The lows are low, but the highs are home: Why pirates should have access to DLC4

mobilemarshall:

lamattgrind:

A little while ago, Crysis 2 was leaked in its entirety onto the internet a while in advance of its release. Then Killzone 3 was leaked - a PS3 game. Not that PS3 games haven’t been on the internet for years, but now that people can (theoretically) actually PLAY them, it’s serious business.

So…

Just a thought that this brought up, all the free to play games with micro-transactions that’ve been popping up.

also leaked games tend to sell more if they’re actually good.

Geez, I forget where it came from now, but I’d heard someone, somewhere say that buying a game is a huge commitment. You spend $60 on something, not because it’s going to be good or worth it, but because you’re hoping it’ll be good. From the publisher point of view, that’s great, because you can’t take your money back after the scammed you into a shitty game.

        I’m not convinced about “episodic” games, but I’d like to see more mainstream retail games adopt the method Fable II (?) did. You get a demo for the first chapter or something, then you can buy the next chapter in game, and progress through the whole game like that. What makes that different from an “episodic” game is that the entire game was actually available from the start. “Episodic” game usually means “we don’t have enough money to finish this game, if enough people buy it then we will keep going” and that’s sad for them and sad for the people who love the game and never get to finish it.

        Also, I think that “free to play” games that give competitive benefit for paying money (just about every F2P MMO and many, many facebook games) rely on their competitive nature for their success. D&D Online tripled its profit after going F2P, as did LoTR Online, but that’s because everyone wants to level up faster and go raiding and whatever high-level MMO content is there for them. If someone said “here’s Mass Effect 2, you can play the entire game for free, BUT equipment costs real money or takes hours to earn” I’m not sure it would go over as well. Although maybe experience boost items would be nice to have…

        edit: I had an argument about leaked games but I deleted it because it was bad, but yeah good leaked games will sell more because gamers like good games, but publishers don’t like potentially lost sales and they especially don’t like it when people refuse to buy their shit games