Lionhead: Second Hand Market Worse than PC Piracy

Fable developer Lionhead has said that the pre-owned sales market for home consoles is a bigger problem for its bottom line than piracy of its PC software.

Speaking to Eurogamer, lead combat designer for Fable III Mike West declared that "piracy these days on PC is probably less problematic than second-hand sales on the Xbox. I've been working on PC games for many years and piracy is always a problem. There are a lot of honest people out there as well, and if they like your game they'll buy it."

Strangely though, that's about as far as West goes with the pre-owned argument, opting to further detail the impact of PC piracy instead. He added that Lionhead has already made its money on Fable III, and that any actual sales made from the upcoming PC version will simply be a "bonus" - "a no-lose even with piracy as it is."

"The pirates, whatever you do on whatever system, they will crack it. It might take no time... I think the longest it's taken to happen is two days. Someone will crack it somewhere and there's not much you can do about it," he lamented.

"It's just a depressing situation we're in that people don't think it's worth spending money on computer games. What they're doing is making sure there are fewer games coming out in the future and more people out of work, which is a terrible thing."

West then realised that he was supposed to be making the pre-owned market sound worse than piracy, rather than deter anyone from actually making games for the PC platform at all - and concluded with "But, as I say, second-hand sales cost us more in the long-run than piracy these days."

Glad we cleared that up, then.