Digital Rights Management is a minefield for game publishers. It seems to be a situation where they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t as they balance negative consumer reaction to anti-piracy measures with the risk of having all their products freely distributed.
Codemasters’ CEO Rod Cousens believes there’s a different way. It’s not an unpopular idea to leverage microtransactional content downloads as a revenue stream and to ensure that players are using legitimate copies of the software. But I have to give credit to Cousens for being straight and calling this practice what it is:
The video games industry has to learn to operate in a different way. My answer is for us as publishers is to actually sell unfinished games – and to offer the consumer multiple micro-payments to buy elements of the full experience.
And why not? It worked for Shareware back in the day, except you generally didn’t have to buy boxed product. I honestly don’t know what idea I like worse, having my full games be hurt by intrusive and sometimes crippling DRM systems or paying money for what could be considered a very extensive demo. As long as they’re willing to drop the retail prices to correspond with the reduced quantity of content, I’m on board.
