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Dave Perry: New Business Models Needed to Fight Piracy
Shiny Entertainment founder and Acclaim executive Dave Perry says that the industry must adopt new business models if it wants to overcome pirates.
“I'm one of those people that is all about the industry moving forward, as technology and pirates always will,” he wrote on his blog, following the conviction of the founders of The Pirate Bay, one of the world's largest file-sharing websites.
“This decision will slow down the "overt" sharing but it's an impossible battle to win. It's like Sony when they release new firmware updates for the PSP handheld because hackers keep breaking the previous one. After countless firmware updates, at some point you accept that this battle is going to go on forever. Jail-broken iPhones being another example. It's actually impressive to last a full 24 hours before the next crack happens."
Perry believes that a switch to server based games and free-to-play models can help combat piracy.
“So what can you do to change the video game piracy paradigm? People are trying... For example, China, where Piracy was a massive problem until they switched to server based games. That stops it stone cold.
“I personally am investing my money into game streaming, hoping that it will give people a dramatically cheaper choice, and (for pirates) be way more convenient than having to download, burn, install, fix drivers and patch (then worry about malware.)
“At Acclaim.com, all our games are free to play, you only pay if you fall in love with the game. For me, there is no better business proposal for the gamer.
“Our industry has very smart people too, and so if anyone can get this right, our industry can. But the solution isn't to fight in courts, or to play "revision ping pong" with hackers, it's to move forward and design convenience, quality and access at a mass market price. That's what will get people to pay, even if there's an inferior pirate version available on some dodgy website.”
I don't have anything against Dave Perry, but I'd put more stock in his statements if they didn't always sound like a sales pitch for his own company.
"New" business models? The last two years have already seen an experiment in requiring server authentication for single-player games - an experiment that failed because it inconvenienced or locked-out legitimate consumers, without in any way preventing piracy. With publishers like EA abandoning this model, it is hardly the wave of the future.
Congrats on criticising an article that you completely misinterpreted.
Hello my name is Dave Perry. I had one good game about an earthworm and I took my shirt off and posed by a leaf in Next Gen magazine because I think I'm a sex symbol.
The rest of my career was shit so please take pity on me.
I liked the Genesis Aladdin title they did as well as MDK.
Brian
www.brianwoods.com
An offensive comment. But everything is true.
Maybe someday I will understand why people pay attention to Dave Perry, BUT NOT TODAY. What is this tripe? He actually said "paradigm!"
Why are edge running this advert? Dave Perry is a compelte tit.
It's not about price, because free is always cheaper. Even if console games dropped to $20 - that's still a significant increase from $0. At the same time, it's so difficult to figure out what the true loss in revenue is because a kid who pirates $20K in software would never have the money to buy that software in the first place, so it's not "lost" to the industry, per se.
I don't think server side works, because we don't have near the bandwidth in the US to deliver content that fast, nor will we any time soon. It's probably going to have to be done with some sort of server side authentication, but then again look at the PS3- from what I know, it has ZERO piracy, so maybe the solution is already out there.
I think a novel idea is to give gamers a couple options - purchase games on disc like we do now, buy them via download, or offer some sort of reasonable monthlyyearly subscription for carte blanche access to all games (though I'm sure figuring out royalties would be tricky in that model).
Drop your prices, piracy and the second hand market will be dwarfed by the increase in revenue.