[quote name='DarklyDreaming' timestamp='1325701363' post='4899662']
Piracy is driven by a misunderstanding of an evolving business model and customer dissatisfaction -- at a certain price point, mostly the traditional 60$ for AAA titles, people don't want just the product, they want the service to go with it. Sure it's not viable for many types of games, for various reasons, to provide constant updates and other assorted that would make it implausible or tedious to keep up with a pirated version (look at Minecraft, a game which updated so often that pirating it just became silly) but it is what the costumer wants and they're right -- a 60$ game is, for the most part, not really worth its price.,
Article related: http://wii.ign.com/a.../1215619p1.html
I read this this morning and I think it's kind of stupid. Here is my take on a recipe for piracy.
1. Have a desirable product.
2. Implement measures that force your markets to be separate more than they naturally are (region based DRM for example).
3. Only release the desirable product in specific markets.
4. Don't even hint at the product coming to a significant other market.
To do these for things and expect people not to pirate the game is kind of silly imo. The writer of the article says that people who pirate need to support the game, but ignores that the developer isn't supporting the game the way they need to in the first place.
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Right, but that's for games that aren't available in all regions -- naturally, people who want the product will at that stage acquire it through other means if they cannot legally and easily find a copy to purchase. Quite reasonably this will result in massive amounts of customers "jumping ship" and joining with pirates to get a game they legally would've bought had it been available in their region of choice.
For many games though, this isn't the case. Piracy occurs everywhere, even in regions where the game is legally and easily available -- price and economic factors play a role too.
Players want value. If they feel they're getting left in the cold, or they need to lump over an unreasonable amount of money for the amount of game they're getting, they will turn to alternative methods or pass on the game -- either way, you lose customers. Naturally, we can't abide to the cheapskates that want "games 4 free" but we can certainly find ways to improve perceived value of the product and, more importantly, turn it into an ongoing service that benefits and rewards customer loyalty.
That's really the only way to stop piracy. Anything else is just slowing it down or crippling it somewhat. (Of course, here we're talking about "classic model" of games -- not the whole freemium model that relies on entirely different metrics)
