For all of those PC gamers anxiously awaiting the follow-up to the great PC Street Fighter IV port, you’re out of luck. A few days ago, Capcom Producer Yoshinori Ono during an interview with 4gamer revealed that there are no plans to bring Super Street Fighter IV to the PC due to piracy. Even though the original sold great, it also was a pirate favourite.

I know there are a lot of people who feel that video game piracy is a victimless crime because they feel like they’re only one person taking a product away from a faceless, multi-billion dollar corporation. However, there are consequences to pirating, and this is one of them. Not only does it hurt legitimate gamers that actually wanted to pay for it, but now pirates can’t even pirate it.

Don’t blame Capcom for this. They’re not here to just give away all of their work for us to enjoy. They run a business, and their purpose as a business is to make money. Releasing that type of game on the platform that is a pirate-haven such as the PC has proven time and time again to be bad business. I’m sure that the potential sales they lost due to piracy far outweighs the money they made on legitimate sales. To be honest, from a business perspective, I don’t know why any major companies would want to put out their big budget games in the traditional fashion on PC.

Where paying gamers can complain is the fact that Capcom doesn’t want to distribute this digitally through a protected system like Steam, which they feel is unfair to gamers who don’t have the service and limiting to gamers. Maybe someday they’ll change their mind on this decision.

Say what you will about much cheaper it is to pirate games rather than pay for them, but this is the end result of rampant piracy. The catalogue from which to pirate from will disappear and everyone loses. I sympathize for the PC only crowd that would have to buy new hardware to play Super Street Fighter IV in some form. As for the pirates that ruined everything…