Gaming & Culture —
EA's new motto: please pirate our games… er, storefronts
EA doesn't mind piracy of Sims 3, as retail customers get the whole experience …
Ben Kuchera - Jun 24, 2009 3:07 am UTC
EA CEO John Riccitiello has a new message for people who want to pirate EA games: go ahead and do it. "By the way, if there are any pirates you're writing for, please encourage them to pirate FIFA Online, NBA Street Online, Battleforge, Battlefield Heroes..." he told IndustryGamers. "If they would just pirate lots of it I'd love them. [laughs] Because what's in the middle of the game is an opportunity to buy stuff." Welcome to the new EA, where you're not being sold a game, you're being sold a store.
Sims 3 was leaked weeks before the game was supposed to be released, along with a warning not to allow the game to connect online. The torrent file also urged people to buy the game if they liked it; a cynical person might say that it sounds like more of a marketing plan than a leak. Riccitiello even jokes that this was a "secret" marketing program for a large-scale demo, focused on Poland and China. He denies that the leak came from EA, though.
EA has some built-in protection against pirates when it comes to Sims 3. A large percentage of the content isn't even saved on the disc: you have to go online and activate the title to get the rest of the game. "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," Riccitiello explained. EA had sent me a copy of the game to check out, and while installing I noticed there was a 3GB update that needed to be installed to play.
EA thinks this is the secret to stopping—or at least curbing—piracy: games should be services, not products. Or at least products that should be selling other products. We already knew that EA would like to turn Tiger Woods into a subscription-based product, and Sims 3 is a game that wants you to constantly be creating, downloading, and buying new virtual items. The old business model was selling expansion packs, but that was too complicated: why not cut out the retailers and turn the game into its own store to sell the products?
"I'm a longtime believer that we're moving to selling services that are disc-enabled as opposed to packages that have bolt-ons.... So the point I'm making is, yes I think that's the answer [to piracy]." Riccitiello told IndustryGamers. "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. So you can only deliver these added services to a consumer you recognize and know... So I think the truth is we've out-serviced the pirate."
The Sims is a great testbed for this approach: the audience trends more towards the casual, and the frequest expansion packs have historically sold very well at retail. This is an audience that's ready for microtransactions, and may actually welcome buying content at a trickle instead of spending $30 a throw for a new disc every few months. Battlefield Heroes is likewise going to be a free product with for-pay aesthetic updates, and EA recently turned its card-game-slash-strategy-title Battleforge into a free-to-play product where you can buy extra cards if you tire of the hand you're dealt in the initial download.
Some of these moves may be experiments, and Battleforge may have simply failed to sell, but EA is certainly interested in expanding the idea of how games are sold and consumed.