EA Chief Sees Pirates as a "Marketplace"

[ma55ter_fett]

On one hand its nice seeing EA trying to be the good guy for once, on the other it seems that he is putting too much faith in DLC.

He's like a person drowning at sea and the only boats for miles around are pirate vessels, sure you can ask a pirate throw you a rope, but he's still a pirate and will probally rob you of all your pocket money once you set foot on his ship.

 

[Darktau]

Yes... they can pirate our games... but not our DLC!

Uhh sir, they can pirate our dlc just as easily...

Damnit...

They didnt think it through very well? xD

 

[LTK_70]

"I don't think anybody should pirate anything," he added. "I believe in the artistry of the people who build [the games industry.] I profoundly believe that. And when you steal from us, you steal from them. Having said that, there's a lot of people who do."

Frankly, if I were to pirate Dragon Age, I would indeed be stealing from EA, but that's not going to make them hold on to Bioware's paychecks. Especially if the DLC alone generated a million dollars. Still, they're fortunately on the right track by getting rid of the DRM.

 

[Abedeus]

Aren't Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2 from Bioware?

EA games I bought in the past 5 years.... Hmmm.... Yeeaaahhh... Games I played? Sims 2, Spore, Mirror's Edge.

Wait...you can't pirate DLC? Why, I wonder... You figure if digital distribution games can get cracked, what makes DLC so special?

Hmm...

Yeah, it's not like there are no full packs of Fallout 3 + all DLCs on torrents. For the last 2 years or so.

BioWare is owned (and its games published) by EA.

I know. But it's the same with World of Warcraft - we don't say it's made by "Activision-Blizzard" or "Activision". We say "Blizzard", because we know which team made the game, not what label there is on the box.

 

[Ironic]

Seriously what is going on with EA. Every news article I read, they are being nicer and nicer and adopting polcies that make sense. Yay for a company actually trying to improve it's practices.

Sounds like "New Pepsi" syndrome.

Make new pepsi, make it rubbish.

Everyone hates it.

Wave of nostalgia and rose tinted nostalgia forces old pepsi customers to buy re-released "old" pepsi in a flood.

 

[Gildan Bladeborn]

This would be surprising if any major video-game publisher had said it, but EA? Mind totally blown! Dare we hope that the bigwigs might finally come to grips with the simple truth that the best way to combat piracy is to reward your paying customers? We can only hope.

 

[saejox]

As i pirate(i plunder the kitchen every night), i m suprised. They invented online activation and install limit ffs.

 

[Ciler]

The DLC option can help with getting money from the players who rent, buy used, or borrow games. Although this assumes that people would want the DLC enough to pay for it... (If I'm renting a game for a week, I probably won't even have time to get through the DLC).

As others have said: DLC doesn't make any difference in the world of piracy, since they can just pirate the DLC along with the game.

 

[chronobreak]

Ugh, come on now. The pirates get the game for free, which is the majority of the expense, so what if they choose to pay for some DLC? I don't even see why they would when it is so easy to download it all in one file, game and DLC included.

reward your paying customers

Absolutely. Give us thing the pirates can never have - things in physical form. Throw your customers a bone, give us a poster, or a code to get an action figure or something in the mail, I don't know. Sure, it will cost a lot, but maybe it can make up for some of the losses that come from pirating. Paying customers always get the shaft, I recently have been playing my 360 that I never really touch, and I was surprised to find that when I buy a game, I don't get anything like backgrounds or skins, they actually charge extra for that. I could not believe it, you make a sixty dollar investment, and they are going to nickel and dime to for small fry things, but then turn around and wonder why people steal it all?

 

[puffenstuff]

This man is wise.

 

[God's Clown]

I personally hate DLC. If I were to pay 60 dollars for a game, it should very well have everything on the disc. If they want to add things, it should very well be free. Not everyone has hundreds of dollars to throw around to buy every little upgrade, every little thing that should have been on the disc in the first place.

I miss the good old days of Playstation 1 and such. Just buy the game, and everything for the game is on the discs. No need to bother with paying 5 dollars for a Chest to store items, just buy the game, and play it.

 

[Wicky_42]

I personally hate DLC. If I were to pay 60 dollars for a game, it should very well have everything on the disc. If they want to add things, it should very well be free. Not everyone has hundreds of dollars to throw around to buy every little upgrade, every little thing that should have been on the disc in the first place.

I miss the good old days of Playstation 1 and such. Just buy the game, and everything for the game is on the discs. No need to bother with paying 5 dollars for a Chest to store items, just buy the game, and play it.

This. If they are planning to generate revenue from DLC then the cost of the game needs to be low to reflect this, otherwise you're coming damn close to condoning piracy of the initial product and using DLC as the primary source of returns on the game, hitting people who actually purchase the game at a financial disadvantage.

Sounds like it's moving more towards mmorpg-style subscription system, which I dislike. Lets stick with good, free DLC and good online multiplayer support as a means to create a loyal fanbase, shall we?

 

[Irridium]

This is what will help stop piracy (Dragon Age: Origins and the upcoming Mass Effect 2, have both eschewed SecuROM and online authentication for a simple, old-fashioned disc check).

I did not buy a single EA game that had SecuROM and online authentication when they had it in why because it does not stop pirates and only affected customers not the pirates. The pirates just went around it which is what they will do with all anti-piracy DRM.
Before any one meantions the batman arkham asylum DRM the pirates got around that before the news about it came out about it
Its a bad DRM if it affects only one paying customer and it always does.

Yeah, but the Arkham Asylum DRM was probably just a test.

