Unreal creator says there will be no Gears of War 2 for the PC because of piracy among hardware savvy PC gamers
Gears of War piracy
After making PC gamers wait six months for Gears of War after the Xbox 360 release, Epic now says that the sequel, Gears of War 2, won’t even be available for the PC. What’s the reason? According to Epic, it’s a combination of piracy and bad integrated graphics chips.
In an interview with TVG, Epic’s design director Cliff Bleszinski (informally known as CliffyB), explained that ‘the PC right now is a fair amount different to what it was back in the day.’ He expanded on this to say that a part of the problem was ‘badly integrated video chips’ that don’t offer enough power to play a high-end game.
So what about people with decent graphics chips? This is what Bleszinski describes as ‘the problem right now.’ According to Bleszinski, ‘the person who is savvy enough to want to have a good PC to upgrade their video card, is a person who is savvy enough to know BitTorrent to know all the elements so they can pirate software.’
Bleszinski says that ‘high-end videogames are suffering very much on the PC’ as a result of both these issues, and even said that there was no chance of Gears of War 2 coming out on the PC, even after the dust had settled.
Given that the PC port of the first Gears of War was a clunky experience, the fact that the sequel won’t be out on the PC isn’t necessarily bad. However, it’s bad news that Epic appears to be deserting the PC in favour of consoles, especially when you consider that the developer was responsible for the Unreal franchise on the PC.
