EA CEO: Piracy Can Help Us Sell More Games
What's that? Piracy could actually help EA's bottom line? It must be magic!
Piracy is often cited as the largest problem for any video game developer and publisher, particularly if it’s a PC game. EA’s recent release of the Sims 3 actually surpassed last year’s Spore for being the most-pirated game.
According to IndustryGamers, the Sims 3 was illegally downloaded around 200,000 times prior to the game’s release – but surprisingly, EA CEO John Riccitiello doesn’t mind one bit.
In fact, when reading in between the lines, it seems like piracy could help boost EA’s business in the long term. Those who downloaded the Sims 3 only have access to one city out of the two. The second city is only delivered via the Internet after product registration, along with other content and access to the community. Essentially, those who pirate Sims 3 only get a portion of the full game – which sounds a bit like the shareware days gone by.
“You identified our secret marketing campaign!” Riccitiello said facetiously to IndustryGamers. “It was only concentrated on Poland and China, but I think of it as not being that different than a demo.”
Rather than selling a simple product-on-a-disc, EA believes that the real money (and protection from piracy) is in selling the services that come after the gamer pops the disc into the tray.
Riccitiello continued, “I'm a longtime believer that we're moving to selling services that are disc-enabled as opposed to packages that have bolt-ons. ... If you see what we're doing with Madden Online, FIFA Ultimate Team or Sims 3, and Dragon Age is probably a 100-hour game by itself, but what comes post-release [for these games] is bigger still. So the point I'm making is, yes I think that's the answer [to piracy].”
Amusingly, Riccitiello made a comment in support of piracy of EA’s games. “By the way, if there are any pirates you're writing for, 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. [laughs] Because what's in the middle of the game is an opportunity to buy stuff.”
The EA CEO does back off a bit, but reiterates once more than it’s not about selling the disc, but rather selling a service.
“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,” Riccitiello added.

So here's a thought... release the game, a fully functional, playable and enjoyable piece of software in its own right. You know, something that leaves the end user actually WANTING MORE, without penalizing said user for not having actually bought a stupid box and disc to clutter up the desk. That way, if they made a good product, people will want to fork over the cash for the game in it's entirety... and if they made a crap game, well, they'll know it was their own fault.
Your lack of surprise shocks and amazes me.
So here's a thought... release the game, a fully functional, playable and enjoyable piece of software in its own right. You know, something that leaves the end user actually WANTING MORE, without penalizing said user for not having actually bought a stupid box and disc to clutter up the desk. That way, if they made a good product, people will want to fork over the cash for the game in it's entirety... and if they made a crap game, well, they'll know it was their own fault.
I made the mistake of buying Crysis, man that game sucks. Yeah it has nice graphics but game play just sucks.
But, yeah, it's a smart move, imo. I usually download games before purchasing them. That way I don't spend a single cent of my very limited income on crappy games.
Last week I lost my disc for Battlefield 2142. "No problem" I thought. I saw an advertisement from EA stating that their Download Manager can now be used to register the games you bought into a library for downloading and no-cd play. Out of ALL the games they have, the games SUPPORTED in that library are about nine. NINE games and Battlefield 2142 is not one of them!!! D:
If they really cared about providing paying customers with service they should address the problem of lost media and cracked/scratched discs or just patch the game so that discs are not required. A replacement disc will cost you $13 plus shipping. A new game will cost you $20...
On the other hand, I still don't like the idea of stripping the game features on disc and replacing them with online features. Imagine playing the game once the servers providing the service are taken down. In every EULA for online games that have come out recently they state something to the effect of: "In no way does (X company) have an obligation to provide online features and at any time they may be removed with or without notice."
oh right, and +1 for dreamphantom_1977
so EA, either do that, or don't use any DRM, cause i will not buy any more games where i have to put the disc in to play, or can only activate it a certain number of times! or have to go through some lengthy download process every time i install to get the rest of the game that you decided not to put on the f*@$ing disk!!, in fact, after using steam, i'm sick of games that you need to re-install after reinstalling your OS, i went from XP to win7 64bit with steam on the other drive, i just fired up steam and within a minute i was playing all my games!
I just enter my serial on battle.net, and download the game. All is done. Blizzard is slowly learning how to do it. Maybe EA should follow suit.
=)
Maybe EA should have given me a better deal on replacing my BF2 disc...
This does appear to be a smart business move though. Kick all the luddites out of office there. Piracy is not going away anytime soon, so learn to profit from it.