I've been thinking.....

[Bodz]

Andrew, Jon, and I need to start a business in China.

I'm pretty sure NLSC will make "decent" profits from the Chinese market...

[benji]

I know I'm late, but I only saw this because of the bump.

EA Sports isn't dumping the PC out of concerns about piracy, it's just an excuse. They didn't hire the former head of the Xbox division because they're interested in PC's. MGS didn't drop its entire PC games division because of piracy.

2K realized piracy is a non-excuse. Attach the game to DD service, drop the price, and outsource a port to five or ten guys in China. Almost free money. Especially when you have no competition.

Any anti-piracy method will only punish non-pirates as everyone who buys games legitimately knows. You can't fight piracy because you'll always lose. What you do is find a way to expand your customer base and find a price point where otherwise pirates will pay for it.

2K does this with the lower priced PC version (and somewhat no online, I assume that was more out of lack of infrastructure though) as do most companies putting 360/PS3 ports on PC. Valve does it by having sales, controlling the distribution method, and providing content updates. (Which make it a negative to pirate the game outside of third-world or developing nations as the servers and stuff for the pirated version are vastly inferior.) Stardock also provides no DRM and instead tries to find ways to provide incentive for legit purchase.

Big companies are not interested in this for the same reason they haven't been interested in the Wii. It's not a model they're used to. Although EA Sports has been an out lier in dumping cheap fast (and often shoddy) PC ports since the generation transition, even EA proper still does it and does it fairly well. I can only assume the dev teams can't do it. Then again with the quality they're outputting most of the time, I'm not surprised if they aren't capable.

And I can't quick post this because of an ad for something I can't and won't watch.

[Arcane]

I am aware the piracy concerns is an excuse, I created this thread to play their game and counter any excuse we get.

[Arcane]

I just thought i'd let everyone know this thread has been sent to EA to look at. Feel free to still throw out suggestions and I will forward them on.

[George7]

Guys,it will be nice if NBA LIVE is released,and thx for doing the best for it.

[shadowgrin]

BUH BUH BUH BUMP!

Article on pirates. Gyaaaar!
Or why focusing on piracy is not the solution.

Interesting bits.

...your game, and you as a developer, needs to be built with the idea of forming a connection with players – and to do so with as many players as possible. The relationship that you establish with those players is the true source of revenue and success. I call this single franchise publishing.

For example, suppose you made a cool strategy game and sold it for $10. You expect it to be pirated by various sites quickly. Your choices are to install some DRM to make sure that every copy sold is legitimate, and then have a running battle with pirates who crack that DRM. Or alternatively you can let the pirating just happen and instead build social features into the game (which could be as simple as links to your company forum) and a requirement that people who need customer service buy a legitimate license. Then you participate in your forum all the time and start telling everyone about version 2 of the game, which will be out in 6 months and cost another $10.

If your model is based on one-shot economics, the risk is that you will not make your sales requirements first time. So the second option (let pirates be pirates) is directly eating away at your bottom line. On the other hand, if your model is based on valuing relationships then it doesn’t matter. A pirate will likely pirate anyway, but instead you are focused on converting them into a customer eventually. And when the second version comes out, the process is the same. More customers, more pirates, more participants in the community, and here comes version 3.

What you are doing is seeding relationships, and then those relationships are yielding positive dividends from customers. Regardless of where the customers come from, legal or otherwise, they will eventually pay you money out of a sense of support, interest, convenience or any one of a dozen other purchase motivators as long as you don’t let the relationship die.

The scare story around piracy infers that in the future a developer will no longer be able to make a profitable living, but this is just not the case. The Internet automates sharing and connection between the artist and his fans. So in games what this means – like in any industry – is that the price of distribution drops to near zero. That also means that the amount of available competition increases, and so the sustainable price of the product also drops.

The missing revenue caused by the sales gap is not hurting creators. What it’s doing is slowly putting a lot of people who work in the publishing factory out of jobs because what they do is simply less essential. Single franchise publishing probably implies that much of the one-shot economy will shrink down to a more manageable size. Right or wrong, there’s not really much that can be done about that, however, as automation of the processes that publishing used to offer is here to stay.

The essential reason why you should love your pirates, sharers, borrowers, lenders, second hand retailers and so forth is that they become your new levers of publishing. Everyone that plays your game, legitimate or otherwise, is another node in your network that may spread the name of your game and its marketing story. Each is an opportunity to build a relationship, convert into a customer, become an influencer on your behalf, and so help your single franchise to spread.

The real gap that you must avoid is not a sales gap. It is a conversation gap. Not talking to your users, disappearing for years at a time to work on your next game, and otherwise simply vanishing off the radar resets all of your relationships back to zero. If you allow that gap to form then you’ve sacrificed the potential of everything that you’ve built for nothing, piracy or no.

Bonus video! Not really, it's in the source link above.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/ ... 653-Piracy

Note the part in that vid where it talks about the PS3 and Linux users. Foreshadowing?

[JaoSming]

Good read, reminds me of Minecraft.

Notch (the creator of the game) has said that he doesn't care if people pirate it because he thinks if he makes a good enough game they will pay for it eventually. Same goes for multiple people using the same username/password and why there isn't a restriction on that. And now he's got 2 million buyers, for a Lego game.
http://notch.tumblr.com/post/1121596044 ... racy-works (another good read)

This cannot be applied to consoles or yearly sports games though IMO. This would require a huge change in EA's community interaction (actually getting the decision makers to listen to us) and knowing that in one short year there will be another version of the game, no matter what, doesn't make me feel like my single (or in the days of PC Live multiple) purchase(s) matter. Seriously, what could have this website done to convince EA to port over Live 09 (PS2 or NG version) to the PC?

Consoles don't help because, well, console gamers are "idiots" usually. By that I mean they are generally not informed on the makings of their games and can only go by "behind the scenes" trailers. The Xbox Indie games has changed that a bit as seen with Fortress Craft (buy this chapter and I'll make more) getting 100k downloads, but you get what I mean overall.

So yea, good read, but does not apply unless a lot of things change in both the video game industry and with EA (and a PC version)