Recently Brad Wardell unveiled the Gamers’ Bill of Rights which he believes would strengthen the PC games market, and he wants publishers to sign up to it.
He’d like to banish the ‘it’s just gonna work’ attitude that regular gamers have toward consoles, as PC titles come bloated with DRM and other haphazards.
Wardell explains how the Bill came about in an interview with Shacknews, saying ”a friend of mine, who’s been a hardcore PC gamer, bought Oblivion for the Xbox 360.”
”And I asked him, “Why did you do that? You’re a PC guy. Why would you want a..” I’m not anti-console, but I wouldn’t want, I couldn’t imagine–I was really surprised.”
”And he says, “I’ll tell you why. I buy it for my Xbox, it’s gonna work. Period. It’s just gonna work. I know it’s going to be finished, and I know it’s going to work.””
This problem is endemic to the PC games market was new or ‘regular’ gamers just don’t want to deal with the hassle of fighting DRM and the hardware issues or obstacles they pose.
”One guy had gotten a game with Starforce on it, and it had actually messed up his ability to burn DVDs. I’m not a Starforce expert, but–”, continued Wardell.
”Basically his solution was to reinstall Windows. And he says, “I’m done.” He’s not buying games from anybody, because he doesn’t know what uses it and what doesn’t.”
Starforce has been one of the most controversial forms of DRM protection that has since been dropped by many publishers and studios from the wave of back-lashes from gamer communities.
”So we collected all these things, and over the last couple years we started changing our own policies to fit this,” said Wardell. Stardock doesn’t employ copy protection on its games and has found it to significantly increased sales online and at retail.
He admits Stardock isn’t ”doing this because we’re nice guys per se, we’re doing this because we think it’ll make our business stronger, and the industry stronger business-wise.”
”One of the first things was our copy-protection, not putting CD copy protection on there,” he explained.
”And sure enough, that increased our sales, because you’d have a lot of people who’d buy the games, who knew about this because they knew it’d just work–knew that we’re not installing anything.”
Click here to read the full interview between Brad Wardell and Shacknews.
