Deep Silver Have An Easy Way Of Dealing With Piracy, Ignore It!

Deep Silver are doing great, they’ve just had a string of successful titles hit the market and all are still doing relatively well too. We’ve got the Dead Island series, Saints row IV and Metro: Last Light and while two of those were actually picked up from the closure of THQ earlier this year, they’re proving profitable for Deep Silver non the less.

While speaking with Penny Arcade, Deep Silver attribute their success to focusing on the PC version of each game and launching them along side their console counterparts. Not some shoddy port, not a delayed release, they get the PC edition right first time. In Deep Silver’s own words, a PC edition of their titles isn’t an option, it’s just what they always intended to do all along.

“We have always been publishing on PC, and PC is close to our hearts from the outset. It’s not an added thought at all,” said Dr. Klemens Kundratitz, CEO of Deep Silver. “It’s hard to generalize because certain projects and certain developers see the PC as their primary platform, and then console comes after that. When we look at Metro for example, Metro is first and foremost a PC brand. In the first iteration, it was launched on Xbox 360 and PC, but it is at its heart a PC product. There is not a question about whether it’s difficult to also launch on PC, because PC is number one.”

It is clear they’re are passionate about PC, in fact it is safe to say they’re not bias about any format they release on and that rather than porting their games, they just design them with multiformat in mind. This flies in the face of many other big developers such as Rockstar who focus on console releases due to piracy. Given that PC has a bad reputation for illegal downloads, which is completely unfounded given that GTA V console editions are being downloaded like crazy and still selling millions.

“There is not the submission process with first parties, you are a lot more on your own to determine if the game is ready. Many publishers are not launching day and date because the PC is so difficult, but they fear the piracy issues, so they’d rather first focus on consoles” said Dr Kundratitz.

When asked about piracy Dr Kundratitz has one solution, ignore it. Which is of course not to be confused with condoning piracy. When asked if he had considered their own DRM platform such as Uplay, Origin etc;

“We have not, no. Uplay is not the way we want to approach things, definitely. I think we just need to make sure that the games we publish are worth the money, and certainly there is always this piracy situation that any publisher has. No publisher can tackle, really.”

Do you agree with Deep Silver and their ideals? Forget the fight against piracy, focus on making products that are worth buying. I know I do.

Thank you Penny Arcade for providing us with this information.