Recently there has been a lot of talk about how piracy affects PC gaming. And if you listen to game developers, it apparently is a foregone conclusion - if a high quality PC game doesn't sell as many copies as it should, it must be because of piracy.

Now, I don't like piracy at all. It really bugs me when I see my game up on some torrent site just on the principle of the matter. And piracy certainly does cost sales.  But arguing that piracy is the primary factor in lower sales of well made games? I don't think so. People who never buy software aren't lost sales.

Is it about business or glory?

Most people who know of Stardock in the gaming world think of it as a tiny indie shop. And we certainly are tiny in terms of game development. But in the desktop enhancement market, Stardock owns that market and it's a market with many millions of users. According to CNET, 6 of the top 10 most popular desktop enhancements are developed by Stardock.  Our most popular desktop enhancement, WindowBlinds, has almost 14 million downloads just on Download.com. We have over a million registered users.

If you want to talk about piracy, talk about desktop enhancements. The piracy on that is huge.  But the question isn't about piracy. It's about sales. 

So here is the deal: When you develop for a market, you don't go by the user base. You go by the potential customer base.  That's what most software companies do. They base what they want to create on the size of the market they're developing for. But not PC game developers.

PC game developers seem to focus more on the "cool" factor. What game can they make that will get them glory with the game magazines and gaming websites and hard core gamers? These days, it seems like game developers want to be like rock stars more than businessmen.  I've never considered myself a real game developer. I'm a gamer who happens to know how to code and also happens to be reasonably good at business.

So when I make a game, I focus on making games that I think will be the most profitable. As a gamer, I like most games.  I love Bioshock. I think the Orange Box is one of the best gaming deals ever. I love Company of Heroes and Oblivion was captivating.  My two favorite games of all time are Civilization (I, II, III, and IV) and Total Annihilation. And I won't even get into the hours lost in WoW.  Heck, I even like The Sims. 

So when it comes time to make a game, I don't have a hard time thinking of a game I'd like to play. The hard part is coming up with a game that we can actually make that will be profitable.  And that means looking at the market as a business not about trying to be "cool".

Making games for customers versus making games for users

So even though Galactic Civilizations II sold 300,000 copies making 8 digits in revenue on a budget of less than $1 million, it's still largely off the radar. I practically have to agree to mow editors lawns to get coverage. And you should see Jeff Green's (Games for Windows) yard. I still can't find my hedge trimmers.

Another game that has been off the radar until recently was Sins of a Solar Empire. With a small budget, it has already sold about 200,000 copies in the first month of release. It's the highest rated PC game of 2008 and probably the best selling 2008 PC title.  Neither of these titles have CD copy protection.

And yet we don't get nearly the attention of other PC games. Lack of marketing on our part? We bang on the doors for coverage as next as the next shop. Lack of advertising? Open up your favorite PC game publication for the past few months and take note of all the 2 page spreads for Sins of a Solar Empire. So we certainly try. 

But we still don't get the editorial buzz that some of the big name titles do because our genre isn't considered as "cool" as other genres.  Imagine what our sales would be if our games had gotten game magazine covers and just massive editorial coverage like some of the big name games get.  I don't want to suggest we get treated poorly by game magazine and web sites (not just because I fear them -- which I do), we got good preview coverage on Sins, just not the same level as one of the "mega" titles would get. Hard core gamers have different tastes in games than the mainstream PC gaming market of game buyers. Remember Roller Coaster Tycoon? Heck, how much buzz does The Sims get in terms of editorial when compared to its popularity. Those things just aren't that cool to the hard core gaming crowd that everything seems geared toward despite the fact that they're not the ones buying most of the games.

I won't even mention some of the big name PC titles that GalCiv and Sins have outsold.  There's plenty of PC games that have gotten dedicated covers that haven't sold as well.  So why is that?

Our games sell well for three reasons.  First, they're good games which is a pre-requisite. But there's lots of great games that don't sell well.

