Gorath, not wanting to be unnecessarily argumentative, but I don't think you addressed why you think my points are wrong?
Maybe I was a bit too crytic because I didn´t want to write a novel.
I presume if you think point 1 is wrong than you think piracy IS killing the game industry. You have to admit, it's a very long, drawn-out death that started the moment it was conceived, and at the present it's looking very healthy.
This quote illustrates the main problem I have with your arguments. You are arguing in black & white while our world is gray.
Of course piracy is a problem. Make it however small you want, but it has a negative impact on sales. If a problem has been identified one has every right to tackle it. Whether or nor the means are adequate is a different question.
Piracy is for sure one of the reasons why the conventional retail PC business is losing ground quickly. There are certainly many others, but it´s still one of them.
When exactly is going to die, because all I see is an industry getting stronger and stronger, more and more profitable?
Really? I only see small PC-centric publishers go out of business or only survive by a hairbreadth. Examples? CDV, JoWooD (twice), DreamCatcher, Frogster, Ascaron, Atari, EIDOS, Midway, Interplay ... the list is endless.
AFAIR the numbers for full price PC games are shrinking while the whole market is growing 20+%. Where are all the coregamers going? Here are a few ideas or observations:
- WoW binds millions of people. Many of them have stopped buying anything else.
- The business is increasingly hit driven. The medium products no longer sell. You either have a huge hit or hopefully calculated carefully that low numbers are enough.
- Or combined with WoW: They buy only a few premium titles in addition to WoW. No experiments. Oblivion, Need for Speed, CoD.
- Consoles have gotten better.
- Plus many attractive games come for them first.
- Online sales are not counted, so maybe the numbers are slightly incorrect.
- The new generations of gamers are no longer hardcore. For them gaming is normal. They play games like they watch movies: instant action. Consume, have fun, forget, move on.
- Coregamers are getting older, move on to other hobbies, have less time or simply an outdated PC. They leave.
As for point 2, if we're completely ignoring the main pirates and looking at only school-yard swapping, then yes, copy protection might do something. I don't have any numbers to hand, but I suspect losses such effects are VERY small. And people have always swapped games, PC or console.
Yes, very small. But Very small times how many?
Game swapping is not much of a problem. Let 10 people buy one game each and then swap. That´s okay.
There are many ways to sell a unit if the CP works:
- Early adopters MUST have it NOW.
- Late adopters can buy it for 10 bucks. That´s still better than no sale.
- Peer pressure. Everybody is playing it.
- Longer exposure to marketing.
- Another chance with the demo.
- Some people have the budget, are generally willing to buy but try to copy first because it´s cost effective.
- The charts. It´s in the top 10, I need it.
- Impulse buys.
- many more
I would say each of these filters will deliver a small, positive number of results if applied to a large number of casual pirates. That´s worth going for. Especially because CP is cheap.
Here is a small calculation:
Game A sells 100k. It´s copied 1M times. If the publisher can convince only 1% of the pirates to buy the game it means 10k sales. The result is a whopping 10% (!) increase in units sold. Plus additional positive effect on the retail presence.
The copy protection we're talking about here, as adopted by Mass Effect, is an attempt to produce consumers who buy something but don't have the right to sell it on. Thus you don't purchase Mass Effect, you rent it (because if I buy a film on DVD, I have the right to sell it on, whereas if I rent it, I don't). And if that's really the stance EA wants to take, then they'd better price their product accordingly!
Oh, I sort of agree with this. EA certainly has more than one reason to use such a CP. Their system changes the equation. It makes Mass Effect less attractive for me. Maybe the masses don´t care. That´s my expectation.
MMO players also don´t have a reason to get angry. Their MMO authentificates itself every single time they log in.
