Capcom's Christian Svensson made a few posts about the PC version of Super Street Fighter 4 Arcade Edition being pirated, as it has hit a few websites ahead of the title's actual release. He also talks again about when the offline DRM will be removed and takes a few feature suggestions for SF3 Online Edition. Lastly, he follows up on the proposed stream law change which has been a popular subject as of late.
The PC version of SSF4 AE was leaked and the pirates posted it, is it possible to push the release date forward now? — KRG
Svensson: That's unfortunate, but not unexpected. It's not possible to move the launch date for a variety of reasons.
Pirates will have their offline play only and no online features at all.
I heard the offline DRM limitations are still in the PC version of SSF4 AE, what gives?
Svensson: To clarify, I said the update would come "shortly after launch". We're still awaiting approval on the TU that officially removes it and that's likely to take a bit of time still.
PC SSF4 AE on Steam was listed for $26.79, but it went away. What happened? — Andre
Svensson: It was a temporary screw up on Valve's part. It's been rectified.
Will I be able to get a retail copy of SSF4 AE on the PC?
Svensson: We'll be shipping a few thousand copies to our distributor but I can't speak to how or who is carrying it at retail. As I've said before, if you want it guaranteed, the Capcom store definitely will have them in stock.
Can you provide us with more detailed info about the PC DLC prices/MS Points and for what will it be ? — Hingis
Svensson: [Check out this image.] The cost per costume here is dramatically lower than it was on the console releases back in the day and the purchasing mechanisms are better for fans of particular characters (don't need to buy 3 packs to get all of the costumes for a particular character).
Something I forgot that should be disclosed:
We won't have a DLC solution for Steam at launch. All other versions will have access to the Games for Windows Marketplace for DLC. For Steam we're have to impliment a solution using Steamworks for the the transaction mechanism and we're still working on that solution.
When I get more clarity on timing I'll let you know.
Is it possible to ignore or block users when we play SF3 Online Edition?
Svensson: Within the scope of Xbox Live and PSN matching, being able to give feedback/requests to avoid those users are always possible. That's not something specific to our game though, that's all games on a given network.
Besides, talking about another announced training feature this time, namely recording set of action for parry (as far as I understood, you can take the control of 2nd player for instance, configure the 1st CPU player in full parry mode, record the set, and then try to parry all the combos). My question is : it is possible to exchange these recorded custom parry challenges between users? This will be great actually!!! — Slim
Svensson: Interesting idea. I don't believe that's currently in the plans anywhere though.
What do you think of the anti-stream bill that's going around? — Toshin
Svensson: The reality is, historically we have been helped by these activities (e.g. EVO streaming) and on some occasions we have been hurt by these things (MvC3 Galactus and other video leaks, AE video leaks, etc.).
There is no question there is an ownership and copywrite issue in these cases, though I'm not terribly sure legal action is in our best interests in most cases unless we have to do so to demonstrate continued defense of the IP ownership.
That said, if this legislation comes to pass I'm sure we'll figure out ways to support folks whose efforts and intentions have historically been helpful. Our community team will likely take center stage in facilitating those activities.
And as you know, we've got games releasing soon that enable YouTube uploads directly from in-game... in the future I hope to have games that out of the gate enable streaming. Obviously we'll have click through licenses to allow for those uses as facilitated by those products.
What's more, I don't believe the government is likely to take proactive action on criminal merits without the prompting of an IP holder to initiate the probe. They just don't have the budget or bandwidth to police that.
In short, I don't forsee this being a major issue for most organizations today.
Thats what iam talking about yesterday, the net was flooded with pirated versions..
And all works my friend downloaded it he said you cant skip the intro..
You can skip gfwl by pressing C..
Stupid hackers at least well still have online...
(People please buy the original)
@3:
lol Yeah they are losing sells. Different console versions don't count as one sale.
Also, considering how Capcom feels about PC games, it's nice that pirates pretty prove them right. Criminals are epically predictable.
When the DRM gets more hardcore, or when they don't bother with a PC version, think about this article.
