EA CEO: “I Think Of Pirates As A Marketplace”
Posted by CaK |Dec 10
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Chief-in-Editor. He has been involved in the Online Community since 1996, and established several successful European gaming websites. Among them were projects for Neverwinter Nights, WarCraft, Diablo and Quake--just to name a few. In late September 2009, he started to develop this blog with the support of BioWare/EA.
John Riccitiello, the gaming-savvy head of Electronic Arts, doesn’t want anyone to pirate games. But those who do, he told Kotaku, present a new market that EA needs to make money from.
How? By selling people who grab games digitally — without paying for them — post-release downloadable content.
Some of the people buying this DLC are not people who bought the game in a new shrink-wrapped box. That could be seen as a dark cloud, a mass of gamers who play a game without contributing a penny to EA. But around that cloud Riccitiello identified a silver lining:
There’s a sizable pirate market and a sizable second sale market and we want to try to generate revenue in that marketplace.
Pointing to DLC as a way to do it.
Do you agree with Riccitiello’s statement?
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3 comments
Comment by Mordaedil on December 10, 2009 at 7:15 am
It's naive to think DLC "combats" pirates.
That's like saying saying people who buy games automatically lose on integrity. That they are already somehow "killed", while pirates are the rebels who are still alive fighting for their loot.
This isn't the case. Pirates are fans of the products as well, it's just that for most consumers out there right now, everything digital is free. They only need to be willing to "donate" to the artists for continued support for good content and then maybe they'll convert.
Too bad there are too many crooks in the world who would still just want free content.
Comment by Bio-Boy 3000 on December 10, 2009 at 12:56 pm
I think they should have stuck with there original reason and said the DLC was to combat used game sales. Would have been more believable then mashing in pirates as well within the reasoning.
Besides, who wants to pirate the vast majority of DLC for Dragon Age that is available? Considering that is consist mostly of overpowered stat based items, doesn't seem worth the download to me.
Comment by Jonaleth on December 10, 2009 at 1:24 pm
I don't think DLC does much to combat piracy, since there isn't much to stop the DLC from being pirated along with the game. What DLC does help the publisher with, however, is reaching all the console gamers who bought the game used from a place like gamestop, which has been making money hand over foot by essentially buying games from the community for a pittance, then selling them right back for near full-price.
The Publisher sees no profits from those sales under normal conditions, so from their standpoint, used-game sales are practically identical to piracy, except it is done legally, and the people marketing the pirated goods are making money. But by including a one-time use DLC code with new purchases of the game, it serves to actively differentiate the new and used product, as buying the used game now requires alo purchasing the DLC in order to receive the same gameplay experience.
This way the publisher can see profits from the developers work even when the game has been resold, which thanks to Gamestop and other companies like it has become a fairly major profit leech, as they aggressively undercut their own new-game prices in order to take advantage of the increased profit-margin used-game-sales provide.
The DLC also makes the new-game purchase competitive with the used-game, as the new game purchase comes with something the used does not, adding value to the new purchase to justify its increased cost to the consumer, who rarely cares enough about who profits from their purchase to let it affect what they buy.
In conclusion, does the DLC combat piracy? Probably not so much. Does it combat the second-sales market, which is identical to piracy from a results-based point of view, and probably an equal if not greater threat to their income? I would have to say yes.