EA Games: Everything On The Disc Is A Demo

As most of you will know by now, Sims 3 was leaked weeks before the game's official release date. Unperturbed by the rampant piracy that is often cited as a cause for poor sales in the gaming industry, EA CEO John Riccitello had this to say in an interview with IndustryGamers: "By the way, if there are any pirates you're writing for, please encourage them to pirate FIFA Online, NBA Street Online, Battleforge, Battlefield Heroes..."

"If they would just pirate lots of it I'd love them. Because what's in the middle of the game is an opportunity to buy stuff."

Anyone who's purchased the game will know that a huge chunk of content isn't even saved on the disc, and those who own it will have to go online to activate their game to download about 3GB worth of content for the rest of the game, available only to legitimate customers. Riccitello explained, "A huge amount of the gameplay is an overlay for the community, where you are sampling assets created by other people. So for the pirate consumer, they don't get the second town, they don't get all the extra content, and they don't get the community."

Like Valve and Stardock before it, EA believes that the real value of a game comes in its online services. However, unlike the aforementioned companies, which provide free DLCs for owners of the game, EA's plan is to ultimately make a lot of money from the sales of content packs and virtual items.

Riccitello said, "I'm a longtime believer that we're moving to selling services that are disc-enabled as opposed to packages that have bolt-ons.... So the point I'm making is, yes I think that's the answer [to piracy]. And here's the trick: it's not the answer because this foils a pirate, but it's the answer because it makes the service so valuable that in comparison the packaged good is not. So you can only deliver these added services to a consumer you recognize and know... So I think the truth is we've out-serviced the pirate."

While providing online services is a laudable idea, I'm not so sure that stripping content from the original game only to sell it back to players for additional money is the right way to go about it. Given the demand for these items, EA will without a doubt manage to sell hundreds of thousands of these virtual items in the same way that Bethesda managed to make a killing from its Horse Armor DLC for Oblivion, so like it or not, the model is probably here to stay.

What are your thoughts?

Source: Ars Technica