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Easy to say that now that your game has sold three million copies. | |
A surprisingly good response from Riccitiello, and why not seeing how much The Sims 3 sold. | |
Now that's pretty damn clever. Though, it could be a fake just to fool the piraters into buying the game, who knows? | |
That is great spin. Pirated copies are always at a disadvantage to legitimate ones, multiplayer capability is guaranteed not to work, there is no warranty and patches are a pain. So in many ways it truly is a demo. | |
Poland and China? Why those 2 countries? He's clearly making that up. | |
Ha! oh my god that's hilarious it almost makes up for the years of evil, almost but not really. | |
Or they'll just find a way around your new content denying system. Pirates are clever little folk. | |
He was being facetious. They didn't actually release it as a demo, but Poland and China probably pirated it the most. So, he was referring to that in a tongue-in-cheek manner. | |
A little late to this aren't we? Didn't this game get on the pirate bay like two weeks before the Sims 3 was even released? | |
Who needs warranty when you download it? Plus the guy is talking out of his ass, since there are already files on the net containing the next town and the beginning crap. | |
Unless someone buys the game, gets all of those extra goodies, and figures a way to pirate it out to the masses
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Ohh. I had to look up facetious, y'know. | |
Pirates usually justify their downloads as wanting to try a game out before buying it because the market doesn't handle dissatisfaction with a product very well; you never get a full refund. Holding back some of the content was just a great idea, and the pirates have no excuses. Kudos to you, EA. | |
Ah a demo, is that what that there calling it now. | |
It's about time that the big guys recognized one of the big factors why people pirate. There will always be those who never buy the game, even if they liked the "demo", but the majority of people I've talked to bought it after they tried it. There were those who didn't like it and didn't buy it, but they most certainly didn't keep it on their systems. | |
Hmm de ja frickin vu. EA actually called pirated Sims 3 a demo last month, right before it got leaked which made some people think the leak was intentional. Just saying, if this is spin then its.. preemptive spin? | |
That's some slick wordin' there, I wonder how he'll avoid the next situation. | |
This is interesting strategy, but I can't register the game, cause it's actually my brohers, he just let's me play it. Thanks for calling me- the non-pirate- a pirate then saying we are all jackasses. Makes me feel warm inside, and whats with this guy being 3 weeks behind the release of his game? | |
It's a demo he says, right, I'll go download this "demo" then without getting arrested. | |
I wonder if he would say that if the Sims 3 didn't sell as well | |
Why Poland? No idea, probably because Sims 3 is damn popular here. China? No idea. | |
Good lord, did JR actually say a few things that made some kind of sense? My world has just taken a turn for the surreal. That's exactly what a lot of pirates, especially ones in the "first world" countries, consider their downloads to be... demos. And it's pretty obvious that sales weren't hurt despite the piracy, so why not treat it as a demo? Of course, this isn't really JR's opinion, we'll never see what his real opinion is. It's pretty clear, contrasting this statement with previous statements, that he'll go wherever the wind blows. | |
What about people who pirate it after its come out so its the full version? Is there any multiplayer aspect? Like on Spore where you share your creations? | |
Well I have mixed opinions. For starters I prefer the disk in hand basis for games. I do not like the idea of a good portion of the game being stored online (like Dawn Of War 2, and I guess The Sims) because then I need to use these DL clients like Steam, and 10 years later if I want to reinstall the game there is always a chance that the game will no longer be supported, or the company might even be out of business. Until companies can guarantee they will be able to support the game until civilization collapses, or the sun goes nova, the game should be playable on the applicable hardware once you buy it. You know, just in case I feel a hankering to play a 50,000 year old game on an antique computer to remind me of my youth. :P Okay that's extreme, but the basic arguement applies, and it seems to be the current technique advocated here. It also seems to be banking heavily on overpriced DLC packs and microupgrades which are already an issue as far as I'm concerned, especially when they are effectively charging extra for content that already should have been in the game. Besides which, I am uncertain as to how exactly the philsophy stops piracy because all it means is that someone will DL the game entirely, crack the security, and then circulate the full version. Ditto for expansions. Unless of course this is a diplomatic way of saying "we surrender" to pirates and kind of an offer to accept a symbiotic existance due to the fact that Sims 3 shows that a game can enjoy massive commercial success, and be heavily pirated at the same time. Basically I have mixed opinions about the whole thing, just like my mixed feelings about the Industry Vs. Pirates to begin with. >>>----Therumancer---> | |
