Steam db shows HFW as:
- Top 1 in "trending games"
- Top 1 in "popular releases"
- Top 3 in "top selling games" (which means Helldivers 2 went down to top 4)
I don't know how old you are buddy, but piracy has been around as long as I remember (Amiga) and probably before that.
I was there in the Amiga days and the generation of computers before it (Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, MSX...). There was a huge amount of piracy on both.
I bought many games for my Amstrad CPC, but most of the games I got were pirated. For Amiga, the only 8 games and apps I bought were the ones included with the computer.
In consoles around that time in the south of Europe (pre-GB and SNES days) it was the age of the NES, but almost nobody had an official NES: most people had clone consoles with embedded games or multi-game pirate cartridges, but at least people also bought some original NES game.
After that, in the GB+SNES+MD era the piracy in console became something rare and expensive: there were some very rare to find multigame GB cartridges, which only had a few and often not popular game. And devices to make pirate copies of SNES games in diskettes or to run Japanese games, but these devices were too expensive for most people.
Pre-Amiga days there was a lot of piracy in the arcades too: at least in Europe, without internet and cheap flights we have today, the world was way less globalized so many people didn't give a fuck about copyright laws. Many local companies build their own unlicensed arcade machines versions of foreign games, quite often copying the game board, and sometimes changing the game design, art or texts (even the name) a bit: what are known as bootlegs.
In the case of Spain, some games got localized, improved the hud, changed its difficulty (normally to make it harder to monetize it more), but sometimes also new features or even innovations (such as adding leaderboards to a game that didn't have them, the first case of "continue?" or final boss) and in some cases even built entirely different games on boards originally designed for other games. Or did use a board of a foreign game to put there a pirate copy of another foreign game.
Shaw layden ,Jim Ryan come outside. Explain it to to toki hiroki and the goofy bean counters.
Each port costs them barely a couple million dollars and they are generating several hundreds of millions of dollars and a huge yearly growth with their first party games outside PS, which means PC ports it's a low risk and very profitable business for them. This is why Totoki wans to continue pushing there now that they need to improve their profitability.
Without this, the movies and in a near future mobile gaming and instead geting stuck in their console, specially without GaaS titles there wouldn't be a long term business for PS unless it was shutting down most teams and making only way smaller, way shorter games wihout high end visuals because the sales of big AAA SP games quickly scale every generation and even with the record growth they have in their console userbase and business most games (selling as Bloodborne or Days Gone did) wouldn't be profitable anymore.
I'm boycotting all games with any DRM.
So you don't buy any Steam or console game at all? Because all of them have DRM.
