Gaming Signal: Piracy Causes Iron Lore Shutdown?

Piracy Causes Iron Lore Shutdown?

Last week, Iron Lore Entertainment announced it was shutting down due to the inability to secure another round of funding. Iron Lore is the creator of Titan's Quest and its expansion. Both of these are fine games that leverage Greek/Roman, Egyptian and Chinese mythology in a Diablo style (which is now called "action RPG"). The situation is very sad since the game was well received with a GameRankings score of 80%, but they were still unable to stay in business.

The latest comment in this story was made by Michael Fitch, THQ Creative Director, who states that piracy was part of the reason for the closure. He indicated THQ made money on the game, but had a larger number of sales occurred then the situation would have been much different.

The question I ask is, would ILE been better served by making Titan's Quest for the Xbox 360 or PS3? While there is piracy in almost every area of gaming, it seems to be much less on these newer consoles. It is also a reason that we are seeing some decline in PC gaming since game developers wish to recoup the cost of developing games and not suffer such high losses. Mr. Fitch quoted a number of 80% and that may be valid for some titles, and that is not a good thing...

GamingSignal does not condone piracy, but instead encourages the dressing up like a pirate and making pirate like statements. Also, there are plenty of ways to obtain games at less than retail including the "wait for it to go on clearance" option.

As one who purchased TitanQuest and its sequels at retail (probably all at full price) I can say that I thought they were all well worth the money. They are very high quality games that are a lot of fun (although the last one was freakin' hard.)

But, does theft honestly hurt sales? I'm not so sure. I've never been convinced that the people who pirate games would actually buy all those games if they couldn't get them cracked. The game industry uses the number of pirated copies directly in calculations of lost revenue, but I'm not sure that's reasonable.

Posted by scottsh on Tuesday March 04, 2008 at 3:24 PM

Actually, I think if you look at some markets that piracy has changed the way some software companies do business. In Korea, the PC game developers there have figured out that giving away the game and then using microtransactions is the way to make money. I also do think that a high piracy rate does impact sales. Given that THQ has released a gold version of the game recently at a very reasonable price point (30 bucks give or take) and probably had very few sales due to number of folks obtaining the game illegally. I also believe that is why you see so many more titles going console first since that is almost a guarantee for revenue and then doing a port over to the PC if the market really demands it.

Posted by Tim on Tuesday March 04, 2008 at 7:37 PM