I wrote yesterday about the difficulties of selling media content when people can get something more-or-less identical without paying. It looked a bit bleak. In this – more positive – post, I’m going to look at some of the ways media owners might persuade people to pay for their content, focusing on the good, bad and ugly methods built around the recent Electronic Arts games release Dragon Age. A hotly-anticipated title, developed by role-playing game specialists Bioware, the production cost millions of dollars and took nearly six years. I think it would be fair to say that it had to be successful.
Like other media owners, computer games publishers have a hard time with piracy and other unauthorised distribution. You know this is true because you were a teenager once yourself and you copied disks and downloaded cracks. In my case, it was copying cassette tapes of Spectrum games. It’s really quite a big problem: 2DBoy, the publishers of indie puzzle game World of Goo, had a built-in mechanism for tracking every copy of the game in circulation. They discovered that 90% of those copies were unauthorised, and that’s discounting any versions whose distributors had found a way to circumvent the tracking. While that doesn’t mean that game publishers only get 10% of the revenue they would in a world without piracy, I think we’re likely to agree that it’s probably a fair chunk.
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