1. This is nothing new. Many new MMO games are giving away their clients for free like puzzle pirates and necron.

2. It does thwart conventional piracy, but hackers just need to find a way to convince the server that they are paid members (I would think).

3. Thwarting piracy in Asia would not neccesarily make an MMO game more successful. If piracy is so popular, then it is possible that few people will play this game and it won't have a large enough user base to sustain itself.

What he said * 4 :-p

Also I see some uhhh ... problems

*) So does piracy mean the end of non MMO games since only an MMO game would need the server. That would suck since so far all my favorite games have been single player.

*) Assume it's true and only MMO games can make a profit. Will the world become a 2 or 3 game world? Think Sports, we could make an infiniate variety of sports but basically only a few make money and are popular. Football, Soccer, Baseball, Basketball, Hockey....

Regardless of how long you make that list you'll notice that new sports do not get added every week even though creatively, nothing is stopping us.

Lots of people have talked about the *network effects* that Microsoft has by being so dominate. They claim it's hard to switch out of Office because since Office is #1 it gets all the support and if you want to exchange files you have to be using it (please don't bogart this thread into talk about Mac vs Windows or Office vs Oo, it's just an analogy)

Well, with MMO games the same is true. If all your friends are playing Uberquest and all their friends as well then while you might want to play Newquest you go over there and find it's just no fun since everyone is back at Uberquest. There's TV shows about Uberquest. There's a news column in every major news publication about what's happening in Uberquest. There's a large market for Uberquest items, etc. Newquest doesn't stand a chance of pushing Uberquest out.

This isn't a problem with single player games because you just tired of it after a week or a month and go get a new game. Not true with MMOs. How many people have played EQ and ONLY EQ for 1 or more years now?

So, my personal prediction is piracy will kill single player games and MMO will kill the industry down to 2 or 3 big popular games.

I'm not trying to claim that offline titles will die, I'm trying to claim that, if Asia is any example, we may reach a point where the whole "retail" thing, with its boxes and CDs and dead trees, becomes unnecessary. Games as they are right now are a packaged goods industry: it's all about chain stores and shelf space.

Of course, in Asia, MMOs already make up the lion's share of the gaming market (likely because with Asian piracy rates being what they are, they are the only games that players must pay developers for). This suggests that Asia may be flooded with online games of every stripe and color (which, indeed, is happening).

I heard an interesting story once about an Asian MMO (Lineage, I think, though the story could be about any or all of them). The makers of the game consciously decided to leverage piracy as a marketing tool. They released the game as a freely downloadable client (with a subscription fee to play), but then they made a small run of CDs and put them on shelves in stores. The pirates then saw that this game was being sold and immediately made a large number of "illegal" copies and distributed them all around the market. Thus the game's makers essentially used the pirates as a free distribution network. The two important keys being that 1) their revenue model was based on subscription fees and 2) they understood that the pirates had to perceive the client software as something of value.

So I guess this story is a testament to the power of the retail/packaged goods mentality that still holds sway over the consumer. At the same time, it indicates ways that game publishers (or makers) can start to stealthily bring us around to online distribution.

gman: "So does piracy mean the end of non MMO games since only an MMO game would need the server."

I don't think so. Microsoft had (and probably still has) a dream that one day all software would be subscription based (.NET is a part of that dream, I believe). You'd pay a recurring fee and constantly get the most up-to-date version of Word, Powerpoint, whatever delivered to your pc over broadband. Already, installing MS programs on Windows XP, you have to validate your serial number either over the phone or the internet. It's not a stretch to imagine this happening for games, especially as broadband becomes more and more ubiquitous for PCs and consoles.

MMOs are the first games to exploit this because their very nature requires that they be connected so it's easy to center a business model around subscription fees. However, as the gaming world becomes more and more connected, I think we'll see this model begin to apply to single player games as well. The Phantom networked game console is an interesting example of this coming to be. Though Infinium Labs has been knocked in the press a lot, they are bringing on more and more impressive names (Kevin Bachus, Kathy Schoback, etc), and these people keep talking about connectivity and subscription gaming as the wave of the future. Even Xbox Live is a precursor to this model. Though you still buy the game disc, more and more of the value of the product comes from the Live service (a subscription service, at that). Even single player games have downloadable content via Live. It's not a big leap from downloading some extra maps to downloading all the maps to downloading the whole game.

