The CEO of Saints Row publisher Deep Silver says the only effective way to fight piracy is to ignore piracy.
Ask around and most people will tell you that the biggest problem with the PC as a gaming platform, at least in the eyes of major publishers, is piracy. It’s absolutely rampant, orders of magnitude worse than consoles, and costs publishers bazillions of dollars in lost revenue every year. But Dr. Klemens Kundratitz, CEO of Saints Row IV and Metro: Last Light publisher Deep Silver, sees the matter a little differently.
Kundratitz told Penny Arcade that the PC remains a priority for the publisher, citing the Metro franchise as “first and foremost a PC brand. In the first iteration, it was launched on Xbox 360 and PC, but it is at its heart a PC product.” And while console sales for Metro: Last Light were greater, he said the PC “has a very decent share” of the total and also enjoys a “very active and committed community.”
Yet while piracy is a problem, Deep Silver isn’t looking to tie its games down to a proprietary DRM system like Origin or Uplay. “Uplay is not the way we want to approach things, definitely. I think we just need to make sure that the games we publish are worth the money, and certainly there is always this piracy situation that any publisher has. No publisher can tackle [piracy], really,” he said. “In a business plan, we typically ignore it. It’s not something that is new, it’s something that has been part of our business for decades. As a publisher you just live with it, yes?”
Source: Penny Arcade
Published: Oct 25, 2013 05:22 pm