Game Publishers Turn To Consoles Because of Rampart PC Piracy. Right.

Some pub­lish­ers and devel­op­ers claim that piracy is one of the main rea­sons behind games not being released on PC. A while ago, Yoshinori Ono, the pro­ducer of the cult beat’em up series “Street Fighter”, said explic­itly that ille­gal file shar­ing caused the lat­est install­ment, “Super Street Fighter IV” to skip the PC market:

The PC ver­sion of the orig­i­nal was actu­ally a strong seller world­wide, said Ono. However, it was also “num­ber one in piracy.”

Ono actu­ally man­aged to look on the bright side of the piracy issue, say­ing that at least the game saw wider spread because of it. However, for the sake of pro­tect­ing the Street Fighter IV IP, they can­not make it so that Street Fighter is con­sid­ered “free” in cer­tain areas.

I could dis­cuss these claims but let’s take them on their face value and see what hap­pened to a con­sole ver­sion of another recent and suc­cess­ful game, “Call of Duty: Black Ops”. Specifically, to the Xbox 360 port:

Last month, with the gam­ing com­mu­nity wait­ing eagerly for the release of Black Ops, the lat­est instal­ment in the Call of Duty series, news broke that that devel­oper Treyarch was fever­ishly try­ing to con­tain a poten­tial leak of the game. While par­tially suc­cess­ful, Black Ops still leaked a week before its due date. This is the story of how.

(…)

True to his word the sup­plier uploaded the game to a file-hoster (which must remain name­less) in around 70 parts, some of which had unique pass­words. The next job was to get Black Ops spread to a world­wide audi­ence and for this T.P received assis­tance from a mem­ber of the Scene. Through highly encrypted con­nec­tions, uploads were made to a very large pri­vate BitTorrent tracker and var­i­ous Usenet servers.

And fur­ther:

In the end the release got out there but, in true pirate style, T.P’s leak was quickly pirated by some­one else want­ing to take the credit for his work. As can been seen on this arti­cle on Releaselog, the release of the ver­sion Call of Duty Black Ops READNFO XBOX360-FW was ‘nuked’ (dis­al­lowed) by the warez Scene for being from a “stolen source”.

Oh, what a lovely read this story is! The game was not only pirated once, the pirated release got pirated, too. Not on PC, but on Xbox 360. And the “Super Street Fighter IV”? Check for your­selves if you are able to locate any unau­tho­rized releases.

Then send the links you have found to Mr. Ono.