The other two reasons are:

• Our games work on a very wide variety of hardware configurations.
• Our games target genres with the largest customer bases per cost to produce for.

We also don't make games targeting the Chinese market

When you make a game for a target market, you have to look at how many people will actually buy your game combined with how much it will cost to make a game for that target market. What good is a large number of users if they're not going to buy your game? And what good is a market where the minimal commitment to make a game for it is $10 million if the target audience isn't likely to pay for the game?

If the target demographic for your game is full of pirates who won't buy your game, then why support them? That's one of the things I have a hard time understanding.  It's irrelevant how many people will play your game (if you're in the business of selling games that is). It's only relevant how many people are likely to buy your game.

Stardock doesn't make games targeting the Chinese market. If we spent $10 million on a PC game explicitly for the Chinese market and we lost our shirts, would you really feel that much sympathy for us? Or would you think "Duh."

You need a machine how fast?

Anyone who keeps track of how many PCs the "Gamer PC" vendors sell each year could tell you that it's insane to develop a game explicitly for hard core gamers.  Insane.  I think people would be shocked to find out how few hard core gamers there really are out there. This data is available. The number of high end graphics cards sold each year isn't a trade secret (in some cases you may have to get an NDA but if you're a partner you can find out). So why are companies making games that require them to sell to 15% of a given market to be profitable? In what other market do companies do that? In other software markets, getting 1% of the target market is considered good.  If you need to sell 500,000 of your game to break even and your game requires Pixel Shader 3 to not look like crap or play like crap, do you you really think that there are 50 MILLION PC users with Pixel Shader 3 capable machines who a) play games and will actually buy your game if a pirated version is available?

In our case, we make games that target the widest possible audience as long as as we can still deliver the gaming experience we set out to.  Anyone who's looked at the graphics in Sins of a Solar Empire would, I think, agree that the graphics are pretty phenomenal (particularly space battles).  But could they be even fancier? Sure. But only if we degraded the gaming experience for the largest chunk of people who buy games.

The problem with blaming piracy

I don't want anyone to walk away from this article thinking I am poo-pooing the effect of piracy.  I'm not.  I definitely feel for game developers who want to make kick ass PC games who see their efforts diminished by a bunch of greedy pirates.  I just don't count pirates in the first place.  If you're a pirate, you don't get a vote on what gets made -- or you shouldn't if the company in question is trying to make a profit. 

The reason why we don't put CD copy protection on our games isn't because we're nice guys. We do it because the people who actually buy games don't like to mess with it. Our customers make the rules, not the pirates. Pirates don't count. We know our customers could pirate our games if they want but choose to support our efforts. So we return the favor - we make the games they want and deliver them how they want it. This is also known as operating like every other industry outside the PC game industry.

One of the jokes I've seen in the desktop enhancement market is how "ugly" WindowBlinds skins are (though there are plenty of awesome ones too). But the thing is, the people who buy WindowBlinds tend to like a different style of skin than the people who would never buy it in the first place.  Natural selection, so to speak, over many years has created a number of styles that seem to be unique to people who actually buy WindowBlinds.  That's the problem with piracy.  What gets made targets people who buy it, not the people who would never buy it in the first place. When someone complains about "fat borders" on some popular WindowBlinds skin my question is always "Would you buy WindowBlinds even if there was a perfect skin for you?" and the answer is inevitably "Probably not". That's how it works in every market -- the people who buy stuff call the shots.  Only in the PC game market are the people who pirate stuff still getting the overwhelming percentage of development resources and editorial support.

When you blame piracy for disappointing sales, you tend to tar the entire market with a broad brush.  Piracy isn't evenly distributed in the PC gaming market. And there are far more effective ways of getting people who might buy your product to buy it without inconveniencing them.

Blaming piracy is easy. But it hides other underlying causes.  When Sins popped up as the #1 best selling game at retail a couple weeks ago, a game that has no copy protect whatsoever, that should tell you that piracy is not the primary issue.

