish pretty clear distribution curves for hardware and if you’re going to tell me that pirates don’t fall within these curves, I’m simply going to laugh in your face.
Nowhere did I claim people had top of the line hardware. That doesn’t mean their hardware didn’t come cheap. You’re misinterpreting the idea that a high end pc costs 4000 dollars. Any PC that can decently run quality, up-to-date games is a high end PC and will set you back a chunk of money. Its easy to look at the Steamworks stats and derive the approximate value of the machines people build/buy to run their stuff. Your question makes no sense. Rephrase.
You need to work on setting up your arguments, SG because you simply jump all over the place and get nowhere. Be concise.