EA: Pirate our games

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24 Jun 09 18:20 by Jared Newman in category Uncategorized To news archive

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In the wake of The Sims 3 leaking to BitTorrent and being downloaded millions of times, Electronic Arts is rolling with the punches.

Speaking to IndustryGamers, EA CEO John Riccitiello said his company has "outserviced the pirate" with an online community and a more complete game than the leaked version. The same holds true for other titles in EA’s catalog.

"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," Riccitiello said with a laugh. "Because what’s in the middle of the game is an opportunity to buy stuff."

Could it be that EA finally gets it? The Entertainment Software Association, a games industry trade group, has famously called piracy "the single greatest threat to the development and release of innovative and creative entertainment software that consumers demand and enjoy." Riccitiello’s comments prove the opposite.

Electronic Arts appears to be using piracy as a motivation to be more innovative, at least from a business perspective. The games have value beyond the disc, to the point that they’re "selling services that are disc-enabled as opposed to packages that have bolt-ons." That’s a lesson that any media trade group could learn from, be it movies, music or video games.

8 Comments

Ramza: Posts: 125; Posted on: 25 Jun 09 15:27

Yeah, I know a couple people who got frustrated the pirated version was missing a ton of online/community content and stuff you can only get my registering the original game.

EA, as much as we can despise them for other things, are clearly going in the right direction. They are using piracy as free advertising and publicity for their games.

Icy Mt.: Posts: 589; Posted on: 25 Jun 09 17:42

HELLO! They're finally starting to get it. No DRM on the game or disc but you can't use our servers for online without a valid registration code or paying us some money.

I read somewhere that in Brazil copying and sharing music CDs is legal because they are only considered to be "promotional materials" for live concerts.

johnzap: Posts: 498; Posted on: 27 Jun 09 05:23

Not really. You can easily find all the missing stuff online (torrents...) and easily apply it. No need to use the official game, register it, etc.

To avoid any confusion: you can get the full game, including online content via the pirate route.

mpicco: Posts: 4; Posted on: 27 Jun 09 16:51

Selling you a game which is NOT the full-content game just to make you BUY more shit after you've bought it is just a dirty, dirty way of making business. And they dont charge you little for the "base" game, either. Last time I checked, around 50€, the same as a normal full content game.
So we shall pirate every single game you make, EA. And we'll play it to the fullest, and we'll laught at your expense. Just because of these kind of statements, I really don't wanna buy anything anymore.

Hemispasm: Posts: 5249; Posted on: 27 Jun 09 19:10

They may be starting to get the idea that it can act as a promotion to their product; I am just curious to see whether they will also embrace the notion of dropping all protection schemes; since they don't really do anything else but add up to the final production costs.

VreebieZ: Posts: 2; Posted on: 27 Jun 09 23:58

As long as they dont charge 'subscription fees', micro-payment to buy virtual accessories can bring a lot of revenues too. Sub fees = more motivation to write an entire server-emulator ;D

arunvinayak: Posts: 1; Posted on: 30 Jun 09 09:49

ea sports are now very expensive so we want new games of ea sports in good website like softpedia pundachi moneee

sativarg: Posts: 8; Posted on: 01 Jul 09 06:44

I should have read this before posting to No retrial for The Pirate Bay. perhaps there is hope after all for file sharing's relationship with capitalism.http://www.cdfreaks.com/jochem/../im...s/6/flower.gif
One can only hope...

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