In the wake of developer Iron Lore’s closing, Michael Fitch, director of creative management at THQ, has strongly attacked PC piracy and hardware vendors which make developing for the platform "a freaking nightmare".

“It's a rough, rough world out there for independent studios who want to make big games,” Fitch wrote in a post on the Quarter To Three forums following the announcement that Iron Lore, developer of THQ-published PC RPG Titan Quest (pictured), was closing its doors. “Trying to make it on a PC product is even tougher, and here's why... Piracy.

“Titan Quest did okay. We didn't lose money on it. But if even a tiny fraction of the people who pirated the game had actually spent some god-damn money for their 40+ hours of entertainment, things could have been very different today.

“You can bitch all you want about how piracy is your god-given right, and none of it matters anyway because you can't change how people behave... whatever. Some really good people made a seriously good game, and they might still be in business if piracy weren't so rampant on the PC. That's a fact.”

Fitch also noted that for games lacking a “Madden-sized advertising budget… word of mouth is your biggest hope”. He said that Titan Quest’s sales had been negatively impacted by a botched pirated copy of the game that was littered with bugs and prone to crashing.

“So, before the game even comes out, we've got people bad-mouthing it because their pirated copies crash, even though a legitimate copy won't. We took a lot of shit on this, completely undeserved mind you. How many people decided to pick up the pirated version because it had this reputation and they didn't want to risk buying something that didn't work? Talk about your self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Fitch then criticized hardware vendors who make trying to develop PC games “a freaking nightmare… Integrated video chips; integrated audio. These were two of our biggest headaches. Not only does this crap make people think - and wrongly - that they have a gaming-capable PC when they don't, the drive to get the cheapest components inevitably means you've got hardware out there with little or no driver support, marginal adherence to standards, and sometimes bizarre conflicts with other hardware.

“Making PC products is not all fun and games”, Fitch concluded. “It's an uphill slog, definitely. I'm a lifelong PC gamer, and hope to continue to work on PC games in the future, but man, they sure don't make it easy.”

The Entertainment Software Association recently filed a “Special 301 Report” highlighting the ongoing battle against software piracy in a number of countries. It urged a number of nations where piracy is rife to clean up their act by bringing their copyright and enforcement regimes up to international standards and opening their markets to legitimate products as a matter of urgency, warning that countries that failed to combat piracy could be subject to “damaging trade sanctions”.