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DRM vs. Unfinished Games
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."
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.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
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.
On top of that, it was $1 million in ADDITION to their previous sales. Not the only money they made. I don't know where all those games were financially beforehand, but if they were already making a profit, that's quite a lot on top. If they were in the red, it most likely put them in the black.
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.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Sell us an ENGINE with one storyline/episode, in FULL.
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.
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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.