EA Chief Sees Pirates as a "Marketplace"
- Thread starter Andy Chalk
- Start date
That is a bet you would handily win - while both pirates and second hand sales/rentals are forms of lost potential revenue for publishers, one of those groups is defined by the act of not paying for stuff. Or in other words, pirates aren't your customers, people buying used games could have been.CD-R said:
News Flash!
You can pirate DLC!
Douche...
Not that DLC is really important in the first place. It just lets you run around for another couple of hours in the same area with a different shade of color in the background
That and trying to bring down piracy is like trying to negotiate the war between pirates and ninjas. You'll eventually have all your limbs cut off.
You can pirate DLC!
Douche...
Not that DLC is really important in the first place. It just lets you run around for another couple of hours in the same area with a different shade of color in the background
That and trying to bring down piracy is like trying to negotiate the war between pirates and ninjas. You'll eventually have all your limbs cut off.
No, previously DLC was called an "expansion pack" and gave us good value for the money until greedy publishers ended that and started selling parts of what would be called an expansion (item packs, armor, quests) all seperately and at a price where everything ends up costing much more than an expansion would.Hardcore_gamer said:
Now we have day-one DLC; content developed along with the release version of a game, but witheld to make a quick buck, and it's not going to stop there, it's just going to get worse with publishers talking about making non-mmo games subscription based.
Too bad piracy actually doesn't have an effect on these companies because EA, BlizzAck, and ubisoft all need to collapse.
Trouble is that won't discourage pirates. They are after the digital media, they don't give a whiff about collector's items or any physical media to go along with the game they are patting themselves on the back for getting illegally.chronobreak said:
Riccitiello said the music industry made a mistake by "demonizing" its customers
Well that's certainly an interesting way of skirting around the fact that his company made exactly the same mistakes. It's good that they've realised it was a mistake and are trying to rectify it, even if they did take a bewlideringly long time about it, but I'd have a lot more respect for these sorts of people if they had the balls to openly admit that they'd done something stupid. You know guys, it's not unreasonable to make a mistake (or several dozen in EAs case), you're only human; if you admit it and try to fix the problem, I'll forgive you.
Well that's certainly an interesting way of skirting around the fact that his company made exactly the same mistakes. It's good that they've realised it was a mistake and are trying to rectify it, even if they did take a bewlideringly long time about it, but I'd have a lot more respect for these sorts of people if they had the balls to openly admit that they'd done something stupid. You know guys, it's not unreasonable to make a mistake (or several dozen in EAs case), you're only human; if you admit it and try to fix the problem, I'll forgive you.
Not if you have to pay for that DLC directly off of an EA server, but legitmate customers get it for free with access codes.Not Gonna Get Me said:
Also, I think he's making sense.
It is nice to see that they're coming around. And I do see their point - back when I was barely putting food on my plate, $50 on a game was steep. I firmly believed in trying before buying - and I did. Half-life was one of the few games that lasted more then a week on my HD, so I bought it. The NHL series - suffering from a complete lack of innovation - I'd only buy a copy every 2-3 years, deciding that if EA wasn't going to put in the effort, I wasn't either.
I'm now wondering how they're going to apply this to their sports line (Madden, NHL et al) - consistently updated rosters throughout the year? Adding in features that should have been in the games years ago?
I'm now wondering how they're going to apply this to their sports line (Madden, NHL et al) - consistently updated rosters throughout the year? Adding in features that should have been in the games years ago?
lol
While I agree that treating legitimate users like criminals in order to NOT catch criminals is stupid, his idea that "you can't steal the DRM" is verifiably false.
Although I didn't end up pirating Dragon Age Origins, I DID find all of the PC's pay-per-DLC on torrent sites, days after it was released.
And the Sims 3 also had all of it's DLC online in a few days, if you were savvy enough to install it (which I am not).
I think it's best if they just ignore them.
There are certain people who will NEVER buy a game, and there are certain people who will NEVER pirate a game. Cherish the latter, and largely ignore the former, and everyone will be happier, including yourself, as the publisher. Treat the people who DO buy your stuff like royalty, and they'll continue to buy it, and admonish their friends for not doing so.
In the information age, you REALLY need to look like a good company in order to maintain high numbers.
And once it's on the computer, it can be cracked, and leaked online, just like anything else.
What the Free-For-New DLC does is damage the second-hand and rental market. It doesn't do anything for savvy pirates.
While I agree that treating legitimate users like criminals in order to NOT catch criminals is stupid, his idea that "you can't steal the DRM" is verifiably false.
Although I didn't end up pirating Dragon Age Origins, I DID find all of the PC's pay-per-DLC on torrent sites, days after it was released.
And the Sims 3 also had all of it's DLC online in a few days, if you were savvy enough to install it (which I am not).