Imagine something like that, only on a larger scale, in, say, Mass Effect 2.

If you played through it a ciertain way, the game gets fucked up. If you go down the evil path, the game gets retardedly hard. If you say "yes" to a question, you lose your inventory.

And if they fix those problems, some clever codeing could introduce a slew of new problems, further annoying the pirate. Eventually they would get tired of sifting through all the code and probably just buy the damn thing.

The people who payed for the game wouldn't get any of these problems, just the pirates.

Simple things like that hidden in the code of a game are a hell of a lot more annoying to try and pick out and fix.

 

[Slayer_2]

Is EA getting... better? Seriously, this is weird. And it looks like Activision is ready to take the "Biggest Corporate Asshole" Award from EA.

 

[lumenadducere]

Seriously what is going on with EA. Every news article I read, they are being nicer and nicer and adopting polcies that make sense. Yay for a company actually trying to improve it's practices.

Sounds like "New Pepsi" syndrome.

Make new pepsi, make it rubbish.

Everyone hates it.

Wave of nostalgia and rose tinted nostalgia forces old pepsi customers to buy re-released "old" pepsi in a flood.

You mean Coke? AFAIK it was Coke that tried the "new" thing rather than Pepsi.

I personally hate DLC. If I were to pay 60 dollars for a game, it should very well have everything on the disc. If they want to add things, it should very well be free. Not everyone has hundreds of dollars to throw around to buy every little upgrade, every little thing that should have been on the disc in the first place.

I miss the good old days of Playstation 1 and such. Just buy the game, and everything for the game is on the discs. No need to bother with paying 5 dollars for a Chest to store items, just buy the game, and play it.

This. If they are planning to generate revenue from DLC then the cost of the game needs to be low to reflect this, otherwise you're coming damn close to condoning piracy of the initial product and using DLC as the primary source of returns on the game, hitting people who actually purchase the game at a financial disadvantage.

Sounds like it's moving more towards mmorpg-style subscription system, which I dislike. Lets stick with good, free DLC and good online multiplayer support as a means to create a loyal fanbase, shall we?

Except if you want additional content at all, there needs to be money give to the designers, artists, marketing folks, etc. who are behind the content, and those guys all get paid by the publisher. And no publisher is going to fund a project that isn't going to get a return on its investment - that's just bad business.

Don't get me wrong, I hate any and all DLC that is a continuation of the original plot or has a strong tie to it in any way - Broken Steel from Fallout 3 and the Prince of Persia DLC come to mind. Those, IMO, are just screwing over the customer because they provide a "proper" ending to the game that the player just has to pay more for. If DLC could be divided into "good" and "bad" DLC then those would definitely fall into the "bad" category, as they essentially force the consumer to pay more if they want to see the real ending.

But something like Warden's Keep in Dragon Age has no bearing on the plot - heck, I skipped it entirely in my last playthrough. If they keep providing content like that (completely optional, doesn't influence the game one way or another) then I think it's okay. Let people who want to buy it go ahead and buy it, and those that don't can choose not to. And if it lets them recoup some of the losses from used game sales (which are huge yet nobody in the industry sees a cent of it) and piracy then why not?

 

[USSR]

"They can steal the disc, but they can't steal the DLC"

*facedesk*

Bullshit -.-

 

[Wicky_42]

*snip*
Except if you want additional content at all, there needs to be money give to the designers, artists, marketing folks, etc. who are behind the content, and those guys all get paid by the publisher. And no publisher is going to fund a project that isn't going to get a return on its investment - that's just bad business.

Tell that to Valve - or do they have bad business sense?

My point is either produce a cheap, bare-bones game and make your money from DLC, or make good games and encourage people to buy them through continued support and free DLC. I'd definitely prefer the second, tbh.

 

[L33tsauce_Marty]

And that's when EA learned the true meaning of Christmas.

 

[CD-R]

Interesting comparison with the second sale market, but it is pretty much the same from their point of view I guess.

I'm willing to bet game companies lose more money from second hand sales and rentals than they do from piracy. This is more of a way to recoup some of the money from those more than anything. It's better than game companies lobbying to make game rentals illegal like they are in Japan and recently Belgium. http://www.neowin.net/news/gamers/08/10/31/1-month-until-belgian-game-rentals-are-illegal

This is definately a smarter move than the music industry, at least from a pr standpoint. Seriosuly go on any forum or comments section and try to defend the RIAA. People will lay into you as if you just pissed on a dead puppie while dressed as Hitler.

Try defending game piracy and you'll for the most part get the same result.

Also to anyone stil going "rah rah rah why can't they put all the content on the disk rah rah rah." Remember when dlc used to be called expansion packs? I don't remember there being any outrage over expansion packs.

 

[TsunamiWombat]

Interesting comparison with the second sale market, but it is pretty much the same from their point of view I guess.

I'm willing to bet game companies lose more money from second hand sales and rentals than they do from piracy. This is more of a way to recoup.

This is definately a smarter move than the music industry, at least from a pr standpoint. Seriosuly go on any forum or comments section and try to defend the RIAA. People will lay into you as if you just pissed on a dead puppie while dressed as Hitler.

Try defending game piracy and you'll for the most part get the same result.

Also to anyone stil going "rah rah rah why can't they put all the content on the disk rah rah rah." Remember when dlc used to be called expansion packs? I don't remember there being any outrage over expansion packs.

Motto, people need to friggin relax about DLC. It isn't a giant conspiracy to cost you money, it's just how the 'going gold' process works.