Pirates as a Marketplace 214
John Riccitiello, the CEO of Electronic Arts, made some revealing comments in an interview with Kotaku about how the company's attitudes are shifting with regard to software piracy. Quoting:
"Some of the people buying this DLC are not people who bought the game in a new shrink-wrapped box. That could be seen as a dark cloud, a mass of gamers who play a game without contributing a penny to EA. But around that cloud Riccitiello identified a silver lining: 'There's a sizable pirate market and a sizable second sale market and we want to try to generate revenue in that marketplace,' he said, pointing to DLC as a way to do it. The EA boss would prefer people bought their games, of course. 'I don't think anybody should pirate anything,' he said. '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.' So encourage those pirates to pay for something, he figures. Riccitiello explained that EA's download services aren't perfect at distinguishing between used copies of games and pirated copies. As a result, he suggested, EA sells DLC to both communities of gamers. And that's how a pirate can turn into a paying customer."
Did they ask why? (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't think anybody should pirate anything (Score:5, Interesting)
Really? Funny old world, isn't it
I distinctly remember EA being sued a while ago for copyright infringement.
They used a piece of music in their games without permission from the composer
Anyway...
Re:Half a game? (Score:4, Interesting)
And that's how a pirate can turn into a paying customer.
And that's how a paying customer can turn into a "pirate".
I would buy the game in the shop and torrent all the cracked and nicely packaged DLC. Winrar!
Read the Saboteur article a few threads back? (Score:3, Interesting)
Seeing as EA still treats their customers like crap. (See the Saboteur article even just a few posts back.) I'm _still_ not being anything from EA, so no DLC for me either.
Les'see Last thing I bought was 6 copies of the Zero Hour expansion for me and my friends (Command and Conquer 3). Which turned out to be a fucking piece of crap. Thing was full of bugs. You used to play with your friends, building up your forces for 3 hours, and when you wanted to start moving in for the kill the fucking thing would de-sync and crash.
And EA did _nothing_ to fix the bugs. And this trend continued, and results will be the same for stuff like the Saboteur game.
So fuck you EA. Fuck you.
Re:I don't think anybody should pirate anything (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm sure the EA lawyers didn't go into court calling their copyright infringement theft either. I would really like to see the press (at least the technical press) conditioned to call the PR assholes on their use of "theft" as a synonym for copyright infringement. The two things are legally and conceptually different. We live in an age where copyright laws, distribution models and our attitudes towards "intellectual property" desperately need to evolve and be rethought. Changes in technology have drastically transformed the cost function for distribution of idea and information distribution, and the old ways of doing things are, simply, harmful and holding us back. When I think that people's lives are being ruined (financially and through prison and social condemnation) i an attempt to keep oligarchs in power and wealth, well, it breaks my heart. At the very least we need to fight against this newspeak conditioning by the PR asshats.
Of course "and when you violate our copyrights, you steal from them..." doesn't carry the same punch does it?
Re:Half a game? (Score:2, Interesting)
I think the opposite is true; you need a quality game for this to work. There is a class of pirate who isn't going to buy anything, no matter what. He can be ignored for the purposes of this conversation. There is another class of pirate who regards torrents as a sort of extended demo program. These guys either buy games that turn out to be good, or at least they wouldn't object to that behavior even if they often never seem to get around to buying the game. That's the target here.
That is me, I think that 99.9% of mainstream PC games are total garbage and not worth my money. The latest games tend to be ports of some console game with the same shitty console controls on my PC. On top of that I can not return a game if it sucks.
Look at Assassins Creed for example, good reviews but I it was one boring, repetitive game.... typical console shit. I stopped playing it after the second city or so.
I also downloaded Dragon Age Origins and liked it so much that I went to the store yesterday to purchase it.
I would consider purchasing DLC but would never do it because I would never allow a pirated game to connect to the Internet. Grant me amnesty when purchasing DLC and I may go for it :)
Re:Half a game? (Score:4, Interesting)
FPS for consoles? That's a good one! XD
Re:Half a game? (Score:5, Interesting)
So after playing many hours of it, he decides that the GTA bunch (Rockstar/Take Two Interactive) deserve some money, so he tries to buy a legit copy of GTA3 but it was banned (in this country) so there was no legit copy around to buy.
So when he was in another country, he tried buy it, but it was banned there too
I figure if the GTA bunch had made it easier to pay them, they'd have the money.
We preferably don't want to pay for shipping, distribution, shop's margin and all the other crap - the pirate shop has already done that for us, just let us pay the difference? That's fair right? They get what they'd normally get from the sale, and we get what we want (the game).
It'll be interesting if list price from pirate + GTA bunch's normal cut < list price from legit shop.
Of course that could be because the pirate shop sells more than a legit shop (cheper) and people don't necessarily pay the normal cut to the game makers. BUT, if it turns out to be much cheaper, perhaps the game makers might make more by working better with the pirate shops and other "unauthorized distributors"
Many of the "pirates" are already happy users of the software. Just make it easy for them to pay, and don't make it annoying - just have the link present on the main menu - obvious but not annoying. For example have something that says "If this game is a nonlegit copy, but you really like it, click here to pay us a discounted price". Not all will pay, but the more they play the game, the more likely many of them will just go "this game is great, I guess they deserve X bucks (which should be a _lower_ price than RRP).
Years ago, one of the Microsoft bosses in my country scolded subordinates for going hard on people that were using pirated Microsoft Software (reporting them to BSA/courts _immediately_). Told them in effect "These people are already happy Microsoft users, all you have to do is get them to pay". And it's an easy sale - just go to the users and say, pay us "$$$"/copy now or have the court tell you to pay far more per copy. I'm sure they did give some discounts/special payment terms in some cases (many businesses just don't have all that cash available to go legit immediately). But they've already got all the software installed and configured - no cost to Microsoft, get the money, give them the license keys. Pure profit. No need for sales talks, presentations and "expense account spending". In contrast I've heard some cases in USA where Microsoft went hard on companies and those companies just completely stopped using Microsoft as a result (and as long as the CEOs are still around their companies will never buy Microsoft).
Do it right and it's an opportunity for you, do it wrong and it's an opportunity for someone else
Re:Half a game? (Score:3, Interesting)
My thought is... while what you're saying is true (most cracked releases will include the cracked DLC), the number of people who didn't buy the original game but do buy the DLR is still greater than zero.
Maybe they're looking more for the 'piracy in the form of borrowing the DVD from my friend and installing it' kind of piracy -- I suspect (for games that don't have some kind of online play that makes it problematic) that kind of piracy is a lot more prevalent than the downloading cracked torrents kind. Not among the Slashdot crowd, perhaps, but there's a ton of gamers who aren't tech-savvy enough to rock the online piracy but who are tech-savvy enough to borrow their roommate's copy of a game.