Would console timed exlusives combat piracy?

Do developers take notice of rampant PC software piracy? Should multi-platform games be released on console first before they're released on PC? Would this help or hurt developers recoup development costs before the darkweb zaps all profits away?

Many might argue that the people who would download pirated software wouldn't buy the game anyway. I'm not 100% sure I believe in that school of thought. I think that a game such as Life is Strange episode 1, priced at $4.99, would make spending such a small amount of money to help the developer continue making games would be a no-brainer. It costs less than a cup of Starbucks, or round-trip daily commute; yet - it's out there...

As far as I know, PS4/X1 piracy isn't possible. Why not have timed exclusives? Is the PC (paying customer) market that big that they can't afford to hold back that segment for three to six months? I know the installed base of current-gen consoles is only around 25 million, but that's 25 million paying customers vs a bunch of leechers.

It's my theory and hope that would-be pirates who eagerly want to play a game would rather pay for it, than wait three months to pirate it.

Games on console usually get pirated before release,soooooooo...

NOPE..... and i totally agree with @MonsieurX games on console get pirated before they release in market.

My friend´s kids have modded consoles to play pirated games, for example, they got pirated Halo Reach a full month before it was launched.

@MonsieurX, @ice_ranger

I specifically said PS4/X1, can you confirm that these have been jailbroken? (Note: I didn't want to discuss or contribute to the furtherance of these activities.) I just want to say that if this current generation of consoles has so far made it impossible to bootleg, or made the barrier to entry cost-prohibitive to pirates, I would consider timed exclusives if I was a developer.

To add, I fully understand it was easy to get the last gen consoles modded. But now with the incentive of XB Live and PS+ to play a lot of games online, people will think twice before doing so since the consoles phone home, and can report any modding activities.

@psn_m1nat3k well, the world is full of hackers and technology don't take much to develop. Consoles like PS4/Xbox 1 will stay in market for next 5-7 years and i don't think that no one will be able to crack them in this time period. And even then developers probably don't want to piss off their PC audience there will be a lot of pissed off people if every game started to come out on pc after 3-6 months of release, bad for sales.

Nope, and PC will continue to get better version of multiplats.

It seems like it would make more sense to have simultaneous releases than times exclusives because hype withers overtime and with systems such as pre-order and get additional content systems it may boost there initial release sales on all the platforms. I don't have any numbers to back this speculation so I maybe entirely wrong.

No. Console games are usually pirated asap. I don't know how people play them but they sure get uploaded quickly and downloaded a lot.

This graph was taken from an article titled Which Platform Has The Most Pirated Games On The Internet?

It's rather old and the names have changed, but the suspects remain the same.

@sheikhspeare You mentioned GTA V, which is a great example. They've probably grossed over $2 Billion ($1.98Bln as of 5/14 source: Forbes) from console sales alone. I wonder how much of that would have been eroded away from PC piracy. It also makes me wonder if the delayed PC launch was an experiment. Developers usually have a more difficult time porting to consoles, not the other way around.

The future release of No Man's Sky will also be a PS4 timed exclusive before it comes to PC if I recall correctly. I would be very interested in seeing how that does as well before the PC versions ship.

Strictly speaking in a world with no PS4/XB1 modchips, I still feel at this point, it's smarter to have a the PC editions staggered behind console. I do agree with @Pedro that the hype does die down, so there has to be a good balance to strike while the iron is hot.

If I may be frank, the "PC is all a bunch of pirates" line probably began (even if subconsciously) as a rebuttal against the equally annoying pixel-counter master racer BS. It's all a bunch of BS... some way for one group to claim they're better than the other. Pirating is higher on PC. But it's higher on PC because it's easier to do on a more open platform. And for all the statistics about how many PC pirates there are, there's also data showing how profitable the platform is for the industry. For gamers, meanwhile, there are also a lot of benefits to the more open platform, including the ability to customize your performance and your experience. Given that fewer and fewer console games DON'T come to PC, I don't see how timed exclusivity is a solution, at any rate. Awfully tired of the "us vs them" between PC and console, and within console between the different brands (not implying the OP is trying to start anything of that sort - I'm just venting)

@psn_m1nat3k said:

This graph was taken from an article titled Which Platform Has The Most Pirated Games On The Internet?

It's rather old and the names have changed, but the suspects remain the same.

@sheikhspeare You mentioned GTA V, which is a great example. They've probably grossed over $2 Billion ($1.98Bln as of 5/14 source: Forbes) from console sales alone. I wonder how much of that would have been eroded away from PC piracy. It also makes me wonder if the delayed PC launch was an experiment. Developers usually have a more difficult time porting to consoles, not the other way around.

The future release of No Man's Sky will also be a PS4 timed exclusive before it comes to PC if I recall correctly. I would be very interested in seeing how that does as well before the PC versions ship.

Strictly speaking in a world with no PS4/XB1 modchips, I still feel at this point, it's smarter to have a the PC editions staggered behind console. I do agree with @Pedro that the hype does die down, so there has to be a good balance to strike while the iron is hot.

I really don't understand how a timed exclusive will stop piracy. As @xantufrog said above there's also data showing how profitable the PC platform is for the industry. Number of available torrent files on the net don't mean that people don't buy games.

You can't stop piracy. The best you can do is make great games and people will buy them. Piracy is just an excuse to hide bad games. Some games are leaked even before release on consoles.

Don't lump me in with the console-centric crowd, and make this a discussion about console vs. PC. I'm actually part of the Mac-PC Master Race as well, and my bootcamp i7, 24GB RAM, 2GB Video card setup runs today's games on ultra just fine.

Top PC Game Downloads of BitTorrent in 2011 (source Gamefront)

1. Crysis 2 (3,920,000 downloads)
2. Call of Duty: Mondern Warefare 3 (3,650,000 downloads)
3. Battlefield 3 (3,510,000 downloads)
4. FIFA 12 (3,390,000)
5. Portal 2 (3,240,000)

Crysis 2 (GameSpot score 8.5, Metacritic 86) ) sold only 486,943 copies that year. That evidence does not support "make great games and people will buy them." Crytek, developer of the Crysis series, cited piracy as its reason for switching from PC exclusives to multi-platform versions after sales of Crysis took a hard hit.

“If the same game has the potential to sell many times more copies on a particular platform because sales are not being undermined by piracy, then quite clearly the priority of the developers and publishers should be to focus on that platform in their design, development and marketing decisions. " - Robert Bowling of Infinity Ward (Call of Duty developer)

I empathize with developers, and wanted to open a discussion about limiting the ability for PC piracy to cannibalize developer's profits on day zero. I think any developer would like to see that they were the most purchased game of the day, rather than the most pirated on launch day. Everybody knows piracy will never end, so please quit answering this as if I had asked if timed exclusives WILL STOP piracy.

Again, I'm talking about modern consoles with no known jailbreaks. No matter how you disguise it, PS4 and XB1 are semi-online-only consoles. My systems go online constantly to get new firmware and game updates. With the fear of getting their shiny-new $400 consoles perma-banned, I think console owners will shy away from modding their systems for the next couple of years until the price of systems go down and getting caught becomes more financially feasible.

And yet compared to PC most games sells 2-3-10 times as much on console. Just look at GTA it has sold 45 million copies so far.

So yes games might be released from the groups, but its a minority who have modded consoles or even know how to do it or know where to get it done. Not to mention that i havent heard about the PS4 or X1 being "hacked" so no piracy on there.

So no timed exclusives wouldn´t prevent pirating, in fact it would make a lot more sense if they had more console exclusives.