SG has never been slow to give praise to one of the industries most under-appreciated, under-reported developers, Stardock. Any member of the PMPB cult of PC Gaming knows that I consider Stardock to be one of the most responsive, creative and fan friendly developers in the industry today, thanks in no small part to the brilliance of Stardock’s CEO Brad Wardell (start drawing your Lono-Animathias parallels all you want, this guy is my hero). Not only has Stardock created some of the best PC strategy titles of all time, Galactic Civilizations and Sins of a Solar Empire (which is one of the best selling PC games this year), they have done so without ANY intrusive anti-piracy mechanisms.

Find out what Stardock has to say about PC gaming piracy after the jump!

Despite some developers linking a huge amount of their troubles to piracy (looking at you Iron Lore…), Stardock thinks using piracy as the primary scapegoat for PC gaming’s trouble is naive.

Via a post to fans on the Sins of a Solar Empire forum, Brad Wardell talked candidly about piracy. While he did not deny piracy is a problem, he does not believe piracy should be the scapegoat for bad sales. He linked the problems in PC gaming to the way that developers look at the PC install base.

“When you develop for a market, you don’t go by the user base. You go by the potential customer base. That’s what most software companies do. They base what they want to create on the size of the market they’re developing for. But not PC game developers. PC game developers seem to focus more on the ‘cool’ factor. What game can they make that will get them glory with the game magazines and gaming websites and hard core gamers? These days, it seems like game developers want to be like rock stars more than businessmen. I’ve never considered myself a real game developer. I’m a gamer who happens to know how to code and also happens to be reasonably good at business.“

Rather than intentionally try to create a game that will grab the most media attention, Wardell approaches development from a financial point of view.

“When I make a game, I focus on making games that I think will be the most profitable… when it comes time to make a game, I don’t have a hard time thinking of a game I’d like to play. The hard part is coming up with a game that we can actually make that will be profitable. And that means looking at the market as a business not about trying to be ‘cool’.”

Continuing this train of thought, Brad used Sins of a Solar Empire as an example. The game received amazing critical praise (89 on MetaCritic) and sold nearly 200,000 copies in the first month, which is jaw dropping considering Stardock’s semi-indie status and the title’s modest budget. Wardell cites the utter lack of copy protection for the title as proof positive that piracy is not the primary villain of PC gaming.

Tweet This

CONTINUE TO PAGE: 1 2 3