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PCGA President: 'Let's Monetize Those Pirates'
by Blake Ellison, Oct 20, 2008 12:38pm PDTPC Gaming Alliance president Randy Stude has decided to turn his industry consortium's attention toward piracy after months of DRM controversy and PC release delays getting attributed to gamers getting their fix by way of a digital five-finger discount.
"At some point next year, we expect to be able to quantify the potential impact of piracy on the industry," promised Stude to Gamasutra, echoing detractors in the piracy debate who warn that most piracy-related statistics available today are inaccurate.
Stude was pushed into the issue by his constituency--a collection of hardware makers, PC vendors and game publishers including Microsoft, Dell, Activision, and Epic Games. "There's a far more urgent imperative [game companies] want to see discussion and debate going on around, which is piracy," he said.
The Alliance president reiterated the most frequently mentioned solutions to the piracy problem, such as digital distribution and taking games online, but he also had a novel idea for what to do before the day that markets go entirely digital.
"Let's monetize every one of those pirates, and let's advertise the hell out of them," Stude asserted. "Serving, for example, six times the number of in-game ads on unauthenticated game versions would be a piracy deterrent that also provides revenues to the developer," wrote Gamasutra of Stude's idea.
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Advertising might be a pretty blunt intstrument in the modern western world, but I think the marketters could still benefit from being a little more subtle - Eventually, if advertising is used like a weapon this way (as with Gametap), it will weaken and weaken the ability of advertising to influence viewers. It will become a default attitude to ignore and disregard advertising, as it already is for me.
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Pirates remove the authentication system. Ads don't show up.
Although I admit these fools are finally thinking in the right direction, whether legal or not pirates are releasing their games better than they are.
Adding interesting features that pirated copies can't get to the legitimate version is the way to deter from piracy.
Here's a gem of a quote from the Steam forums regarding region restriction:
"So much fuss about lost sales due to piracy... Can't be that bad if they can afford to deny online sales to half the globe?"
This speak volumes really, consider the fact that piracy is almost entirely online, through torrent. This is digital distribution, and it's to the entire world!
Yet Ubisoft, Atari and others continue to restrict their games to the US only on Steam and other services.
They don't lose sales from piracy, these idiots lose sales from incompetence at basic marketing in the digital age.
If you're going to put in game advertisement, how about you do this.
1) If the game can connect to the internet, reduce the amount of ads. You can also change what ad is displayed. This means you can take the ads out altogether too (hint hint).
2) If the game cannot connect to the internet, the game increases the amount of ads the player will see.
Note: The increase in ads in #2 should not be overbearingly, retardly stupid amount.
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i can't even begin to decipher how silly that is.
this shits bonkers.
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- Hence leading to more shit-free pirated versions (or at least more annoyed consumers)
- More piracy (or at least non-diminishing piracy) leads publishers to try newer more restrictive protection schemes
etc...
It's a catch22.
PC market is in a sad state and I don't see how it can't go worse..
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way to punish those pirates.
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And, what ad companies would want to place ads in pirated (illegal) games anyway?
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They should run a discussion on how to run an business and how to be profitable in the games industry instead of talking in circles about piracy.
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Piracy isn't exactly something new, but it's now 'mainstream' (takes a while like everything to get there) but it seems that DRM's is more annoying than piracy, limiting install times etc.
put a >GOOD< PC game out with no DRM and lower price and i'm pretty sure you'll see alot more sales.
Stop whining with piracy and blaming it on that why your game didn't sell much while ignoring that it might be the game that isn't so good (and that people really aren't sure if wanna buy it) + DRM / install limits, DRM's are just challenging the pirates, EA seemed to think that their DRM on Spore was bulletproof, but heard it was cracked before game came out and no other game has had this much controversy around it.
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I would be interested in that calculation. And no, just counting how many people pirated it and then adding up the numbers does not = the potential lost sales. Because:
1. Many people "try before they buy" and will pirate it first and buy it later
2. Many pirates have no money and would not have bought it anyway.
While almost all pirates will say "the game sucks I would not have bought it anyway" some of them actually mean it, some don't and just say it to defend piracy. The problem is you will never know who is who until you invent a machine to read thoughts.
Also, the ads will be cracked and removed as well.
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Far more urgent than what? What other imperatives are they backseating to talk about...advertising to pirates?
Far more urgent than "DRM controversy" and "PC release delays"? I don't think that's true.
"DRM" and "PC Delays" are losing you PAYING CUSTOMERS. I think that's where your focus should be. Of course, you figure the PC Delay is getting you console sales. Fine, stop complaining about low PC sales 6 months later.
I, for instance, do not own a current gen console. By the time you release the PC versions of these games, whoopdee-do...I don't care anymore. You get no purchase from me at all.
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I love that idea-- instead of 'fighting' piracy one instead just annoys people till they comply. Appeals to my inner passive aggressive child. : )
Though the fundamental flaw lies in the fact that the illegal distro will end up hacked to eliminate the ads.
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