For those who didn’t know, Iron Lore Entertainment, the maker of Titan Quest, closed its doors. Well, THQ creative director Michael Fitch is not a happy bunny about the situation, and he knows exactly who to blame for the downfall of the development house. He blames you. All of you.
“Trying to make it on PC product is even tougher, and here’s why.
Piracy. Yeah, that’s right, I said it. No, I don’t want to re-hash the endless “piracy spreads awareness”, “I only pirate because there’s no demo”, “people who pirate wouldn’t buy the game anyway” round-robin. Been there, done that.”
In a very long rant posted on the Quarter to Three forums, Fitch goes to town on the multitudes of PC gamers who pirate their games:
“Titan Quest did okay. We didn’t lose money on it. But if even a tiny fraction of the people who pirated the game had actually spent some god-damn money for their 40+ hours of entertainment, things could have been very different today. You can bitch all you want about how piracy is your god-given right, and none of it matters anyway because you can’t change how people behave… whatever. Some really good people made a seriously good game, and they might still be in business if piracy weren’t so rampant on the PC. That’s a fact.”
He also says that pirates giving bad word-of-mouth reviews about Titan Quest‘s bugs (apparently caused due to their piracy/lack of knowledge) didn’t help matters, and then goes on to bemoan the difficulty of working with PC hardware, which he describes as a “freaking nightmare.” Oh, but Fitch doesn’t stop there — he labels the majority of the game’s audience “stupid” and then starts blaming bad reviewers just to add icing to the misery cake.
Altogether, it’s a very bitter, very candid bucket of hate that Fitch has spilled all over the Internet, and one that is likely going to put him up there with Julian Eggebrecht and Jeff Minter. However, unlike those two, there is a very heavy element of justification in Fitch’s words. In many ways … this guy’s right.
[With thanks to Boolean]
