Sims Social and Freeplay: A Glimpse of the Anti-Piracy Future?
Regardless of where you fall on the piracy continuum, one thing is very clear: EA hates it. Right or wrong (and I know people who will argue either way) EA is convinced that it is losing millions of dollars of revenue per year to piracy of its flagship game, The Sims 3. And when a company is convinced that it is losing millions of dollars of revenue per year, it fights back.
EA has tried a lot of different anti-piracy measures in the past. SecureROM proved to be a major debacle, one of the few instances of gamer news that broke through to the mainstream media. Spore was originally going to ship with SecureROM, and it was originally going to be inextricably tied to one specific computer. Buy a new computer? Too bad - you have to buy a new copy of Spore, too.
Public outrage caused EA to roll back its anti-piracy measures for Spore. The same thing happened with The Sims 3, albeit in smaller form. And by going light on the anti-piracy measures, EA was treated to the spectacle of The Sims 3 literally setting piracy records.
That's the thing about anti-piracy measures: they only punish the legitimate users who pay the $60 to buy the base game. The game gets cracked and shopped around to all the torrent sites within hours.
So what's a billion-dollar game development company to do?
One possibility is to figure out a way to basically give the cow away for free, but charge you for the milk. This levels the economic playing field, because both pirates and legit consumers pay the same amount for the base game ($0). And if they can make the "milk" tempting enough, they can capture revenue from both pirates and legit consumers.
But how?
Two current models show us what EA may be planning for future Sims title releases. Both The Sims Social and The Sims Freeplay are free for consumers to play, on Facebook and the iPhone/iPad respectively. But both games offer a ton of things for you to buy - and each game wields its own set of strong-arm tactics to convince you to pony up real cash.
The challenge for EA is to make the base game interesting enough to catch a player's eye. I think they have done this well for Sims Social, but I'm not convinced Freeplay is catchy enough to work this way. You can't pirate Freeplay… but I'm not sure it's interesting enough for anyone to WANT to.
Is this what The Sims 4 will look like? And if it is, would you be happy or angry?