In the end, the pirates hurt themselves. PC game developers will either slowly migrate to making games that cater to the people who buy PC games or they'll move to platforms where people are more inclined to buy games.

In the meantime, if you want to make profitable PC games, I'd recommend focusing more effort on satisfying the people willing to spend money on your product and less effort on making what others perceive as hot.  But then again, I don't romanticize PC game development. I just want to play cool games and make a profit on games that I work on.

For users of desktop enhancements, the abuse of other people's copyright is a well known topic. Whether it be with rips in skins or the pirating of software.

But in the PC game market, piracy has reached a head recently as it apparently was a hot topic at this year's Game Developer's Conference. At the GDC, many developers blamed piracy for the soft sales of their PC games.

However, Stardock's own Sins of a Solar Empire topped the US retail charts despite having no copy protection whatsoever.  So what's the deal?

The article below goes over some of our thoughts on the matter. We think you'll find it an interesting read.

Windows Vista Service Pack 1 is the first major update to Microsoft's controversial follow-up to Windows XP. I say controversial because Windows Vista got off to a bit of a rough start mostly in the area of driver support, the new User Access Control and just a number of polish issues that gave early adopters a bit of a sour taste.

We've been given a copy of the final release of Service Pack 1 and we're pleased to say it's a big step forward for Windows Vista users.  Having previously been using the betas and most recently RC1, I had been disappointed with the general slowness and klunkiness of Windows Vista.

For most new users to Windows Vista, the first thing they would tend to notice is how much slower Windows Vista was versus Windows XP.  With Service Pack 1, Windows Vista is very snappy.  The overall experience is just much better.  Here are the big improvements based on our testing:

1. Superfetch is super. The most significant improvement we noticed in SP1 over Vista (including the RC's) is that superfetch is much better. Superfetch looks at what programs you tend to use and so when you boot up, it will tend to load pieces of these into memory.  Now, users who get really uptight about the amount of memory used by the system on bootup will still have a cow. But the reality is that now when you load up the programs you usually run, it's lightning fast.  If you've ever right-clicked on the desktop in Windows XP to create a folder and found it obnoxious how long it takes to bring up a pop up menu, you'll like SP1.
   
   
2. File Management much snappier. In Windows Vista, moving files around was obnoxious. You'd get a dialog that would start to estimate the amount of time it would take to copy the files.  If I'm moving 10 gigs around, sure, that might make sense. But even on relatively small file operations, I'd get this dialog.   Now, moving things around in Windows is as fast or faster than it was on Windows XP. It's very snappy. One other plus, the zip handling is much faster.
   
   
3. Using it with a laptop is nicer.  One thing we noticed immediately over plain Vista was coming out of sleep was much much faster. This is particularly true if you have USB devices hooked up. It was very noticeable.
   
   
4. General performance is better.  Is it better than Windows XP? Most people will say no but it depends on what matters to you.  Windows XP benchmarks better but in terms of actual responsiveness, Windows Vista is feeling faster on the same hardware for me.  That is, loading up programs I commonly use, switching between programs, etc.  I am inclined to agree with those who say that Vista will perform more slowly in benchmarking but Vista is a lot more intelligent in its memory management in SP1 than XP and vastly better than Vista plain.

There are numerous other updates to Windows Vista SP1 but in terms of what we think most users will notice, these are the big ones. 

In terms of listing new articles and latest article comments, we need to make some distinctions:

An article has a blog ID.

A forum post does not.

Therefore, newest articles and newest article comments should only be listing things that have a blog ID.

We should use that as an opportunity to display both the latest articles, latest article comments, and latest forum activity.

I think one of the frustrations (Certainly one of mine) with the new JU is being whisked away to the forums when it is not intutive that that would happen. It also causes FORUM traffic from WinCustomize to get mixed in with BLOG activity on JoeUser.

