Quote Originally Posted by drone
I'm in the software business. I pay for my games, I hate software pirates, and I understand the corporate thinking behind decisions like this. But there is a point of diminishing returns. How much does 2K have to pay to maintain the activation servers? How much do they have to pay SecuRom to use their software? How much money do they have to pay their tech support to handle the deluge of calls from a launch fiasco? Does that make up for the potential losses to pirates (remembering that each pirated copy != a lost sale), bad press, and outraged geeks? I'd love to see the actuarial analysis on that.
We'd better hope they don't get too far into that type of analysis, because they'd eventually arrive at the conclusion that the only really good model is what Blizzard is doing with WoW -- a continuing income stream from monthly fees in addition to the box purchase, and half the game running on their servers that require authorized client accounts, so there are no piracy issues. It's really the perfect economic model for a game company, with the caveat that it has to be awfully compelling to get enough people to sign up for the monthly fees. Companies like 2K, CA, etc. must be looking at Blizzard with envy.

It would be the death of single-player games if they all worked like that. Few of the specialized, narrow-interest genres like strategy games or simulations would be popular enough (or good enough) for people to fork out a monthly fee on top of the box price.

OTOH.... what might work is if PC game companies just get rid of the $50 box, make the game downloadable, and charge by the month as a rental. Use a server/client setup like WoW so there are no piracy issues. Make the initial rental price steep... maybe $10 USD/month for the first 3 months, then it slides to $5/month for the next 4 months, and then it's free after that (but still requires some degree of server/client interaction for the authorization). Allow the player to quit at any time, and jump back in at whatever price tier they were at. It wouldn't work for all genres... obviously it's better for a game with sustained re-playability like strategy games and simulations, not so great for shooters where some people blast through them in a few days. But with some rate-juggling... maybe a very high rental for the first month of a shooter... it might work.

The game companies would save the cost of physical product distribution too, and we'd be contributing less crap to the landfills. You wouldn't have to jump through any hoops where you have to de-authorize a computer when doing a system upgrade. Just plug your account name and password into a screen on the new computer, and you're in. That's all I had to do with my WoW account after re-installing Windows recently. The back-end server (and needing it to run the game) is all the security Blizzard needs.

Well, it's just a thought. I'd prefer running the risk of not being able to play a classic game years from now, to the current nonsense where we have to keep track of authorizations and de-authorizations. It's bad enough I have to do that with Windows, iTunes, and Photoshop. I'm not going to do it on a regular basis for a game.