Why no one talks about console piracy?

I know tons of PC gamers pirate games off net, it looks bad for PC gaming i agree. But these guys atleast uses and pays for the original hardware ( GPU/CPU/RAM). Many console gamers mod their consoles and plays games on custom firmware. They buy cheap modded consoles and play pirated games on them as console games are very expensive compared to PC games.Personally i know many guys using modded consoles, they don't care about online services but single player games only.

Why some developers and gamers complains about PC piracy only? Do they got no idea about how much consoles get modded and pirated?

Answer warriors:)

Because the sales makes up for the piracy. maybe. But most of the ps3 player buys legit games though used game selling/trading is rampant around here.

I think used games are a far bigger issue on consoles than piracy via jailbreaking.

With that said, neither piracy on pc, or used games on consoles, are that big of a problem. We've seen companies try to stop both, and failed.

In the end, it's clear that sales across pc and consoles is enough to make used/pirated games a problem that can simply be accepted, rather than fought.

The first rule of console piracy club is we don't talk about CPC... eh, that's all I got. :P

It's pretty common outside the US. Hell. One of my in-laws (my wife is from the Philippines) works in the Middle East and used to bring home big shipping boxes of bootleg 360 games. I'm not even sure how such shipments got past customs over there. They wouldn't get past customs here. During one of my visits there, I also saw shops that specialized in modding consoles/handhelds. Pirating is so deeply ingrained there, it's regarded as part of normal life.

While I lived in Turkey, I saw bootleg PC and console games selling at the equivalent of $2-$3.

Because consoles are owned by Sony and M$, so they don't bash their products. However, lot of devs see used games as piracy too (apart from regular piracy that exists on modded consoles) but no one talks about it that much. PC is open platform, not owned by anyone, so everyone can trash talk it. However, we haven't heard devs hiding behind piracy argument in a long time. I guess last time it was like 2009. Everyone praises PC and Steam now.

Maybe because piracy on console it's not such a huge problem as it is on PC even with used game sales?

PS3 didn't get cracked till like 2010 and none of the current gen consoles have been cracked yet. When you go to torrent sites all you see are the PC version of every game with thousands of downloads but to find the console versions you need a magnifying glass. And not to mention that consoles sell more games too. The PS4 version of Tomb Raider (at the time there were only like 5 million PS4 sold!) sold more than the PC vanilla version (LOL). Both EA and Ubisoft make more money on consoles. Minecraft makes more money on consoles than PC too. Etc. lol

One of the problems with the PS3's slow start was it took so long to crack. Look at the PSP, decent enough hardware sales and pitiful software sales because everyone just pirated everything. Before I moved to the US, I walked into a friend's apartment (ah college days!) and he had a floor to ceiling wall shelf full of pirated PS2 games. Consolites on SW's likes to pretend that piracy is only a PC issue b/c its the only stick they have left to bash with.

QFT

That's what PC gamers have been telling themselves for years. But anybody who has been around long enough will know that.....torrented PC games are accessed by millions of people AND every developer out there finds consoles to be more financially lucrative. If used games were a bigger problem than piracy on the PC, the gaming industry would not have shifted towards consoles the way it did. Contrary to what many people think, it is the developers, not the gamers, who leaned towards consoles. And when the devs leaned towards consoles, consoles became more of a one-stop-center for games, and gamers followed.

The piracy excuses for fracking up games or marketing got old fast. I'm done talking about it. It's the same shit with every media and yet the industry numbers are growing like bunnies. Most companies have learned that instead of bitching about piracy, selling half the game as DLC gets them that money they need to pay their managers' managing managers team and the CEO's daily 4 o' clock bonus. Who's robbing who now?

Because it is nowhere as big problen as on PC there 90%+ of the games is pirated

Another silly myth. Consoles are where the big budget games are targeted because you have a captive market with limited choice. Granted they may be more niche games but there are tons more games released on the PC each month than on consoles. On consoles you maybe have 5 or 6 releases a month vs huge numbers on the PC. Its therefore hardly surprising that games will have a higher sales on consoles when you have so few to choose from. The PC gaming market is booming and hasn't been as vibrant in decades. "And when the devs leaned towards consoles, consoles became more of a one-stop-center for games, and gamers followed." Just daft.

Is your attention spam so low that you skipped the rest of my post? I specially adress the outlined part.

Also, lol at the bolded. The majority of devs are on pc, since it's a better platform to gain exposure to smaller titles, and much easier to release a game.