I think it's best if they just ignore them.
There are certain people who will NEVER buy a game, and there are certain people who will NEVER pirate a game. Cherish the latter, and largely ignore the former, and everyone will be happier, including yourself, as the publisher. Treat the people who DO buy your stuff like royalty, and they'll continue to buy it, and admonish their friends for not doing so.
In the information age, you REALLY need to look like a good company in order to maintain high numbers.
All DLC, no matter whether you pay for it or not, is downloaded onto the computer to be used.Booze Zombie said:
And once it's on the computer, it can be cracked, and leaked online, just like anything else.
What the Free-For-New DLC does is damage the second-hand and rental market. It doesn't do anything for savvy pirates.
Finally. Someone uses their brain. The DLC is still easily pirated, once one person obtains the files legally then he can crack any protection and torrent it to other people.
However, piracy has been around for years. Videogames and music still are. I don't see why people are still fighting this futile battle. I've seen some scary things that enable piracy, I've met people who have cracked steam to make it think they have over nine million dollars to their name. Yet the industry endures. He's right, its a fact of life. Not a good one, but a fact. At least they're stopping secuROM, which stops me from backing up my legitimate CD's and trying to not wear out my disc drive or the disc itself.
Finally, some down to earth common sense.
However, piracy has been around for years. Videogames and music still are. I don't see why people are still fighting this futile battle. I've seen some scary things that enable piracy, I've met people who have cracked steam to make it think they have over nine million dollars to their name. Yet the industry endures. He's right, its a fact of life. Not a good one, but a fact. At least they're stopping secuROM, which stops me from backing up my legitimate CD's and trying to not wear out my disc drive or the disc itself.
Finally, some down to earth common sense.
You don't need to, because piracy is not actually the problem, or even a problem. You want to encourage people to buy your game, not futilely try to discourage pirates. If you've sold a million copies of your game, but 10 million copies have been downloaded illegally? Congratulations, you've sold 1 million copies of your game!samsonguy920 said:
The 10 million piracy figure? Completely irrelevant! It doesn't actually cost companies anything when somebody illegally downloads a copy of their software, such that the numbers make any form of difference. In terms of impact to the bottom line, 1 pirated copy does as much damage as 100 million (none).
Pirates are non-customers - they do not buy your products. The traditional response to software piracy has been to tackle it much like the retail industry handles loss prevention - preventing the non-customers (thieves) from absconding with your merchandise without paying for it. The problem is that while it makes complete and total sense to do that if you're say... Walmart, it doesn't make any sense if you are Electronic Arts. The store sells physical products that it had to pay for, so any units that go missing directly equal units it can't sell anymore. The publisher sells lines of code that can potentially be copied an infinite amount of times - if somebody makes a copy without paying for it the publisher still has exactly as many units to sell as it did before.
Of course when publishers see that there are a staggering number of pirates downloading their games, they naturally start imagining their bottom lines if all those illegal copies had been actual sales, and then start looking for ways to make that happen. It's understandable but flawed, since pirates are not your customers, and therefore the assumption that preventing piracy will increase sales is based on a flawed premise - that pirates all would have gone out and bought themselves a copy if only you could make it impossible to pirate.
So rather than wasting time and money trying to make your products harder to steal (this is how piracy impacts your bottom line!), you should concentrate on making them more attractive to buy - if the addition of a cloth map in the box encouraged even 1 person who would otherwise have pirated your game to go buy a copy, then you have just accomplished more than every DRM scheme ever devised has.
You can't stop pirates from pirating, so logic dictates that if your goal is to move more units of your product, you should work on providing them with reasons not to pirate your software instead.
This move by EA doesn't really have anything to do with that (other than acknowledging that DLC sold to a pirate is still DLC sold), since it's really a shot at the used games market, which might as well just be piracy for all the money publishers see from it.
I mean via the traditional publisher/developer business model. Valve is an outlier because of Steam - they directly see the profits of their games that are distributed via Steam, and on top of that they get a small percentage of every other game that's sold on Steam. They make more than enough from those revenue streams to support continued updates to their games. With most publisher/developer models, though, the developer is only being paid as long as content is being created. Once the game launches, sales profits all go to the publisher, with the developer getting a bonus check based on whether the game sells well or not.Wicky_42 said:
And I get your point, but it's not an either/or type of deal. Cheap, bare-bones games won't sell in the first place, thus whatever DLC you have, it won't matter - you're not going to get the initial users needed. Good, quality games can be made, but free DLC is a rarity because revenue is generally not forthcoming. So I feel that what's currently available - good, high quality games that have additional DLC that's generated post-launch - is a good method (again, as long as it's optional and not tied in strongly to the narrative).
