BioWare to defeat piracy with customer satisfaction

Funny you should mention pirating Crysis mix. I tried the demo for Crysis, loved it, and preordered the full version from Gamestop.com. I got the package in the mail shortly after the release date, but to my surprise they had sent me two copies of the extra disk with art and videos and what not, but no game. NO GAME. I called them and they said they'd send me a copy of the game, but I was still annoyed that I'd have to wait a day or two.

So, I pirated the game I'd bought, then played the pirated copy until my real copy arrived, backed up the save file, reinstalled the legitimate copy and went back to playing. I have absolutely no regrets.

I actually agree with Muzyka. I do pirate games but I also buy a lot of games every year. I'm not ashamed to admit that I tend to buy games from certain publishers and pirate from others. The publishers whose games I tend to buy are publishers who I feel confident will deliver that bang for my buck.

I kind of missed out on commenting on the whole Crysis thing when that comment was first made (the 20-to-1) but I wanted to chime in now.

If you make a game that's a tech demo people are going to pirate it "just to see how it runs." Next time try making a game that people will want to own rather than a $50 tech demo/stress test.

@frog
why reinstall the game? You already bought it, it's no different. And now you have to put the CD in when you feel like playing. Unless there's some patch that adds features, there's no reason.

A quality game for your money?! What is this a market economy?! Who needs customer satisfaction, you'll play what they tell you to!

I would think that just releasing quality demos would be enough to curb the "I just want to try it first...really I do" pirates.

However, demos can be completely impractical if not properly built into a development schedule.

The game industry seems to have gotten a hold of the MPAA and RIAA play books. Let's be honest here. A lot of games are crap and not worth $40 to $50. Just like most mainstream music is crap these days, and most movies are crap as well. I'm in no way advocating or justifying stealing people's work. But if people feel they are getting a good value, they will buy your product! I buy all my games, but I don't end up buying too many because I only like to invest in the really good titles. The bottom line is this. People are always going to pirate. Every copy protection scheme will be broken. DRM only hurts the honest consumer. The pirate is never inconvenienced or deterred by DRM. Period. So what will start happening is companies will start losing the business from the honest customers because they are going to decide the DRM hassles are not worth dealing with.

How about a decent patch for Mass Effect so the game doesn't constantly crash? That'd be enough customer satisfaction for me.

I think his comments are more in relation to Bioware's other releases. You can't really fault the post-release support of the Neverwinter Nights games and if it's DLC you're after then there were masses and masses of free, well-designed levels, campaigns, whole new stories from the community and Bioware themselves (which cost a few dollars).

DLC isn't new, the likes of EA and MS leaving things out of games to extort money at a later date is.

Oh and Cevat Yurli is a goddamn fucking retard if he thought that spouting a 20-1 ratio would do anything other than make him look like a dick. So 20+ million people pirated Crysis/ Suuuuuuure...

I live in Argentina, and you know, I recently went to this place (Musimundo), wich surprisingly had GTA4 for the 360. The price tag was 352.60 pesos, my countrys currency.
So.

Customer Support.

Yeah.

I'm not buying any fucking games.

(It applies to pc games too, they're also 60 bucks right? Plus, my pc can't handle anything new, so if i download anything it will be old...ish)

I was all set to purchase spore and sims3, but now there is no way because of the retarded protection on mass effect and probably carrying to spore and sims3- the funny thing is that I do pirate a lot of games (PC, DS, PSP)- mostly because most of them suck- I can really point to a handful of games on each platform that I love- a few more that were fun for a time and the rest that suck ass. I like to play games though so I try whatever to see how I like it- I am though a lot more particular on my console games- the funny thing is that I recently got a ps3 and low and behold- I bought 3 games that I played pirated on PC (orange box, assassin's creed and overlord)out of the first 5 games that I bought- on my PSP I bought every game that i really wanted and ripped them, because I hate playing from UMD- I have pretty near played the entire psp catalog though and the 20 or so games that I did buy were to this day the ones that I liked the best. on the DS I have not bought a single game, but there were really not that many titles I like on it- I mostly use it for homebrew and to play multiplayer games like skip bo w/ my GF