Speaking from experience, piracy has a very strong influence on how much money video game companies are willing to spend on development. Piracy is the reason that PC gamers have to put up with games that are primarily designed for consoles, with very little invested in adapting them to a PC interface. Few companies are willing to spend money on PC development when you can only expect a few hundred thousand sales.
> Speaking from experience, piracy has a very strong influence on how much money video game companies are willing to spend on development.
The PC gaming market is very healthy, probably healthier than ever, so I honestly do not know what you are talking about here.
Triple-A games aren't targeted to consoles because of pirates, they are targeted to consoles because consumer demand is higher for console games. Only a few genres are more popular on PC, like RTS, MOAB, and MMORPG.
> Triple-A games aren't targeted to consoles because of pirates, they are targeted to consoles because consumer demand is higher for console games.
The estimated PC install base for one of the console-led titles I've worked on is in the same ballpark as each of the consoles.* The actual sales on PC, however, were far, far less than the consoles.
* We know this due to, e.g. number of people pinging the multiplayer servers, checking for updates etc.
The PC gaming market is almost entirely multiplayer games, console ports, republished older releases, flash games, and independent games sold through Steam. Almost no one is investing significant budgets in easily pirated, single-player PC games. I'm not saying the PC gaming market is unhealthy or dying, but you should realize that every decision PC game developers make is driven by the need to make money in spite of rampant piracy. The OP asked for evidence that piracy has an effect on business decisions - it definitely does for PC games. In fact, I think it's probably the most important factor.
The PC is certainly seen to be less profitable than consoles, which is why it's given a lesser priority.
For multi-platform titles, typically 360 and PS3 titles are developed in parallel. Often the PC version comes later, after the console releases have finished and a small subset of the console devs have time to polish the PC port.
Usually two reasons are given. One is that it's not worth the extra management complexity and dev time to release at the same time as the PC. The other is that the piracy rate on PC is so high that launching all platforms at the same time actually cannibalizes both PC and console sales.
PC games generally cost less at retail, but manufacturing costs are lower and no subsidies go to console owners. Dev costs are slightly harder due to the challenges of developing for a wide range of hardware vs two fixed targets. I think that the profit per unit sale is slightly higher on PC than console (I could be wrong).
Yes, absolutely. The fact that PC sales are normally very low (around a tenth) of console sales for the same title and games without multiplayer are pirated at a much higher rate than multiplayer games is common knowledge and entirely uncontroversial within the game development industry, and always factors into decisions about how much money to invest in PC titles. Pretty much all the major shifts in PC gaming since the late '90s - cheap console ports, the emphasis on multiplayer, MMOs, Steam, etc - have been responses to piracy.
So you're saying that since the difference in PC game sales versus consoles can be accounted for primarily by piracy (not difference in demand), and that PC game sales are 10% of console sales--that 9 times as many people pirate PC games as buy them?
That doesn't take into account that many of the pirates wouldn't have purchased the game if piracy wasn't an option. If we consider that, then we'd need many more pirates, maybe twice as many (18 times as many pirates than purchasers in total), to account for the lower PC sales.
