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Piracy pushing Epic, id away from PC gaming
by Cyril Kowaliski — 1:42 AM on March 12, 2007

At the Game Developers Conference, Epic Games president Michael Capps and id Software CEO Todd Hollenshead dropped a major bombshell: rampant software piracy on the PC has made both their companies concentrate more on console development. Shacknews has the dirty details here, including the following choice quotes:

"Piracy has pushed id as being multiplatform," stated Hollenshead, whose company contracted Z-Axis to handle the PlayStation 3 version and Nerve Software the Xbox 360 edition of Splash Damage's forthcoming Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (PC).

Comments made by Epic's Capps carried a similar tone. "PC gaming is really falling apart," he revealed. "It killed us to make Unreal Tournament 3 cross-platform, but Epic had to do it," adding "the market that would buy a $600 video card knows how Bittorrent works." Epic is currently developing Unreal Tournament 3 for the PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in-house.

That said, other developers are a bit more optimistic. According to Soren Johnson, a designer and programmer for Sid Meier's Firaxis, PC game design "is going to bend toward persistence." Johnson cites World of Warcraft as an example of a successful PC-only game—successful, he says, because "you cannot pirate an MMO. Period."