FIFA ‘09 – PC as well?

Electronic Arts’ Sports division stated some major improvements (Sunday) in the long running soccer game series, with their upcoming FIFA ‘09. While that can be summarized to prettier graphics, improved physics and more animations, what it reminded me of and wer’e here to discuss is EA Sports’s promise not to develope any more games to the PC, beside that very FIFA ‘09.

Piracy, as we all know, is a world spread phenomenon, and anyone today knows how to download and install cracked games. This isn’t new: games have been illegaly obtained for many years, even in the DOS period (on Floppies, yep). And there have been many attempts to fight it: better protections, validations and even half monthly periodic validation was suggested (and rejected due to gamer’s protests). None of which prevented the cracking teams from doing their magic.

Thus, there is a recent trend of companies abandoning exclusive PC game developing, or even developing for consoles only. In my opinion, it shows those companies’ true abilities in handling with a crisis. A company not able of creative thinking and out-of-the-box marketing and selling, can’t exist much long. I mean, bailing out of ship that wasn’t sinking in the first place is the stupidest thing to do: hundreds of millions of new computers are bought every year, and no console has ever even got close to that. So let’s try and help EA Sports and its friends, and think of new ways to earn money:

Direct-to-PC selling: VALVe did it big time, and it appears to be working. Steam is an efficient and very easily accesible way to sell games, and you even get to cut the losses of the manufacturing a bit. Take a look at IGN’s Direct2Drive!

Cutting off the prices a bit is always considered a generous move by the buyers. Although this has to do more with the game stores, it’s not like the developers and publishers haven’t got a impact on those stores. even 5$ will be enough, it will at least hold piracy back a bit.

In-game ads: integrating ads in-games, especially online games, will be an alternative to actually selling the game or selling it in half the price. It might be annoying, but it’s far more irritating having the major publishers and developers whine about piracy.

Last but not least, one I thought of myself – recently a small website named StreamMyGame went live, and it offers a way to stream games from one machine acting as a server to a receiving machine. Now imagine whole server farms doing just that: renting game time for people, charging a small fee: lets say, 2$ an hour, an average game is 10 hours play, so you rent the entire game for 20$. This isn’t that bad and it virtually eliminates all low-end machines unable to play new games. Of course, someone’s got to lose money – that’s the computer manufacturers (Intel and AMD mostly). And of course this will only be possible in a future when upload/download speeds are much higher than today’s.

So it seems retail selling doesn’t work anymore, so instead of sticking your head in the sand, figure out a new method of earning money, making both the players and the publishers (and developers) happy.

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