Shack: So you would say the "PC problem" needs to be solved with significant action, rather than just words?

Brad Wardell: It's not a PR problem. The people I'm talking about or I run into, they don't pay attention to the marketing at all. They just know they pay $40 for a game--$40, who am I kidding--they pay $50 for a game at Best Buy or wherever, they take it home, it doesn't work on their computer. And not because the game minimum requirements were just bull, or because it installs some weird driver on their machine that didn't test the copy protection right.

Or here's one of the things I find funny--we as an industry can't manage to get multiplayer games to connect correctly half the time. How many times do you run into that, where you didn't install such-and-such port router. We can't get that to work, but we're smug enough to think that we can get some sort of sophisticated product activation for people who didn't buy it online, who bought it at a store. I mean, good gravy.

Shack: A lot of people think the solution is making games that are so connected with the online experience that everything is validated online, patched online, controlled through the internet. But what you're talking about is an offline, almost traditional solution.

Brad Wardell: Well I think [we need] a combination. You have to be able to protect your intellectual property. And I'm a big believer in activation. Our games, not all of our games, but Galactic Civilizations uses activation for downloads. Basically, our system has always traditionally been that you purchase a game, it has no copy protection, but if you want to update it you have to get it from us with your serial number, and we validate who it is.

But if you're not connected to the internet, if you're in the service and you're overseas, and I just want to play the freaking game single-player, I should be able to just play it and not have to worry about it. But if you want to get updates, obviously if you have interent access, all bets are off, it's fine.

As an example, if someone can update their game, they clearly have internet access, and at that point it's perfectly valid to make sure they're a customer. But if it's a single-player game, and if it doesn't have updates to it, there's gotta be a way so that people who aren't connected to the internet aren't going to be jerked around. Because they don't have to go through that with the console.

Shack: I always love interviews about piracy where the developer says, "There's a better solution--I just don't know what it is yet." Do you know what it is yet?

Brad Wardell: We come from the shareware world on the non-game side of things, so we know all about piracy. To us, these game developers complaining about it, it's like, "Welcome to the party. We've been dealing with this for a long time, when you guys were still making cartridges."

The answer is that you focus on people who buy your stuff, who will buy computer software. The game industry is the only industry that I know of that sweats people playing their games even if they were never gonna buy them. It's completely different form the software industry in this regard. Adobe for example--I'm sure they don't like the fact that people pirate Adobe Photoshop, but I doubt they're losing sleep over it. There's no major common business software that I can think of where they go through the elaborate lengths to control piracy that the game industry does.

And the difference is that in the game industry, the emphasis is on keeping pirates from playing the game, regardless of if they're ever gonna purchase your product. Whereas in the software industry, the emphasis is on making people who would otherwise buy your product to buy it. And I know that seems like a subtle distinction, but it's a lot easier to focus on getting people who might otherwise buy your game to buy it.

And that's where things like providing updates comes in--where the source is secure, where you have to get it from Stardock. Or you have to get your update from Microsoft, and you have to install Windows Genuine Advantage. Some people get annoyed by it, but the average user does not care about installing an ActiveX controller to run the Genuine Advantage thing. They don't even think about it.

But why does Microsoft have that? Because if you want to get some extra feature out of Windows, then they want to make sure you're a customer. Verified at the time they want to make use of one of your services. They don't sweat as much whether someone's installed an illegal version of Windows in the beginning. Because the people who are going to buy stuff are going to buy it, and the people who are never gonna buy it, well, who cares about them? They're not a lost sale. I mean, it annoys me if someone playing my game didn't pay for it, but I only really care if they are someone who might have bought it.

Shack: So you take the stance that the majority of pirates would never have purchased the game in the first place?

Brad Wardell: Well, I don't know about "majority"--yeah, I would say probably, it depends on the title.

A lot of people will go and say, "Oh, what about Crysis," as if there was some universe where Crysis was going to sell four million copies on the PC if it only weren't for piracy. And it's like, oh come on. If you're making a game for a demographic that's mostly 15-18 year olds, who probably don't have jobs, but it requires a $4,000 computer to play, where are these kids getting the machines?

Crysis and other games like that need a high-end PC to get anything out of them. Look at the Tom's Hardware benchmarks on even the latest cards. "Oh look, I'm getting nine frames a second with the new GeForce, the 9800 GT or whatever." And then they come out, and they're like, "We've sold fewer copies than we had hoped. Look at all the copies on Bit Torrent." Well, those people weren't going to buy it. How were they going to buy it? With what money?

Shack: One could make the argument that if the pirates downloaded it and played it, you can assume they have a computer that can run it.

Brad Wardell: Well no, they have a computer that could install it. But do they have a computer that can really run it decently? I don't know.

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