Couldn't have been much more than a year ago that Rein said PC gamers were their bread and butter. Oh, how the mighty have fallen. Epic have lost their minds a la EA, and I've lost respect for them. F**k 'em. They will get no more of my money.
I'm half-tempted to go this route as well.
I understand why they're looking to go console-exclusive. It's a wise business move for them since UT3 sales haven't been hot, and they've been unable to recreate the success of UT99 with the previous games. Unreal II crashed and burned. GoW has been a smash hit on the XBox and they'd be stupid not to focus on that franchise for the time being. It's obvious that their traditional business plan for PC games (cater towards the high-end systems) isn't working for them anymore. That's fine. UT is no longer the only FPS game out there along with Quake, something that id and Epic have both found out the hard way in the last 5 years.
I am royally annoyed by this newfound "party line" of "our core PC audience is a bunch of pirates" that is being bandied about very casually by companies. This is the second time I've heard this line in the last two or three months, the last was a comment by someone at id claiming that hardware vendors like the fact that piracy somehow keeps them in business. When I see companies like Crytek blame flaccid sales on piracy for a game that 99% of the gaming population can't run smoothly, I immediately get a whiff of RIAA tactics in the air.
This is ludicrous. I waited until UT3 dropped in price because my computer was running the demo at 30 FPS at 640x480 with lowest detail settings. Based on three maps covering two of the three main gametypes that didn't give me any incentive to go out and buy the game on release date especially since I wanted to see this new fangled Warfare game. Which by the way, was not included in the demo for some unknown reason. What's the point of teasing us with this ONS/AS replacement and expecting us to pay $50 for a game mode we have no idea if we'll like? I have bigger financial priorities right now, like college and car loans, and I can't afford to drop $600 on new computer hardware on a whim right now. I was very pleased that when UT3 did arrive on my doorstep yesterday that the performance was much better than the demo, even before patching (although I couldn't tell what revision was initially on the DVD). I'm now getting double the performance with the same settings as the demo and I'm very pleased about this.
If Epic wanted to stay in the PC gaming business (which they very well could be, I get a sense that they want to keep GoW tied to consoles, and the fate of Unreal is still up in the air right now), they certainly could if they wanted to put some effort into it. I think the pink elephant in the room is the hardware specs. People don't want to upgrade every 3 years to stay current with games. My current PC performs very well with day to day tasks and I don't see any reason to upgrade outside of games (which I might be able to hold off even longer since UT3 seems to run ok even if it looks like crap) and I find it hard to justify shelling out $600 on hardware that will only be needed for 5 games and will be obsolete in another 3-4 years.
Likewise, why is it that low settings on UT3 look worse than the highest settings in UT2004? This should not be the case. I suspect it's model complexity, but the texture quality is garish on low. This is the exact same problem that happened with UT2003. If you're on the low end of the requirements your game is going to look
worse than the previous game. Someone needs to find a solution to this.
I've enjoyed every Unreal game and some of the old Epic series as well (cut my teeth on Epic Pinball back in the day). If Epic wants to switch focus to consoles, that's fine. But please don't give your loyal fans another backhand bitchslap with the "PC gamers are pirates naturally" schtick.
EDIT: Do companies like Epic see any profit from used game sales? I know that's something Mark Rein has brought up in the past. It'll be interesting to see how things go with GameStop aggressively moving towards used game sales as their main profit source. While console games aren't easy to pirate, it's not like Epic isn't losing potential sales to used game trading either. The grass isn't totally greener on the other side.
EDIT: Re: Spore. Yes it'll probably be the biggest pirated game, blah blah blah. Poster child for anti-DRM. I personally haven't had any issues with it, and EA has done an ok job addressing many of the complaints. I personally think that there's a bigger deal being made out of this than needs to be, especially given that a precedent for this DRM system was established a year ago with BioShock. I think people have a right to not like DRM especially when it's intrusive like StarForce which seems to have fallen out of favor. But, I don't think the gaming community reaction to the Spore DRM system is justified at all. There's no reason to throw a temper-tantrum and snipe the Amazon rating for the game. That's petty and only encourages the "us vs. them" mentality. Telling everyone to pirate the game only encourages companies to tighten up the DRM schemes. Not drop them.