According to Brad Wardell, the CEO of Stardock Entertainment and publisher of the critically acclaimed PC strategy title Sins of a Solar Empire, the way to make sure your game pulls in the benjamins isn't to load it up with DRM; instead, he believes it's best to ignore piracy altogether.
Ars Technica reports:
The way to make money in the world of PC gaming, according to Wardell, is to make sure many systems can play your games, while continuing to make them attractive. Find a market where people want to buy and support the games, and don't go by what the magazines and the blogs seem to think are the big name titles. Don't let people who aren't your audience control the titles you make, and ignore piracy. This is much like Trent Reznor's strategy, although the execution is different. Instead of worrying about pirates, just leave the content out in the open. The market Reznor plays to will still buy the music; he's simply stopped worrying about the pirates. He came to the same conclusion: they weren't customers, they might never be customers, so spending money to try to stop them serves no purpose.
"The reason why we don't put copy protection on our games isn't because we're nice guys. We do it because the people who actually buy games don't like to mess with it. Our customers make the rules, not the pirates. Pirates don't count," Wardell argues. "When Sins popped up as the #1 best selling game at retail a couple weeks ago, a game that has no copy protect whatsoever, that should tell you that piracy is not the primary issue."
We can't wait to see DRM take a hike, permanently -- even when it's not doing nasty or illegal things to our machines, it's damned annoying. Why in this day and age of tremendous hard drives must I reinsert a physical disc every time I want to load a game I went out and spent $50 for?
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August 7th, 2008 at 6:14 pm
[...] may have only sold 40,000 units on PC through June, but when the DRM-free Sins of a Solar Empire begs to be pirated yet somehow manages 300,000 copies in the same timeframe, you have to wonder if piracy is really to [...]
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