There was a an article pushing Mvc3 on the pc.
This article officially kills it.. lol
#4 Agree, We know now why they were so strict.
Though they still cant prevent the inevitable.
#3 he he.. Serious? : )
So what if it's pirated, you act like xbox doesn't get pirated... People WILL buy it because of the online play... So shut the f**k up and stop bashing every pc gamer like we are all pirates. Pirated ssf4 ae is like a demo, nothing more, nothing less, so capcom deal with it because you're going to make ALOT of money on the pc version despite the pirated version.
Doesn't matter if you buy it after pirating. You are still doing something illegal and PC owners usually don't go out of the way to buy the games despite saying they will. The online play restrictions will probably alleviate the problem though.
Just saying, nobody is hating but they are things to consider. Speaking which, I can't wait to see that Oni Broly mod or the Yun Wang Tang mod.
(Y'know how folks are always asking for EX characters then someone responds back 'Capcom doesn't own the license'?
This may cheer the former up: http://shoryuken.com/2011/06/30/stree...)
This doesn't surprise me at all. PC gamers wonder why Capcom hardly makes a PC port of their hit games.
Some can argue that any console can be pirated. While I agree to that, it's still far more inconvenient to pirate a console release and getting a hacked 360/PS3 than to burn a DVD and upload a torrent.
In the end, it looks like this will be the last fighting game or maybe any game in general that Capcom will release
This is sad news regarding the AE leak on PC. I preordered my copy 2 months ago on D2D as soon as they had it available to show my support for Capcom porting the game over to PC and now this happens.
This probably takes away the slim chance we had of Capcom bringing SFxT on the platform and even as a primarily PC gamer I don't blame them.
On top of that I still have to wait another week until the game is officially released so I can finally play. >_<
"Svensson: To clarify, I said the update would come "shortly after launch". We're still awaiting approval on the TU that officially removes it and that's likely to take a bit of time still."
This is precisely why Capcom should have dropped Windows Live. Title Updates via microsoft take entirely too long to approve. Steam has significantly better rules for developers to be able to regularly update their products.
They seem to be expecting far fewer sales, particularly retail sales, for this version, anyone know why?
I have had mine preordered on amazon.co.uk but they took the purchase button off of the product page on the 24th (the old release date) and haven't put it back up yet. Hope they're actually getting it in still.
well I don't blame capcom if they dont want to make PC ports in the future, but on the other hand when PC games rarely gets to Africa most are stuck with the option of pirating to get the games, I decided to buy the original PC port of vanilla and it took a year after release to get to me, credit card doesnt work in nigeria for the most part.
but still Kudos to Capcom for releasing this game in PC
@#20
Yea the superior version of DMC4 that didn't have mouse support, wasn't promoted or marketed and wasn't released at all on digital distribution sites until much later, on top of that it wasn't a good game in the first place. As I said, blame failure on pirating, it's the easy way.
So what? Every pirated copy is a lost sale now? That is a bull argument.
For instance I have downloaded a pirated version of ssf4ae and I am playing it untill the game launches when I will buy the official version so I can play online.
Honestly I think the ideea of sayng "we don't want to make pc games because of pirates from capcom is utter bull".
They just didn't want to release a pc version of super because they wanted AE to go live first , a project wich was kept secret till several months before launch.
I mean take the same company capcom, they are making silent hill, resident evill and now street fighter for pc. Clearely they are geting good sales despite piracy and what not.
Although you could make an argument that not every pirated copy is not a lost sale, the reality is that many people, who already have a pirated copy that fully works, won't ever bother buying the original. Does it matter that they own the game on other platforms? Not at all, that argument is completely irrelevant, since the game on another platform is a different product, even if you already know the content. That would be like saying that you can pirate the Harry Potter movie since you alreay own the book (or Blueray, whatever).
This is an interesting topic and both sides says true things, but don't forget: 1 illegal download =/= 1 sell lost.
