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Piracy news.

Pirates!

A couple of news items showed up this week that may be more related than you’d think.  First up we’ve got developers Stardock complaining that their PC strategy RPG has had only 18,000 legitimate online connections and over 100,000 filthy piratey ones.  One of their number bleated ‘we spent a lot of time today trying to isolate out the warez users from the legitimate users (it would require a lot of surgery to actually break them and even if we did, there’d be no friendly ‘ha ha pirate’ message which would result in people just saying the game is buggy).’

Not arsed obviously.  PC strategy RPGs belong in the Austrian cellars that home most of their players but the rather natty GTA: Chinatown Wars has also threw up some evidence of pirate shenanigans.  You see, it only sold about 90,000 in the States despite being good, being on the DS and being a GTA game.  Of course once you get past the DS’ main userbase a GTA game would only appeal to the kind of user that might happen to know about the wide range of no fuss, but highly illegal, flashcards widely available for the machine.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 19th, 2009 at 6:35 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “Piracy news.”

  1. Jason says:
    April 19, 2009 at 10:21 pm

    How about it dident sell because no one cares about DS games

    I mean madworld did shit and no one is saying the pirates are at it again. Fact of the matter is that these two consoles the DS and the Wii don’t have vast swathes of gamers willing to try out these hardcore games.

    Stardock dont really have a leg to stand on either developers have been stopping people without legit copies from playing online for more than ten years.

  2. Matthew says:
    April 19, 2009 at 10:48 pm

    “How about it dident sell because no one cares about DS games”

    Utter nonsense, Jason. The sales of Mario Kart DS says otherwise. It’s pretty much been a mainstay in the charts since it’s release. New Super Mario Bros has sold plenty too. Plus you have recent stuff like Professor Layton doing well. And there’s Pokemon Platinum selling 805k in less than two weeks in the US…

    Oh and this is the only place I’ve seen that have attributed piracy to the lower than expected Chinatown Wars sales, I thought more sites would have realised this. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if the game becomes a steady seller and goes on to do pretty well.

  3. Jason says:
    April 23, 2009 at 11:59 pm

    your argument loses a few points when you realise the word Mario is in two of your examples :P

  4. Allard's Lovechild says:
    April 24, 2009 at 9:17 am

    I’m glad I bought Chinatown Wars. It’s really rather good, but as the original post indicated it doesn’t really cater for the Layton/Brain Training/Nintendogs demographic who’ve been buying the DS in droves. The same people who’ve made Wii Fit such a runaway success in fact.

  5. Matthew says:
    April 24, 2009 at 3:48 pm

    “your argument loses a few points when you realise the word Mario is in two of your examples :P ”

    Big franchises selling millions shocker! Depends if you want to be selective with your games or not, I suppose ;)

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