People on WinCustomize who have personal pages can write articles, but they don't have to.  We need to separate the two concepts so that people who want to read articles are reading articles as opposed to being sent over to look at forum posts.

One of the most exciting things going on in our household is what we call "Future House".  While most people who know me personally know that silliness is the core of my being (by contrast, on-line my persona is stuck as crutchety stereo type authority figure), I do take major life plans serious to the point of insanity.

When my wife and I got married, nearly 15 years ago, we had a plan. We would have 3 houses in our "effective lifetime" (only an engineer comes up with a term like that).

The first house would be our "Starter house". The second house would be our transitional house that would be nicer while we prepared for the "ultimate house".

Of course, we had no idea what scale these various houses would be. But the plan was to try to afford as much house as we could by the time my wife and I hit 40. This wasn't merely due to distracting ourselves from our various pre-planned midlife crisis's (well sure it was but anyway...) it was also because we wanted to make sure our "final" house was set up while our kids were still young enough to think of that house as their home.

2 years ago, I bought about 3.5 acres of property near work for the project and this Spring, the trucks move in to begin clearing things and start building. It will take about 2.5 years for the house to be built. If all goes well, we'll be moved in right around the time my wife hits 40 (I'll still be 39).

For both my wife and I, the whole project is surreal.  For myself, I grew up in a 2 bedroom apartment with my mom. Through her frugal management of money, we eventually moved into a house in a very nice neighborhood. Her house is about 1,000 square feet (though I'm sure she'll correct me on the exact).  It was a great house to grow up in since it was just the 2 of us.

When I got out of college and the first product I made (a PC game for OS/2) helped the company take off, I used the fame of that game (our publisher didn't pay us so I only had glory but no money yet) to launch additional products which we published ourselves (And thus got to actually see the money).  That allowed my new wife and I to buy our first home. 2,500 square feet. Very nice house. Had a little pond in back that I dug and had woods near by.

When we had two kids and thoughts of having a third, we decided on a whim (after being talked into it by my diabolical neighbor and friend and now coworker who had just moved to a new neighborhood) to get house #2 which is 4,000 square feet, not counting the finished basement.  It is a really nice house, great neighborhood.

But the house we're in, as nice as it is, isn't our dream home.  First, there's no woods around. It's completely in a sub-division so there are houses on all sides. Even as I type here in my pajamas (I am a blogger after all) I am sure the neighbor across the way can see right into my window at my ever expanding gut (I'm shirtless). 

I like neighbors, but I don't like having them on all sides. Plus, my wife wants a pool and I'd like to have some space for having various critters in the house (I love animals of all types but don't dare have them here).  The house we're in was obviously designed by a guy. Very small laundry room and tiny mud room.

So for the past couple of years, we've been deciding on the features of our dream house. I won't go into too many details as I recognize that there's plenty of people who get resentful over "conspicuous consumption" but my feeling is that life is short and having a cool house is something I've always wanted and now we have the means to do everything we've always wanted. 

Even my kook side can be placated with hidden rooms, alternative power sources, conservatory with water supply for all kinds of animals (I want to build a mini eco system), a lower floor lab for robotics, electronics, etc.  A mini shop for beekeeping stuff and building other stuff.

The idea is that this will be the house we retire in. Our last house. So we're trying to make sure that a) it has everything we can think of today and it's got space and flexibility to have what we think of in the future added.

The lot itself is beautiful. Totally wooded (Which is a bit heart breaking as trees have to be cut down to build the house -- a LOT of trees).  The wood, however, is being used on the house rather than scrapped so the wood won't be really going anywhere, it'll simply be reformed.

So over the coming 2.5 years, you'll likely see some pictures and notes.  A great adventure is about to begin.

As part of my growing flash light fetish, I picked up the Surefire Executive Defender E2D flashlight.  It's a small flash light that fits in the palm of your hand but provides serious utility.