CAPCOM has a huge fanbase on PC too, and maybe it's surprising for some people, but MOST of the PC players buy their games. Seriously, I have about 12 euros PER MONTH to spend on games, and even I can buy everything I'm interested in (about 8 games / year + steam sales). Don't tell me PC players (especially SF players, which community is a really, really respectful community) can't offord a game costs $30.
Everybody blaming piracy, but you forget what kind of people download it from not too legal sources: the 13-14 year old Call of Duty fanboys. THEY. ARE. NOT. THE. PART. OF. THE. SF. PC. COMMUNITY. Clear enough? I hope so. The REALY capcom pc community will buy it (or already preordered), and THAT will make money to CAPCOM, a lot of them.
Remember what capcom said after vanilla realase on PC? They sold MUCH MUCH more than they expected. Everybody forgot this, and remembers vanilla sf was on of the most pirated game of the year. That't because there is only 1 or 2 fighting games /10 years on PC, but this is another topic.
So all what I wanna say it to trust SF PC community. We aren't worse than the console community, AND IT'S F*CKIN ENOUGH ABOUT EVERYBODY THINKS ABOUT US AS PIRATES.
Speaking of intelectual property rights. "piracy" existed even before computers.
Think about an author who publishes books. Yet how many people actualy bought the book, read it, then past it around for their friends/family. The people who got the book passed would read it and not buy it themselves thus causing the author to loose monney.
So in other words piracy existed and will allways exist.
Its not JUST on the pc, its on the xbox as well. And even god of war was emulated to run on pc and thus was "pirated".
Its your decision to judge if piracy is right or wrong but actualy beliving that capcom wont release games for pc due to piracy makes you a golable person.
And the console versions were also cracked and released a week earlier, no one complained then. You'll only be able to play it offline, that's going to get boring real quickly. No one cracks their consoles, why you ask, to keep their online capabilities.
Point is, I was very happy to buy both SF4 and SSF4AE, I like supporting companies that pump out quality games.
Anyone with enough cash to blow on games will purchase legal copies because they want legal copies. People who don't have the cash were not going to buy it anyways. That's officially Nintendo's outlook on it also. Anyone who was going to buy it did.
The game was on the top twenty steam games list yesterday and it's not even out yet. It's been knocked of recently due to the summer sales.
Strike a balance. Piracy will always exist. Make anything for PC and there will always be a % of piraters if it is popular.
Only a small percentage of pirates make up lost sales. Sure, sales can always be 'greater' if all piracy was eliminated, but if every software company used that excuse then why do companies still make PC software in the first place? Why do musicians still release songs if they know it will be pirated?
The balance is to consider 'will the PC sales from real fans still make up for any potential piracy releases?' Because to eliminate all piracy, you can just not have a PC option at all. They can choose between selling nothing or selling something and also losing a fraction of it due to piracy.
Off topic, here, so sorry for that, but I hope someone can help. I want to get SSFIV for the PS3. Can anyone tell me if I get the disc release of AE can I choose to play 'chocolate' SSFIV, or just AE? How much for AE download if I buy the disc release of chocolate? Thanks in advance gentlemen!
This is one of the reasons capcom doesnt want to port games to PC well it does bother me if they do port stuff or not I dont play PC games
I will buy the costume packs as well. Using D2D digital copy should work well.
capcom should just forget about the PC market. PC players don't want to pay and they don't make that much money on it anyway.
I wanna pay. I think devs should make their salaries and I believe in the sanctity of property. I think pirates (casual or hardcore) should think about the work that goes into these games and stop feeling so entitled.
The old "pirated copy doesn't mean lost sale because they may not have purchased it if they couldn't pirate it" applies to physical property too, not just intellectual, but I don't see them using that argument for robbing grocery stores or banks.
Face it, it's just easier to justify piracy because intellectual property isn't something you can point to physically. But the hard work that went into creating it is no less real.
@ 49
Lots of people bought the original SF4 (hence the huge amount pirating). Not going to bother showing figures, you can find it all of the interwebs anyway.
As I already said, people who want to buy this game on the PC, will. Pirates will be limited to offline, what pirate is going to settle for a singleplayer fighting game?