There's still a lot of problems. Broadband isn't ubiquitous yet. People are still attached to physical objects. But still, I think there are clear steps being made in the direction of digital distribution.

For me, the idea of owning a physical game is not desirable in and of itself so much as it is desirable because I only have to pay for it once. This is especially true of console games as opposed to PC games. When I buy a PS2 game, I pay $50, and then I never have to pay an online fee to get extra levels, more characters, basic game patches, or, in the case of online gaming, just for the opportunity to play the game the way it was intended. The initial $50 is all I will ever have to pay for that game.

As you can tell, I'm not a big fan of online gaming.

Going back to the original question of retail packaging and traditional distribution, I agree that online game distribution is the thing of the future if for no other reason than for game companies to manage costs of materials and shipping. You can already see this with titles that are on the shelf in smaller boxes. With the extra savings, profits become larger and borderline titles (meaning one with a smaller potential audience) become feasible.

But for the player looking to pick up a new title, it really comes down to the user experience. Having just joined City of Heroes Saturday night, I downloaded the client and the game manual, paid for the game, and created the account. Best Buy, Game Spot, FuncoLand, etc., wasn't open, and I didn't want to wait for an order to arrive via the mail, so this was really the quickest option for me.

The actual process for buying the game and creating the account was simple, well-documented, and quickly done. From that perspective, NCsoft did a fantastic job of making things so easy that I never worried once whether my money would be going into the ether. It made me a firm believer in buying games online. Further, the lack of packaging materials was a godsend, as I don't know where I'd stack another empty game box.

Yet despite that, the download took three to four hours, and that's with a nice highspeed connection. Luckily, I had another PC game to occupy me in the meanwhile, but not everyone is fortunate enough. I can see how it would work in Asia (my aunt's family in Taiwan has had better, faster, and more stable access for longer than I've had, and I live in the Cradle of Connectivity in Virginia), but in the United States, at least, the infrastructure is not in place for a mass migration to this distribution model. The user experience suffers terribly at this point, and the average American gamer, with our gotta-have-it-now mentality, won't be willing to put up with it just yet.

aw hell no dog! Does this mean that I won't be able to line my walls with box art and instruction bookelts anymore? No more gold zelda cartridges? Are games like my "Wing Commander 3: Heart of the Tiger" (one of Mark Hammill's best, albeit chubby, roles imho) which fit on a MERE 4 cds, a thing of the past?

I remember Trond Aas from Funcom [ Anarchy Online talking about this at a seminar here in Copenhagen last year. His main point was basically, that Funcom had great success with offering their client as a one week free trial. Not only did this give players an idea of what the game was about, but more importantly for the company piracy was basically eliminated.

So yes, ClockworkGrue, it's a very successfull model for MMO's and the Western markets are already adapting.

I remember Trond Aas from Funcom [ Anarchy Online ] talking about this at a seminar here in Copenhagen last year. His main point was basically, that Funcom had great success with offering their client as a one week free trial. Not only did this give players an idea of what the game was about, but more importantly for the company piracy was basically eliminated. Basically what Mr. Falcon said above ;)

So yes, ClockworkGrue, it's a very successfull model for MMO's and the Western markets are already adapting.

You can sort of see anothe example of this going on in the music industry, which is handling it extreamly badly, in that you can pay to download an entire CD but you don't get anything else. Sure you could burn it, but then it would just be another burned CD berift of any cover art or any distinction what so ever. At the same time they're charging the same for the downloads as they do for the store CDs. Kooky.

The games on the other hand have a better rack going; they either sell you a tangible product then back it up with online goodies, which may or may not cost you money. If you download them you will at least have a website and usually they're smart enough to promise somthing else, like a donwloadable manuel. Personally however I'd rather have the tangible products.

In Asia credit cards are not as prevalent, so game cards (stored-value cards) becomes the physical objects of desire with collectible cover art and so on. Most are credit card size, but they are now being packaged in ever-bigger cardboards to get ever-more shelf space and ever-more art space. So in-no-time they will be as big as magazines (the biggest size I think they can go). Remember the days when CD's were packaged in those kooky long cardboard boxes?

Also, internet cafes are the places where people can demo as many games as the cafe have loaded on their computers. It's like going to a game store in the US and able to demo all the games in the store! Just so damn convenient.

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