CEO John Riccitiello has joked that the early leaks of The Sims 3 was nothing but a dastardly ”secret marketing campaign”, a glorified demo if you will.
Putting aside humour, EA’s new approach means that only legal registered owners can have access to all the bells and whistles for the game. Community and content sharing is key.
”You identified our secret marketing campaign!” joked the CEO with IndustryGamers. ”That was a very large scale - concentrated on Poland and China - demo program.”
”Sims 3 has a massive amount of content, and a lot of it is downloaded once you register with EA,” he continued on a serious note. Once gamers registered their copy they get access to a whole second town for The Sims 3.
”For the pirate consumer, they don’t get the second town, they don’t get all the extra content, and they don’t get the community.” The rampant piracy of the pre-release ”was only concentrated on Poland and China, but I think of it as not being that different than a demo,” stated Riccitiello.
It’s becoming increasingly common for publishers and developer studios to offer more content once an owner of the game registers their copy. It’s seen as a much cleaner tactic to fight pirated copies than adopting highly intrusive and aggravating systems.
He pointed to BioWare’s Dragon Age: Origins, where it’s likely ”a 100-hour game by itself, but what comes post-release” will expand it much beyond and keep the community alive. He argues this effectually outshines the pirate through service, that while they can offer games illegally for free you won’t be getting the full package.
”It’s not the answer because this foils a pirate, but it’s the answer because it makes the service so valuable that in comparison the packaged good is not. So you can only deliver these added services to a consumer you recognize and know…I think the truth is we’ve out-serviced the pirate.” It’s all about ”disc-enabled” services, going beyond packaged goods.
EA CEO John Riccitiello even has a friendly request for the swashbucklers on the Internet.
”By the way, …please encourage them to pirate FIFA Online, NBA Street Online, Battleforge, Battlefield Heroes… if they would just pirate lots of it I’d love them.”
”Because what’s in the middle of the game is an opportunity to buy stuff. I increasingly believe that’s the way the market’s going because that’s how the consumer wants to consume,” he noted.
”…do you think Blizzard gets upset when someone pirates a disc of one of their online games? While we don’t want to see people pirate Warhammer Online, if they’re going to give us a year’s subscription it’s not exactly a total loss.”
Did EA really pre-release their own creation as a ”demo program,” to whip up a frenzy for it?