Saying PC players don't want to pay is just insulting.
@51 i agree--if you steal something physically you either have cash on hand which can be spent on goods/services or you have products that can be sold for cash for the same purpose. i'm pretty sure nobody will rob a grocery store trying to just get a month's worth of groceries.
people pirate cause it's convenient but it's also not like they have a moral dilemma when they download. they are not physically hurting or endangering anyone, nor are they reselling and profiting off the game. downloads are somewhat isolated in terms of impacting society, beyond just affecting sales to an ambiguous degree.
Also, they won't drop PC, unless Capcom is too stupid to look at the PC sales figures and not realize that we are a strong market with the highest profit to sale ratio than that's their own damn fault and there is absolutely nothing that we can do about it. In 2010 the PC Gaming market brought in $16.4 billion in revenue with an estimated growth to $24 billion by 2014.
I can't believe the amount of ignorant idiots on this board. Pirating is stealing, no matter if it's digital or physical.
If you spent months making something like a youtube video and someone jacks it and uses it. It's stealing. Just as if you made a product and someone steals it for free.
Arguments that say pirates are only call of duty fan boys are loads of crap because I hate call of duty and I wouldn't even take that sheet game for free. Why would I waste hard drive space or time to download the game?
So thanks to pirates, Capcom will probably not waste time to do a PC version ever again because it's probably not going to be worth their time. That valuable time developing this could have been allocated to more DLC material or rebalancing AE(for all the whiners).
So in the end, this PC release will end up like Vanilla where they pirated more copies than they sold.
Thanks, arce holes.
"@50 It doesn't apply to physical property because if you rob a grocery store you are taking products from them. If I download a game I'm not taking a product they could sell."
Yes you are. Intellectual property means the physical _arrangement_ of matter is considered property, i.e. the way of regarding something, not the something. If you go into a bookstore and take a book without paying, are you just walking out with ink and paper? No, you're walking away with that ink arranged in a certain way, i.e. the value is in the arrangement of matter, not the matter itself.
And arrangements are infinitely repeatable. It doesn't matter if you write out Street Fighter 4's content in binary on paper or in stone walls that can be read out from outer space, you're disseminating the arrangement when you are not the copyright owner.
The stealing is the dissemination. You steal the right to copy and dispose of. Once downloader B downloads a copy of a game from pirate A, they are in posession of a copy belonging to the copyright holder, as much as if you were in posession of your neighbour's car. If copyright holder says it's yours, then it is. If they say you have to pay for it or provide any other terms for ownership that you don't satisfy, then it isn't.
Only philistines don't understand intellectual property. Let's go back to bashing people over the heads with clubs or rubbing sticks together to make fire, if an argument like "there is no physical object stolen" makes any kind of sense to you.
@56 you're wrong.
Pirating is not stealing. Its the same as lending a book to a friend who reads it and then gives it back to you. That friend will not buy the book and thus the author will loose on a sale.
So get over it this has happened since intelectual property was invented and it will keep happening, on pc and xbox.
In fact the pirated version of sf4ae for xbox was out TEN DAYS before the game went live, and where wore you then to complain about piracy?!?!
Fact of the matter is, SSF4 AE is alerady on top 4 most sold games on steam and its not even out yet.
#59 Hell yea!
I am still a vanilla warrior, always been on PC, I never cracked and got a 360 myself....
1080p bigscreen with some of those custom mods its just pure beauty.
Would I be a terrible person for downloading it for the sole purpose of getting a hi-res screenshot of Oni's U2 KO screen then deleting it?
Pirating is not stealing, it's just taking someone's intellectual property without their consent and without paying them the amount they intended to charge for said intellectual property.
Besides, we all know that every pirate who received the game for free will then proceed to pay money for the same product anyway. It's just logic.
Funny how there are 61 comments and only 2 of them are about the costume packs, didn't you guys notice it's only 15€/$ for -103- costumes? That's some seriously good pricing. All the packs on console costs like ~44€/$.