For larger studios funded my the big publishing companies, sure, specially since you're counting 2 consoles vs 1 platform. And not meantion that more than 50% of the sales on on consoles, most of the time. Still, besides Ubisoft, we actaully never get accure sales by platform numbers from devs. Not to meantion on PC, you have higher profit margins thanks to the focus on digital, and not retail.

Specially for fucking EA, which forces everyone to buy from their digital store, Origin.

If they sell the game for about $35 to $40 at launch digitally they make about as much money as the $60 for consoles retail. ($10 royalty and Steam fee vs shipping to retailers)
This is also why $50+ games on Steam/Origin piss me off. Some even sell for $60 at launch unless you find an alternative dealer. That's called a rip-off.
I'm all for supporting the devs but not that way. I bought Dragon Age: Inquisition for $49.99 and that's my max.

They have to sell for the same price online as in retail because otherwise retailers get mad. Did you see the fit that gamestop threw recently over MS and Sony just for selling games online?

They should have released a public statement saying 'Frack them.' Just my opinion of course.
It'll just be a longer and more painful process now. Gamestop is still gonna die, and make us suffer elevated prices a while longer than they should have.
Suppose their lack of balls has done wonders for the indie community, so that's something.

@KungfuKitten: Sadly, even on consoles digital games cost full price. It's what publishers, and MS and Sony for that matter, want. The same revenue with higher margins for both parties. And i bet Valve is happy with it aswell and would rather keep it like that..

Agreed OP, in fact the console torrents are usually the first to show due to early copies being released. They get thousands of seeds & downloads.

This combined with the 2nd hand market is costing publishers/devs loads of money too.

isn't more risky to pirate console games?

Here you are again just making things up with not a single source to back up your claims.

Keep on with that console damage control.

At the very least, we should have stopped talking about "piracy" once Microsoft announced you needed to connect to the internet every 24 hours on their new console.

Piracy is not the reason for some publishers to shift focus. If you can make more money on a system that has a bigger audience and lower standards, why wouldn't you? For most game genres, there's no reason.

ah.. the good old days.. er.. I mean.. bad piracy is bad! :P

takes more work to pirate games on a console, u gotta get modchips or whatever they use now to do that. its easy on pc. So i don't think as many people bother with it.

The only consoles i ever modded was my original playstation, and my 2001 xbox because its dvd drive started giving errors, so i put games on the hard drive instead.

I'm guessing most console people that have modded consoles probably have unmodded ones also that play games they bought also so they can play them online. I dont really see the point anymore to have a modded console since theres so few games that are worth playing. May as well buy them since theres only a small handful each year worth your time.

basically offer a good game and on top of that a few useful online features and free updates with the game and people will buy it.

I think it's more to do with the majority of the forum posters here being from North America, where console piracy is a bit uncommon, if not exceedingly rare.

You can still play online with the modded console. my friend got his xbox 360 modded for like $100. It was like an external hard drive plugged into the console which tricked it into thinking it was a disk. He just torrented the game then copied it to the external HD.

So he paid $100 to mod it and saved hundreds (probably close to a thousands over the years). Obviously there is more work involved to get it started up compared to pc but once you've got it modded you're golden.

In fact it's even better than PC cause you can play online. You're probably thinking of a jtag'd console which is used for cheating/hacks & will get you banned online.

Yup, I live in latinamerica and its like that everywhere. There are huge stores which specialize in selling modded consoles and modded copies. A single downloaded xbox360 game torrent can mean 300 pirated copies sold (because the guys from the stores only need one file and then they just burn it into multiple DVDs and put them for sale).

Americans are mostly oblivious to this, which is why most of Americans think that console piracy happens only when a person has a PC and he manually download every game he wants and just burns it and plays it himself.

it might take a lot of work in america, but in the rest of the world its easy as hell, pretty much every single video game store will not only sell the chip to you, but will also install it on the spot (or in 1-2 days depending on what is it).

In fact, in latin america and eastern europe, console piracy is way more rampant than pc piracy because pc parts are extremely expensive over here, so not many have gaming PCs.

maybe because its not that big of a problem...or not yet at least

Because its not an issue on any of the current gen consoles. I'm sure its an issue with many of the lastgen consoles, but games sales have not been effected greatly, even on PC games sales just fine.

