gameshadow posts

In the past few months, we have heard from Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli rant a number of times against piracy of PC games, specifically for his 2007 shooter Crysis. He has even claimed that just one legitimate copy of the game has been sold compared to 20 pirates copies of the game. But are such numbers misleading? Edge Online has an opinion that says, "Yes",

That opinion comes from Tom Jubert, an editor for the UK based Gameshadow which supplies automatic downloads of PC games. Jubert does state, "There's no doubt that PC gaming suffers due to piracy - and to a considerably greater extent than console titles." However, he believes that Yerli's claims of the amount of piracy is overblown. Jubert uses data from their own Gameshadow program to prove his point, saying, "What that means is I can tell you the ratio of legal vs illegal Crysis installs in GameShadow's UK customer base is more like 7:3, while in the US it's closer to 5:1 - a far less bleak scenario."

And while Yerli's ratio claims may in fact be true in a worldwide sense, Jubert adds, "they are not representative of the true impact of piracy on the PC games industry." He states most pirated copies are going to territories where there's not a large PC gaming market anyway. Also he feels not everyone who pirated a copy of the game would haved purchased it anyway if they couldn't get a free copy anyway. Jubert's conclusion? "In short, rampant piracy is no longer the catch-all excuse it's often employed as."

So you are a developer that wants to make a game but you want it to appeal to a certain audience. How do you make sure your game will get the attention of the gamer you want? UK based Gameshadow, which offers an automatic PC game patch service, has announced a new feature called Gameshadow Metrics that aims to give "real time reports on PC gamers' playing habits and preferences."

Gamers that download and install the Gameshadow program are apparently being tracked not just on how many patches they download but also what hardware they have on their PCs, what games they like to play most and more stats. The makers of Gameshadow claim that such data mining is safe for gamers, saying " . . . we fully protect our gamers so that nothing can be tracked backed to individuals." Still having yet another program that tracks our PC usage is always a little bit "Big Brother" like to us.