Following last week's unfortunate closure of Titan Quest (TQ) developer Iron Lore Entertainment, THQ creative director Michael Fitch wrote about his frustrations with PC game development on the Quarter to Three forums. In particular, Fitch focused on the detrimental effects of piracy, which goes beyond simply lost sales.

"For example, with TQ, the game was pirated and released on the nets before it hit stores. It was a fairly quick-and-dirty crack job, and in fact, it missed a lot of the copy-protection that was in the game. One of the copy-protection routines was keyed off the quest system, for example. You could start the game just fine, but when the quest triggered, it would do a security check, and dump you out if you had a pirated copy. There was another one in the streaming routine. So, it's a couple of days before release, and I start seeing people on the forums complaining about how buggy the game is, how it crashes all the time. A lot of people are talking about how it crashes right when you come out of the first cave. Yeah, that's right. There was a security check there," he explains.

"So, before the game even comes out, we've got people bad-mouthing it because their pirated copies crash, even though a legitimate copy won't. We took a lot of sh*t on this, completely undeserved mind you. How many people decided to pick up the pirated version because it had this reputation and they didn't want to risk buying something that didn't work? Talk about your self-fulfilling prophecy."

He continued, "So, for a game that doesn't have a Madden-sized advertising budget, word of mouth is your biggest hope, and here we are, before the game even releases, getting bashed to hell and gone by people who can't even be bothered to actually pay for the game."

Piracy itself can truly be catastrophic for a game developer, however. And Fitch is clearly very angry over what piracy has done to Iron Lore. "The research I've seen pegs the piracy rate at between 70-85% on PC in the US, 90%+ in Europe, off the charts in Asia. ... Titan Quest did okay. We didn't lose money on it. But if even a tiny fraction of the people who pirated the game had actually spent some god-damn money for their 40+ hours of entertainment, things could have been very different today," he said. "You can bitch all you want about how piracy is your god-given right, and none of it matters anyway because you can't change how people behave... whatever. Some really good people made a seriously good game, and they might still be in business if piracy weren't so rampant on the PC. That's a fact."

ESA CEO Michael Gallagher recently stressed the importance of fighting piracy in an interview with GameDaily BIZ.

Although piracy has been the biggest problem, Fitch also complained about complications from hardware vendors, who make creating PC games "harder all the time," and game reviewers who missed key points about Titan Quest, which were documented in the manual and elsewhere.