Cliffy B thinks his company's console games are AAA...
Epic's CliffyB got all up in MTV's Multiplayer grill dissing PC gaming and state of the industry in general:
“I think people would rather make a game that sells 4.5 million copies than a million and “Gears” is at 4.5 million right now on the 360. I think the PC is just in disarray… what’s driving the PC right now is ‘Sims’-type games and ‘WoW‘ and a lot of stuff that’s in a web-based interface. You just click on it and play it. That’s the direction PC is evolving into So for me, the PC is kind of the secondary part of what we’re doing. It’s important for us, but right now making AAA games on consoles is where we’re at.”
What he thinks of the quality of the games on Consoles is also irrelevant, that's just bravado, politically correct bullshit to shine the company's image a little bit in the mind of the indifferent and the naive. In the end what's important is what the gamers themselves think of the games, not Mr. CliffyB who quite probably don't care about the games nor might not even own a single console to begin with, but even if he himself is a gamer it still doesn't matter due to his position in the market, he's not the one actually developing nor the one buying them in mass for the market to survive, the gamers do that, and they are the ones with the final say.
The problem is that the final say dictates everything, and if the gamers are sincerely content with what they have and make 'x' game sell 4.5 million copies then of course 'x' game's devs will continue to make them, perhaps not even by passion, but by pure financial interests and "practical" survivalist practices (although in the case of Epic they are far from being on the verge of extinction as to justify any form of survivalist business practice, as someone else mentioned already they could live and continue to pay their employees with the money they make from the purchases of their engine licenses).
So ultimately the gamers themselves are driving or helping the market to slide either way, positively or not, but since a couple of years I've had the feeling that the gamers who have the most influence on the way the market is shaping itself into (that's the Consoles market if it wasn't clear enough) were just born ten years ago and never experienced the golden age of gaming first-hand when quality prevailed over content, and those gamers somehow became blinded by the numerous releases left and right and tempted by the fast-food entrainment (A.K.A streamlined, toned/down games, mostly cross-platform ones of course) as if paralyzed and unconsciously helping the manipulator controlling the peon that they themselves ironically became over the years, ironic because even though it seems they're being controlled they too have the influence to "change business models" by the sheer power of their or their parent's pockets, they just need to buy games like MW2 by the millions and the manipulator will receive the message that the pawn just wants more of it.
Call me fatalistic but that's how I perceive the whole thing right now in the gaming market as a whole, so, no, piracy is certainly far from doing the damage it's supposedly doing especially not for paramount companies like Epic, I could understand that for "lesser", growing, evolving developers (including the Indies) piracy does hurt and even bring some to their closures. I still believe at least in the specific case of Iron Lore, they had a lot of potential and already showed their talent in general but just couldn't take it anymore, stories like those are rare but they do exist and I'm not entirely turning my back on them either, I do believe that piracy is not only a negative in the market but truly a blight in entertainment in general, not just in video gaming.
