| famousringo said: I've always wondered how well Obivion sold on the PC, since it won all kinds of awards and compelled a lot of people to buy new video cards, yet the disc had absolutely no DRM or copy protection whatsoever. Is DRM really protecting profits, or is it just causing headaches? |
In my opinion it just causes headaches. For example Sins of the Solar Empire didnt have any copy protection besides the serial and the developer was happy to announce that the game far exceeded their expectations in terms of profit
The biggest misconception that developers have is that people who pirate their game are the people who would have bought it otherwise as if those are the only two options. There are a lot of games out there that i would have never bought but played just because I could do it for free. Just like Crysis developers claiming that they lost millions due to piracy just because if they would take every pirated copy and get profit from it but considering that most people who played the game, found it boring and generic and used it mainly for benchmarking their systems.
Crappy games will sell like crap, big games will sell well and smaller games can actually benefit from piracy. A small game that you would have not bought otherwise gets downloaded and people realize that it is a great game and they will go out and purchase the copy. Not everyone will do it of course but piracy will provide that small boost in publicity. If it wasnt for piracy PSP would never sell as well as it did. In anime business American licensing companies rarely touch fansubbers who translate and distribute the series for free because it gives them so much free publicity. I think of piracy as a means for gamers to get demoes when they are not available, at least that's what I use piracy for.
Proud owner of the following gaming devices:
PC, XBox 360, Wii, PS2, DS, PS3
