EA Chief Sees Pirates as a "Marketplace"

[Over_Krill]

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 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.

I wish people would do there research the same DRM Arkham Asylum has been in a lot of other games like Mass Effect and titan quest and many others it far from new and it's complex and hard to put in to the game not to mention only one of two thing can happen first one the game developer tells every one about the DRM and the pirates get around it and affects the paying customers and the second one is the game developer does not tell any one about it and get's a bad name and go's out of business just like Iron Lore Entertainment who made titan quest.

If the game playes like a buggy piece of crap why would people buy it see what happened to Iron Lore Entertainment.

And realy no DRM has ever had a false positive the SecuROM on the disk of S.T.A.L.K.E.R clear sky said i was using a pirated version about half way through the game now that made me quite mad because i payed $70 for the game and i never pirated it.

 

[FROGGEman2]

Yes... ...EA has been doing a lot of "turning around" lately.

 

[M4rsch]

Actually I've been using pirate copys as demo's for about 5 years now. Whenever a game turned out playable after all I did actually buy it. Why the hell should I buy all of the generic shit that's popped out in a weekly rate and then sort out the mass for games that are more than just 'compelling'? I'd rather do the same and not lose any money, thank you very much.

 

[Asehujiko]

Well one thing he is certainly NOT making any more profit from: Me. I refuse to buy incomplete games and then pay to have them fixed.

 

[DeathQuaker]

...a company that only a year ago was almost universally reviled for the intrusive (and ineffective) DRM it forced on gamers through games like Spore and The Sims 3...

Minor correction: it's the Sims 2 that had a nasty version of SecuROM on a number of its expansion packs, and Spore and Mass Effect that had both the nasty version of SecuROM AND annoying online activations (which at the time Ricitiello was saying people who didn't like these things were either pirates or who "just didn't understand" why they were bad).

By the time the Sims 3 rolled around they had gotten around to getting rid of most of the intrusive DRM. There still is a version of SecuROM on the download-only version of TS3, but it's not on the disc.

Which, come to think of it, is probably really why he's pushing DLC--because they can track DLC purchases and user activity via the EA Downloader and the download-only copy protection. Just saying he's doing it "for the consumer" makes it look nicer, and he hopes it'll make us forget the time he called a good portion of his consumer base criminals and morons.

 

[ItsAPaul]

Spoiler alert: you can download DLC for free. Reading that a CEO hasn't figured that out yet made me teehee.

 

[Slider2k]

Can't steal DLC? Yeah, right!

 

[Miral]

So I pay 79.99 for the SE had to spend another 6 bucks for a storage chest because of leeching assholes who are to cheap to fucking buy it?

Or you could have waited a little for one of the many storage chest mods from the community, now that the mod tools are out... Besides, the storage chest isn't really the point of Warden's Keep, it just happened to be in there. (It's pretty inconvenient as a storage chest, since it's in a fixed location you have to risk random encounters to get to. The mods do it better, but the point of Warden's Keep is the story content.)

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.

So you want games to be delayed even longer before release?

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?

Valve are sitting on a large (and growing) mountain of money made via Steam, and don't release or fund nearly as many games as publishers do, so you're comparing apples with oranges.

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.

Well, there's no excuse for subscriptions, and certainly some developers/publishers could be abusing day-one DLC, but there is a real legit reason for day-one DLC to exist: testing and certification. Particularly for console games, there comes a point a month or two prior to release when the game code gets locked down and they can't make new content (at most, only bugfixes -- sometimes not even those), and the game goes off to a testing lab. During that time, developers can either sit there twiddling their thumbs (bad for the company), can be shunted off to work on another project (what used to happen), or can start working on DLC content. Since DLC content is smaller, it can often be tested faster and in parallel with testing the full game, so they can end up being released together even if the DLC was completed a month after the game was.

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.

Actually they weren't exactly the same. The music industry had no means of technological enforcement (bar the rootkit debacle), so they went for legal enforcement (and ended up trying to sue kids and grannies). I don't think EA ever tried that path; they've been trying various technologic measures instead. Sure, some of them have been merely stupid, while others have been collossally stupid, but they're different mistakes and they do seem to actually be learning from them. Albeit slowly.

