One PC game studio is using its high piracy rate as a reason to improve the industry’s business model to battle illegal downloads.
After realizing that 90 percent of the players of Championship Manager were running illegal copies, Beautiful Game Studios manager Roy Meredith learned to adapt the company without resorting to customer-repulsing digital rights management.
Meredith commented, “That’s not just a number in the air, we can measure it and we know that there are a huge amount of pirated copies.”
“There’s a real issue around DRM,” he continued on games he’s personally played where DRM hindered his fun. “I’d love to defeat pirates, but actually, with all this mess on Spore and Football Manager, which I haven’t been able to play this year… I spent about three hours trying to go through this registration process and I really want to play it but I’ve got other things to do with my life.”
Pirates can be beaten, or at least curbed, by providing better customer service and support as Valve does through Steam or using a subscription service a la World of Warcraft.
“One is to compete price-wise,” suggested Meredith. “We haven’t got to pay royalties to Sony or Microsoft, so we can go into territories and price compete.”
Source: Computer and Videogames
