One way is selling ”unfinished” titles where gamers ”buy elements” of the full title through ”multiple micro-payments”. Experience ”answer” to piracy.
Could selling only some of the game world straight out of the box and the rest offered as optional payments online be the answer to combat piracy for publishers? Cousens seems to think a future could lie in this distribution model.
Here’s what he had to say on the DRM issue, reports CVG:
I’m not necessarily a fan of DRM measures. I think sometimes they’re almost counter-productive. I can still be persuaded on them, and I completely understand why they exist.
But my initial thought is that DRM is not the answer to the piracy issue.
The video games industry has to learn to operate in a different way. My answer is for us as publishers is 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. But I may be a lone voice in that.
It’s one of the things that troubled me greatly with the Digital Economy Bill last year.
Piracy has been there forever. Whether we care to admit it or not and whether we say it’s right or wrong, it’s a factor. It’s never going to go to zero.
Lyndon B Johnson once said ‘you want to be on the inside pissing out rather than the outside pissing in’ - and I wholeheartedly agree. Look at the partial demise of the record industry - they never embraced technology, they fought technology and I think that created a huge downturn vacuum for them.
Actually, if they persevere now with the technology they’ve got, in a few years it will probably take the record industry to a level that exceeds the past. But you’ve got that hiatus going on - that was inevitable and self-fulfilled, and if we’re not careful the games industry will make the same error.
So I believe we as an industry have to be far more creative in addressing the issue, and think much more about the experience the consumer gets in the end. As publishers, we can use that to our advantage as well as theirs.