Guess I'm getting the costume packs.
Id love to say Boo Hoo Capcom, however your sales come from DLC anyways. I think SNK is taking a bigger hit with KOFXIII being hacked and released. But hell. 6-8 years from now when Microsoft kills their online for their 360...we might be revisiting AE on PC. In the meantime..I'm kinda over it all.
Why do piracy arguments always turn into semantics?
You can't define a userbase as big as PC, especially not with a word like "pirates." That's dumb, and you should feel dumb if you think PC users are nothing but pirates.
There are pirates, sure. There are also legitimate consumers. Hell, there are even pirates who'll illegally download the game, then buy it. Are they wrong? Sortof, but at least they pay their due. Me, personally? I think the pirates who don't end up buying it wouldn'tve bought it anyway, and I'd say Capcom's smart enough to consider those numbers.
Game's gonna do well, I don't give two craps if anybody pirates it. I bought it, my friends bought it, a bunch of people I don't even know bought it, and Capcom is gonna make their money. I just hope they include us in on the updates, I'm eager to buy all the DLC I can get my hands on.
Kinda sucks about Steam though, who knows when they'll get the DLC loaded. Or if they'll even let us pre-load the game before midnight.
please let this be the last street fighter for PC. Most people are too smart these days to buy their games. Leave PC for FPS and RTS like it should be.
#62 - you are right
http://fast1.onesite.com/capcom-unity...
Thats killer costume prices!
I am All-in on that easy.
Same costumes, higher resolution, less money, works for me! lol
Blaming the PC community for pirating the game?
Seriously this is an internal fail from Capcom. If they are not able to protect their game inside their structure they are the only ones to blame.
Funny details any argument regarding a possible mistake from Capcom softening the DRM: The DRM is still the hardcore one and if the pirate have proven something it is that DRM are useless and do harm only to their legit clients!
Capcom should focus on the sales and not on the number of pirated version downloads! There is no way to estimate the real loss in sales due to that. It might actually be insignifiant for an online game like SS.F
There are so many straw men arguments in here that it's impossible to mention them all.
Gotta' love it.
Anyway, I'll be buying AE for PC as soon as my loot gets right, and that costume pack deal is pretty damn good. Can't wait to see some of the mods that come from this!
I have some friends who downloaded the pirated version... but we all already pre-ordered a couple of 4packs from Steam. Cheers to good sales Capcom!
So if I was a pirate I could be playing it right now, but since I'm not I have to wait until it's released and shipped. Suckage.
I pre-ordered the ae 2-3 weeks ago(despite my ridiculous region lock from GFWL - I opened an another account in USA to go around this). And now i'm downloading the pirated version. I will train and learn about the new characters until the lauch and at the 6th july, i'll simply delete the pirated copy and just install the game. Then activate it with my legitimate serial key. Pirated copy will more or less act like preload for me. Profit+Profit
As a footnote, i don't see the the point behind pirating fighting games. You're not going to be able play online and that's the whole point of the competitive games cpu is very boring and feels repetitive after a while(also it cheats). Nothing beats destroying someone online with a perfect flashing on the screen.
I wish costumes were unlockables. I'd love a real reason to play the arcade mode.
For the idiots who say that pirating is not stealing, here's news for you. The last time I checked, a pirate rapes, pillages, and plunders.
So I presume there's a reason they are called "pirates", you freaking retards.
And final thoughts, if you guys don't think that pirating is stealing, then if I shot and killed a man, it's not murder. It's only sport hunting.
You pirates do as you please, but don't try to find excuses on doing what you know is 100% illegal and most definitely unethical.
@77
I just opened an another account at the Games from windows live website. At the registration phase, i selected USA, New york as a place of residence. This should go around the region lock problem, USA is a supported country for GFWL. I bought the game from Capcom store, neither steam nor D2D was selling me the AE.
Here's an archive from steam forums about this subject: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums...
I saw more about the anti-streaming bill on SRK and SDA. I think Svensson or S-kill responded to it over there.
I wish we had more info about the PC retail though.