DRM vs. Unfinished Games 462
Rod Cousens is the CEO of Codemasters, and he recently spoke with CVG about how he thinks DRM is the wrong way to fight piracy. Instead, he suggests that the games industry increase its reliance on downloadable content and microtransactions. Quoting:
"The video games industry has to learn to operate in a different way. My answer is for us as publishers to actually sell unfinished games — and to offer the consumer multiple micro-payments to buy elements of the full experience. That would create an offering that is affordable at retail — but over a period of time may also generate more revenue for the publishers to reinvest in our games. If these games are pirated, those who get their hands on them won't be able to complete the experience. There will be technology, coding aspects, that will come to bear that will unlock some aspects. Some people will want them and some won't. When it comes to piracy, I think you have to make the experience the answer to the issue — rather than respond the other way round and risk damaging that experience for the user."
Re:Isn't this just DRM in little pieces? (Score:1, Interesting)
Nothing at all, the pirates will release a convenient all-in-one pack with the base game and all the DLCs, for easy download and installation.
This guy is either incredibly naive, or it's really an attempt to make further milking of their paying customers more palatable by obscuring it as "fighting piracy"
There is another model out there that fits this (Score:3, Interesting)
The BOOK publishing industry has had a model similar to this in place for a while, and I would love to see video games follow this. Most of the books I read are parts of a series, so I buy the first book ( the starter ), and then the next books ( DLCs ).
Just like with book publishing, you could do DLC packs with price reductions after they've been out a while.
As long as they deliver value proportional to the cost, I'm good with this.
Option Multiplayer (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Isn't this just DRM in little pieces? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm okay with Little Pieces of DRM if the game is like Firefox where you buy a stripped product, and then pay micropayments to get various addons. The product would still be "complete" and usable but minus the optional features/sidequests.
What I would Not be okay with is if I was playing Final Fantasy 12 or Zelda Twilight Princess and suddenly a popup says, "If you want to enter the final dungeon, please type in your credit card number. It will be charged $10." That would piss me off.
Won't bode well with the gaming community... (Score:5, Interesting)
As a member of the gaming community, I have come across a large number of discussions concerning DLC, and the vast majority of gamers I've seen online have been very vocal against this idea. The community as a whole doesn't care what the price of the game is--in this case, a game that would normally retail for $60 could be sold for $30 with DLC making up the other $30--they simply will not support a game that feels unfinished.
Ultimately, the gaming community feels (unrealistically) that video game publishers are trying to milk them for all the money they are worth and that DLC that feels like it should have been included on the disc (or that was included on the disc and then unlocked via purchase) is one of the greatest sins conceivable.
Personally, I think that the gaming community is largely built of alarmists and that these changes wouldn't seriously hamper gaming at all (especially if the retail price was lowered), but the community as a whole simply will not stand for this, and any attempts to roll this out in the near future will fail.
Re:When I buy a game, I /buy the game/ (Score:3, Interesting)
How does this make any sense? Avoiding games with limited activations is understandable, but a blanket statement that you won't buy games that have microtransactions/DLC just seems strange. Do you not buy games that are part of a series? What about books or movies with sequels? Do you not buy a season of a tv show because there's another season after it?
There are certainly ways to do DLC/microtransactions badly, but the basic theory of splitting something large up into smaller parts and selling them separately is perfectly sound and can be beneficial to all parties involved if the pricing is done correctly. I don't want to have to wait ten years (if i'm lucky) for an author to finish an entire series so i can pick the whole think up at once before buying the first book. And unless it's an author i know really well i probably don't want to put down the cost of the entire series all at once without having read any of it first. Likewise i wouldn't mind buying a smaller chunk of a game and trying it out before buying the rest of it if the pricing was amenable to doing so. I'm willing to gamble $7 or $8 on a book to an extent that i would never consider for a $50 or $60 game. If books only came bundles in "complete" series for $50 then deciding which books to invest in would be just as much of a pain as it currently is for (most) video games.
Your examples make it seem like you're confusing DLC with rentals. You would still own what you bought, you'd just be buying smaller chunks of it at a time for a smaller amount of money. (In the cases where the idea was implemented in a successful manner anyways.)
Re:Isn't this just DRM in little pieces? (Score:3, Interesting)
What about the approach Ubisoft took in Assassin's Creed 2? Out of 14 Sequences (roughly equivalent to chapters), they shipped with 1-11 and 14. 12 and 13 aren't critical to the plot line, and they wrote around them ("These memories are corrupt, we'll skip to the next non-corrupt memory," which happens to be the final mission). 12 and 13 were later offered as DLC for about $3-4 each.
I played through the game before they were released, and the gap was a little weird, but given that they often skipped a year or two of game time between sequences, the gap was nothing new. There's never a pop-up in game, but once the DLC was released, they notified you on the initial menu; if you reached the end of sequence 11 without the DLC it did the "memory is corrupt" bit and skipped you to 14, but if you bought the DLC, it just transitioned to it with a brief mention about needing to fix the corrupted memory. Would that bother you?
Re:You're going to charge me $30 upfront, right? (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't you usually pay $60 for an unfinished game anyways? What's the last game you purchased that didn't require at least 1 or 2 updates to fix things that were broken from the start?
Not really. Here's a few that I'm thinking of off the top of my head I've paid $60 for and are perfectly finished (though some offer extras if you like, but the game itself is still complete): Crackdown 2, Halo 3: ODST, BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger, Super Street Fighter IV, Assassin's Creed II, Splinter Cell: Conviction, God of War III, GRID, Singularity, Uncharted 2, Gears of War 2... All of those for $60 offer a complete package, many of them with free updates and all of them with optional additional content that is unnecessary to "complete" the $60 game I bought. I can go back further if you like but that'd take more time. Interestingly every one of those is a massive blockbuster with the possible exception of Singularity (though I think it is).
Re:No. (Score:4, Interesting)
I was already thinking about half of what you said:
To prevent piracy, you need to to two things:
1) Produce a decent game, for a decent price, and not lie to and abuse your customers.
2) Ignore the douchebags who don't ever want to pay anything for anything.
If you fail to do #1, you create pirates because people don't want to pay a lot of money for garbage, and don't like being treated like shit. This ties into #2 - if you spend all your time worrying about pirates, and adding DRM and other idiocy, you end up producing more pirates.
Do this instead : (Score:5, Interesting)
put out new storylines/episodes as time goes by, and sell those to us, as DLCs.
do not sell us half finished, half assed games to rip off money like base swindlers.
Re:Isn't this just DRM in little pieces? (Score:4, Interesting)
Ah yes, Steam. That program that wouldn't let me play Half-Life 2 when my Internet was out. Mind you, I purchased the CD version, installed it from the CDs, and yet Steam felt compelled to not let me play it because it couldn't verify I owned it over the Internet. So I uninstalled Steam and played Half Life 2.
Re:haha (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, I wouldn't feel that bad if I were to get the PC version off of a torrent, because I already own the PS3 version. Not saying it's right, just feels less wrong.
Re:Heading the wrong direction? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:hmm (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, I am the type of person that waits until all expansion packs are released and the game is sold as a bundle, which is generally the same price or cheaper than when the game first came out. Which is also the reason that Valve's deals are a major drain on my wallet. (I get 9 games for $80! Count me in!! -wife: But you already have 3 of them...)