As for piracy; well, there are two kinds of pirates. One kind is philosophically opposed to paying for anything; they're going to pirate both the game and the DLC, but they'd never be your customers anyway, so there's no point paying any attention to them. The other kind might be willing to give you some money, but finds it more convenient to pirate instead. They're the ones that you need to coax (not bludgeon) into giving you money -- and DLC might be a way to do it (another way is to make the games cheaper, which I'd be thrilled to see). Sure, probably most of these will just get a pirate DLC pack. But if you release enough DLC and make it cheap enough then the delay of the pirate version might be enough to tip the scales and make people buy it anyway, even if they pirated the game itself. (Of course, then you have to make sure that legit DLC will work in a pirated game, without relying on the pirates to "fix" it...)

But (as others have said) DLC is probably mostly aimed at the second-hand market. These are people with money who are giving it to someone, but not the developer. So the DLC gives them a way to get some money out of them. It's a much better attitude (and more likely to succeed) than trying to block the second-hand market entirely (which was their previous strategy, with limited activations).

And as long as it's only used for side-quests, or items, or other entirely-optional things (rather than being "the real ending" of the game) then it isn't really hurting anyone either. (Bonus points if making DLC free for fully registered copies of the game.)

TL;DR: DLC isn't as bad as some people claim. Sure, I'd be happier if it was all free, but I understand the reasons why it is not.

 

[squid5580]

So I pay 79.99 for the SE had to spend another 6 bucks for a storage chest because of leeching assholes who are to cheap to fucking buy it?

Or you could have waited a little for one of the many storage chest mods from the community, now that the mod tools are out... Besides, the storage chest isn't really the point of Warden's Keep, it just happened to be in there. (It's pretty inconvenient as a storage chest, since it's in a fixed location you have to risk random encounters to get to. The mods do it better, but the point of Warden's Keep is the story content.)

Sure if I had bought the PC version instead of the 360 version. Still doesn't change the fact these leeching asswipes are costing honest gamers money who want all the content. Just like they were effecting PC gamers by forcing companies to use stupid DRMs to try and stop them.

 

[God's Clown]

snip

Yes, I would prefer they take their damn time, and make sure the game has everything it should have at launch in the first place. That would also give them more time to fix bugs they should have fixed before launch anyways.

 

[Shru1kan]

I've met people who have cracked steam to make it think they have over nine million dollars to their name.

I would love to see that, because that would be Piracy to the next level - buying things legitimately with unreal money.

Don't they usually call that credit card fraud though?

Yeah, credit card fraud. But VALVEs privacy policy would stop them from noticing anything, you'd almost have to brag about it to a cop before anyone would look into it.

 

[Auric]

I don't get this.

People can pirate DLC just as easily as they can pirate the game.

Nonetheless, im happy.

 

[AceDiamond]

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.

I don't agree with this.

If they create a proper game and then release DCL for it later then you really don't have any right to complain.

.....Now if we are talking about games like the Sims where there are like 5 or 6 add-on packs for each game (aren't there over a dozen Sims titles?) then i would say you have a right to complain, but there is no fair reason to demand DLC for free if it is something that is not a part of the core game and just something they created to make more money.

Just look at it this way:

If you order a meal that consists of 1 hamburger, 1 order of fries and 1 medium Pepsi and some ketchup, then that would be your core meal. Now imagine that you have the option of ordering some certain kind of sauce that according to the person serving you fits very well with your meal, then would it make sense for you to demand this extra sauce for free for no other reason then that you already bought the core meal? You already have everything you need to enjoy your burger, so this extra sauce would only be a bonus and not actually necessary to make the meal enjoyable. So what right you have to complain?

DLC for video games is no different. You get what you pay for, and then sometimes have the option to pay a little extra for more if you want to.

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.

Expansions used to cost $40+, and in fact still do (WoW). That said I provide Fallout 3 as an example of you being wrong. $50 of DLC that adds up to roughly doubling playing time of that game. That is more than worth it seeing as how many expansion packs were barely worth $20 much less $40. In fact most of the expansion packs I did get I didn't feel ripped off by because I got them as part of anthology collections/gold packs/whatever which meant I was paying maybe $10-$20 for them. If I had bought most of them at full price? Yeah I would've been annoyed as hell in many cases. In fact the only expansion pack I did purchase at full price just happened to turn out to be worth it. That was Mechwarrior 4: Black Knight. And it was worth it because it had a campaign as long as the first game's and added enough in new mech and weapon content. I personally do not think all DLC should be free, I do agree some companies have serious problems when it comes to pricing and itemizing, but by and large I have not found any real complaints in my personal DLC purchasing.