This is smart. Finaly companies get it that the only way to combat piracy (you cant eliminate it, only cobat it) is to reward the honest consumers- not punush everyone. And it's not just something that someone can download and crack: user generated content is comming out all the time- so if you wanted to get it all, you'd have to download a new set of cracks every day. I'll confess: Once uppon a time I had a pirated copy of a game, but I ended up going out and buying the retail version, because my pirated copy would run user generated mods. | |
The fact that he's taking this with a sense of humor bodes well for once... If 200 million copies are pirated, but 3 million copies are sold, you STILL SOLD 3 MILLION COPIES. Piracy be damned, that would still be a success. $3M x 59.99 = $179,970,000 And we all know that this time next year, their sales will have tripled because of re-ignited popularity from expansions. Sims is a long-term profit base, and they'll be crankin out cash for five or six years for this version. | |
I'm suspicious of the legitimacy of his claims... | |
Well, I suppose this is better than sticking SecuROM on everything... ...The Sims 3 doesn't have SecuROM, right? | |
Me too. Someone must be threatening to shoot the bunny. | |
Well that’s a big pile of steaming horse shit, having played both the pirate and legitimate versions they are identical apart from the extra neighbourhood with the retail version. Although the pirates already have all the "additional content" including all the items from the store and the exchange. I have my retail copy and I’m happy with it however I bought it on the strength of his promise that there was "significant" extra content in the retail version. I also said that if that wasn't the case then they would not see another penny of my money for content and expansion packs. I guess I'll be a little better off over the life of the game then. | |
This response seems almost rational. We can only hop the attitude catches and the industry chooses substance over DRM as a method to reduce piracy. | |
he knows that you can pirate the second town and all the download able things right? | |
CEOs usually aren't idiots. Making games more irritating to pirate is the whole idea behind DRM, and the same idea behind this. They shouldn't expect much that they can do to not alienate more legitimate consumers than pirates. But I don't expect that this will prevent piracy, particularly of such a popular franchise. And as a previous poster said, the DLC has already been leaked. This might lead to more draconian account management, which might lead them to favor a subscription-based model. Despite alienating a large number of fans, the gamble on revenue and the commensurate required improvement on security might tempt them into doing it. And if they're playing with DLC, that justifies a subscription model even more. | |
Looks like Shamus is becoming more influential than we thought. | |
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EA Chief Calls Pirated Sims 3 a "Demo"
In a bit of an unusual twist, Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello said that he looks at the widespread piracy of The Sims 3 as "not that different than a demo."
The Sims 3 was downloaded nearly 200,000 times over a three-day span in May, a rate that outpaced even that of Spore, which became the most pirated game of 2008. Yet instead of freaking out and vowing to inflict much punishment (and DRM), Riccitiello surprisingly chose to look at the bright side of things. "You identified our secret marketing campaign!" he said. "That was a very large scale - concentrated on Poland and China - demo program."
He clarified, for the benefit of people who take such comments too seriously, that EA didn't actually leak the game, although he did point out that the pirated version was incomplete and, in many ways, very much like a demo release. "Sims 3 has a massive amount of content, and a lot of it is downloaded once you register with EA... and join the online community," Riccitiello said. "A huge amount of the gameplay is an overlay for the community, where you are sampling assets created by other people. So for the pirate consumer, they don't get the second town, they don't get all the extra content, and they don't get the community. It was only concentrated on Poland and China, but I think of it as not being that different than a demo."
He also appears to have shifted his views on how to combat piracy, saying the best way to beat it is to "out-service" it. "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," he explained. "I think that's the answer [to piracy]. And here's the trick: it's not the answer because this foils a pirate, but it's the answer because it makes the service so valuable that in comparison the packaged good is not."
Source: IndustryGamers
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