

THQ's Michael Fitch places the blame for the closure of Titan Quest developer Iron Lore Entertainment, squarely on the shoulders of game pirates, though he does suggest that they may have had a bit of help from dumb players, hardware vendors, and one particularly stupid reviewer.

Fitch begins a lengthy (and hopefully somewhat cathartic) rant on the Quarter to Three forums by taking aim at those who feel justified pirating a PC game:

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. 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.

Bad enough that they were stealing the game to begin with, but players with cracked copies would sometimes complain that the game was buggy, apparently oblivious to the fact that what was crashing their game was Titan Quest's copy protection protocols.

"Here we are...getting bashed to hell and gone by people who can't even be bothered to actually pay for the game," Fitch laments.

Fitch also takes a shot at hardware vendors who "make it harder all the time" to make a PC game. The various combinations of components make "innumerable configurations that you can't possibly test against," but no matter if it's a CD/DVD drive with bad firmware, a video card issue, or conflicting drivers, "it's always the game's fault when something doesn't work."

Which leads us to the stupid players that earn Fitch's ire. "Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of very savvy people out there," he says, but there are even more who don't understand the basics of keeping their PC working, then blame the game when it doesn't run properly. "There are few better examples of the "it can't possibly be my fault" culture in the west than gaming forums," writes Fitch.

One particular reviewer completely missed the teleport option in Titan Quest that would allow you to zap back to town whenever you liked, and was walking all the way back every time his inventory got full. Naturally, such drudgery was reflected in his review.

"When we - and lots of our fans - pointed out that this was the reviewer's fault, not the game's, they amended the review. But, they didn't change the score. Do you honestly think that not having to run back to town all the time to sell your stuff wouldn't have made the game a better experience?" asks Fitch.

Fitch is clearly very frustrated – and rightly so – by the obstacles and difficulties inherent in making PC games, but it's difficult to see *Titan Quest'*s problem as unique. Given that game piracy and configuration difficulties seem to be particularly problematic for the PC gaming world, we have to wonder, would Iron Lore have survived if Titan Quest had been a console game?

Venting My Frustrations With PC Game Dev [Quarter to Three]