PC Game companies are not losing tons of sales due to piracy, just like the music industry isn't.
Well... now that isn't right. The piracy does hurt the companies quite a lot, but there are some other factors.
Development costs are rising, but you can't simply make your games more expensive. There are too many games in the same genre.
And there is the game reselling, which might be the main target of DRM. At least that's my guess.
DRM didn't have any effect on the piracy, but reselling your game became harder and it's harder to lend your DRM-protected game to a friend.
Reselling = another person plays the game, without any profit for the company.
I think it's wrong to target this market. Makes gaming more/too complicated.
Well, I never said piracy didn't hurt.. but it sure as hell isn't the single handed PC gaming market killer all the companies want you to think it is. Especially since the major game companies achieved record profits last year. They're not losing money.
Reselling PC software is illegal in most places. It's also been proven that second-hand game sales
do not in fact hurt the gaming industry. DRM is also doing nothing to prevent this. If you have the legit disc and a legit key you have no issues. Also, companies like EA and Ubisoft have time and time again made the flat statement that they use DRM to combat illegal
copying of a game.
You either have to have a huge budget, or your chances of creating a top-selling horror/action fps are less than slim.
Not really. Stardock is a perfect example of this. Granted, I wouldn't call the RTS genre as crowded as the FPS genre, but making a good RTS is significantly harder than making a good FPS.. and they did SoaSE on ~$900,000. Innovative, fluid, and fresh gameplay is what sells games. Not big budgets. If it was big budgets, every EA game would be a top seller.
Another thing I think that is a problem is companies (again, EA..) vastly overestimating their "projected sales" to please their shareholders. I don't have the exact numbers.. but EA said one of their problems with Spore was that it undersold by something like 5 million. They of course blamed it on piracy.... not the fact that expecting to sell 12 million copies of the game was completely ludicrous.
And the thing about using a computer's hardware to generate a key... that wont work for the simple reason that gamers frequently update our hardware.