Wasabisoft

I saw this article on cnn.com today by accident… I WAS looking for information on this thing, and my eye was caught by a brief Internet piracy blurb.  What follows is what I tried to post in the discussion, in its entirety.  It was moderated out for some reason, probably ’cause I cited Wasabisoft at the bottom… but you tell me.  I’ll try a re-post on cnn.com later, sans the shameless self-promotion.  Enjoy an entire page of me not cursing.  For once.

I download personal computer (PC) games on a regular basis.  I do so not because I feel like stealing from a software company; I do so because consumers like myself NEED to be able to “test-drive” this sort of media prior to purchase.  Especially as PC game complexity and system resource demand increase, it has become more and more common that a given PC game will simply not run (or will run exceedingly poorly) on a given consumer’s computer.  The lack of full demos for the vast, vast majority of PC games only serves to exacerbate this problem; never mind that game demos generally do not provide the consumer with a true idea of how the full, retail version of the game will perform on their home system.

Speaking for myself again, there have been many occasions where I have purchased a PC game at a retail outlet (for $50-60 for most new games) and taken it home only to discover that the game cannot be used in a playable manner on my system.  Upon attempting to return the game, I am inevitably informed that I cannot receive a refund for the game because it has been opened (and is now considered “used”, just as in the auto industry)… but they ARE nice enough to give me the option to “trade-in” this brand new game for $10-15 (which they can then re-shrink wrap and sell as new, to quote the practice of one game retailer) and this $35-minimum loss over the course of an afternoon is just not a good return on my investment.

Therefore, it has become my general practice to download ANY game I am considering buying before I even consider a purchase.  In this way – by testing the full, retail version of the game prior to purchase – I can ensure my money is being invested wisely.  I will gladly attest to the success of this method; in approximation, I end up purchasing one out of every ten games I download and the remainder of nine is deleted from my system within days (usually hours) of initial download.  While I understand that many, many, MANY people are NOT this honest (I have met quite a few myself) I would still endorse this kind of “pirate” activity as a means of responsible product evaluation.

Actually ENFORCING honest behavior of this sort would be much more difficult; the release of full demos via the company’s website could help, but ultimately the best solution to ensuring that the final purchase is made could be to distribute additional content only to consumers with some means of proof of purchase.  Internet-based digital distribution (which would require creating a user account to purchase games directly from the company) would be the easiest means of checking this variable.  In fact, the solution to the pirate problem (for any media) could very well be the following:  switch over EXCLUSIVELY to digital distribution as the primary means of media income, particularly for the film and music industries.

Our Internet infrastructure is developing to the point that providing your media FREE of charge in conjunction with brief advertisements (at the beginning of the film for feature films or interlaced at normal “commercial break” areas for television content) is far more viable than relying upon traditional physical media ownership (with whatever “you only purchased the rights to USE this content” they want to make… which is a crock anyways).  This ensures a CONTINUING source of income as online advertisement can be tailored to particular types of content in addition to being present on the site itself.  I refer you to thedailyshow.com, southparkstudios.com, or hulu.com for examples of this kind of thing that I use myself.  Since television will likely be supplanted to a huge degree by Internet content sources in the near future, this would be a good bandwagon for companies to jump on very, very soon.

By relying entirely upon FREE distribution for post-theater (etc.) release of media, the producing companies can cut pirates’ legs out from under them by denying them access to reproducible forms of their product.  By providing access to their material that is free to the end-user (or new game content that is free to the legitimate purchaser) companies can continue to enjoy advertising revenues through greatly increased usage rates for their site.  This seems like a practical and reasonable next step to take in the face of a society that is – let’s face it – moving towards more sophisticated technologies at an accelerating rate.

Darian Sentient
wasabisoft.net