At 60 lumens of brightness, it will light a dark area extremely well. It is also designed for self-defense with enough brightness to blind an assailant immediately. The front and back are reinforced with a very very solid steel that is slightly surrated to ensure that anyone you whack it with takes some serious damage.

While not something I would personally use for defense in all likelyhood, as a last resort, it's better than nothing. In the meantime, I'll use it as a handy way of getting around in the dark.

The Linksys Wireless print server does what it's supposed to do - but just barely. It's more hassle than it's worth.

When I got it, I was hoping that would would allow my printer to work much the same way that a network Printer does. But that is definitely not the case. The proprietary software and reduced functionality (I can't use the printer's scanner capabilities) makes it just not worth it.

It is the time of the Twilight of the Arnor. Or, more specifically, time to start going through the AI for enhancements for the new expansion pack.

Today, I'm going to play and show BUGS in our stuff as I play. Here we go.

I'm playing a Tournament game for this. Now you all will be able to play Drengin-Human Wars.

Bug 1, the name provided should be based on the title of the campaign (Drengin Human Wars) not on file names.

Drengin vs. Humans

The Drengin and humans are battling it out for a 25 sector quadrant. The Terran Alliance starts out with just the planet Avalon. The Drengin are located on the other side of the map.

Since I designed the map, I know where the planets are which I take full advantage of since I'm playing to win. But I still need scouts to help me figure out where some of the other things are so I design one.

I make use of the new animated piece feature to have a sensor dish that rotates.

Early in the game, this is what the map looks like. I'm in great shape because I took the two big center planets (since I knew where they are and the AI does not).

There is a show stopper bug on this screen. See if you can find it.

Gotta go look into it...

Have some change you would like to see made to JoeUser? Make it here.

I'll get the ball rolling:

1. Make the editor clearly show the "more" tag (type more with brackets around it to control which part is the summary).
2. Get rid of the little arrow image that appears next to links. It's distracting.
3. Have the most recent article comments find the blog article first and only use the forums if there is no blog connected to it. I don't like being switched to the forums.
4. If I do go to the forums, don't make me logon.
5. Don't have my logon expire on forums or on JU ever. I don't want to have to relogon.
6. Get the "more" (full listing) of popular articles and recent article comments implemented so that I can see them.
7. Fix bug where some Stardock support forums show up in the recent article comments.
8. Implement full leading blogs and leading users lists so that I can click on them and see a full listing on each.
9. Users with access level > citizen should not see any ads.
10. Make a user's blog roll show up on every sidebar that's related to their blog (i.e. if I click on one of my articles, I want my blog roll to show up).
11. The new rich text editor is really slow to work with (I normally use live writer but when I do use the new editor it's painful).
12. When I am reading an article and it says "by user in blogging" and I click on blogging, I expect ot be taken to the main blogging category index not just the ones from that personal site.
13. It is difficult for users to go to the specific blog-specific channels from a user's home page. That is, if users wanted to read just my artcles on PC gaming, they'd have a rough time doing it.
14. The tags on blogs are always the global tags. There should be per-site tags generated.
15. Need an easy way to tell if a category link is referencing just the articles in the user's personal category or the entire site. I.e. Just my articles on Politics or all of teh articles on politics. Users should be able to easily tell which is which and there are times when users are going to want to quickly jump to a full list of articles on politics versus just the articles written by that blogger.

That's my start.

I wrote this last year:

https://forums.joeuser.com/?FoRumID=3&AID=144168

"What if the earth starts cooling"

Since 1998, the temperature has been pretty flat. This year, it's looking like it's going to take a dip (and it may be that 2007 was a bit down as well) even as CO2 rates increase.

So...

All those smug global warming zealots...do you think any of them will apologize for being so obnoxious with their half-baked theory?

I am not arguing that there isn't global warming nor am I asserting that I know that humans aren't the cause of global climate change.   But I have researched the topic enough over the past decade to know that no one should be behaving as if human contribution to the environment is a certain cause for anything.