BioWare: DLC, Customer Loyalty to Combat Piracy
In a time when most PC developers are jumping ship to consoles due to piracy, BioWare has announced its intentions of supporting the platform, noting that it plans to combat piracy by providing add-on content for its games and promote customer loyalty.
“We’re doing a lot of post-release downloadable content on all of our PC titles going forward,” said studio co-CEO Ray Muzyka. “We think it’s a good thing to encourage players to make them want to buy a PC title.
“That’s ultimately the best, most successful path to prevent piracy—to have players that want your games, want to believe in them and think they’re high-quality and realize they’re going to get a lot of value out of them as platforms for long time afterwards.”
However, all this has been said and done before by Stardock. The studio anticipated piracy and knew that whatever DRM it used for its games would be cracked eventually. So, they went without DRM and offered incentives like additional content and a solid multiplayer component to lure would-be pirates into buying the game. Now, that’s a solid strategy if I see one!
July 10th, 2008 at 7:39 am
This Bioware “customer loyalty” stuff is PR hype BS. Everone remembers that you can install Mass Effect only 3 times, right? Despite the fact that you actually PAID for the blasted thing. I’ve pretty much decided that I’m pirating all of BioWare’s games and DLC from now on. Heck, I’ll HAVE to get a copy of Mass Effect off of TPB despite the fact that I already paid for the #$@% thing! Yeah, hey Bioware? Screw me? Nuh uh. SCREW YOU!