600 MX pesos and you can mod your X360 to read pirated games, cost of a pirated game : 50 MX pesos, you can get them at the swap markets, any game you want, only problem is that you have to update the console like every 3 months, as new games appear the console will need patches, cost of the update : 200 MX pesos, one drawback, sometimes when you update the console it won't read pre update games anymore. RGH mod cost : 2,000 MX pesos, not only allows your console to read pirated games in disc, add 1,000 MX pesos and you can get a HDD full with pirated games, cost of adding a pirated game to your HDD : 30 pesos. Not all consoles can be moded, PS3 for example, only consoles manufactured in a certain period of time can be moded to run CFW. Wii's can be moded too, probably the easiest to mod. Handheld consoles like PSP can be moded to read from the memory stick, PS Vita hasn't been cracked yet. Nintendo DS, DS lite and 3 DS can run pirated games by means of a R4 card, cost of the card: 400 MX pesos. If you want to run 3DS games in your 3DS you'll need a more expendive card, cost : 1, 000 pesos. Welcome to Mexico fellow gamers.

PS1 and PS2 piracy was huge. Loads of people got their console chipped so they could buy pirate games for £5.

Perhaps this is why PC gets most piracy blame? The console pirate game is downloaded once and copies made from it and sold to people, whereas on PC, everybody just downloads their own. So this makes the numbers seem bigger on the PC.

Machines are getting harder to crack and games are getting bigger to download.

A few years ago you could go to the local weekend market (in my case the Barrowlands in Glasgow) and a guy in the corner would be spitting out game discs, basically pick the games you want and the disc would be written there and then. Today everyone can download their own pirated copies for free, so the problem seems worse but in reality it's no different.

Outside of the US and most of Europe you can still go to a market and find a guy doing the same for console games, 1 download = hundreds of copies, so the problem does not appear as bad and there is absolutely no way to monitor how many copies are being made. Then chuck in the used games market and it's likely just as bad if not worse than on PC, for devs.

Also in answer to the folks saying consoles make more money, you really should look into where most of the hardware and software revenues are coming from, Hint: It's PC.

Quoted for muthaf**kin truth. I was one of those guys. (please dont ban me). Good ol broke college student days. Hell, a lot of my friends had modded Xbox 360's as well, with pirated games that could also be played online.

The wii was also pretty notorious for pirating, and the NDS you could buy things like the R4 cart to play roms (not that anyone should do that)

Forgot about the Wii. I remember 1 particular friend from college that had a modded Wii as well. He would play all the games from an external HDD connected to it. I had an R4 >_>...

Does anyone really talk about PC piracy though? Outside of console fanboys trying to claim consoles are better...

ubisoft

lol. You're on a role.

Companies aren't out to make money on their consoles as much as their out to make money on the games sold for their system and fee services. So don't act like pirates are doing these companies a favor by at least buying the hardware. But yeah, pirating on consoles is big as well I'm sure, not willing to guess how much it compares to PC pirating though. I imagine PC pirating is a lot greater simply by virtue of there being a lot more PCs out there in the world.

tell that to numerous countries where that's all they sell at the marketplace....pirated and cracked consoles everywhere, because buying the real thing is way too expensive

They are all on pc. Pc gamers on this board defend it all the time. I haven't even read this thread and chances are wis3boi (reading genuinely reading the post) is making up some piffy excuse.

Very predictable.

Not for many years. And lol at Ubisoft for blaming others to hide their shortcoming .

Cherry picking.

PC makes more software revenue than all 6 consoles combined at the moment, while having much better versions of multiplats.

@Jankarcop: Not to mention the hardware sales. I've built two £1800 PCs in 1 year; one at my home and other at my parents place when I go there to visit. That is what 7-8 consoles?

Console fanboys didn't want GTA V to be released for PC because "PC gamers just pirate their games". A couple of days before GTA V launches the 360 version leaks in torrents and a lot of people downloaded the iso.

America

No other country exists :P

@Cloud_imperium said:

@lostrib said:

@melonfarmerz said:

Does anyone really talk about PC piracy though? Outside of console fanboys trying to claim consoles are better...

ubisoft

Not for many years. And lol at Ubisoft for blaming others to hide their shortcoming .

Hope UBI stops making games for a while, really got tired of this shitty devs lately.

But had it been the PC version that had been on torrent sites, the number of downloaders would have been much higher. Console piracy is there, it has always been there, but it's a much smaller percentage, and it is a lot more work getting pirated games to run on consoles than it is on PC. The PS1 was simple, with just needing the Power Replay add-on in the back. But now, it's a bit harder, modding the DVD drives, installing custom firmware and what not, risk of bricking your console. On PC, it just works. It's as easy to get pirated games as it is doing everything else on PC, everyone can do it.