How To Compete with Free (and Pirates!)

They say file shar­ers destroy the enter­tain­ment indus­try. In the end, it is impos­si­ble to com­pete with free. If piracy is not stopped by legal means (mean­ing by force) we are being told, there is no way con­tent cre­ators and dis­trib­u­tors can earn money. There are many rea­sons and coun­terex­am­ples that show this is sim­ply not true but since any claim made by your hum­ble anony­mous author can be eas­ily dis­missed as com­ing from some­one lack­ing exper­tise and expe­ri­ence in the field, let’s see what some of the peo­ple work­ing right on the front line of the indus­try have to say.

In an inter­view with PC Gamer, Marcin Iwinski and Guillaume Rambourg from Good Old Games, a suc­cess­ful dig­i­tal dis­tri­b­u­tion ser­vice for clas­sic video games, explain their way of think­ing about busi­ness and sur­vival in a dig­i­tal world of plenty.

On con­sumer choice:

Marcin Iwinski: If I con­sider buy­ing things, I always think about the value it will bring, and the same is pretty much about games. So if you buy a game and it’s rea­son­ably priced and it offers you a lot of value, and then maybe there is a great com­mu­nity on GOG, it’s com­pat­i­ble with your new oper­at­ing sys­tem, it’s patched and it runs really well, and you just pay, I don’t know £5.99, £9.99 for it, that’s an extremely good deal. Then you have a sound­track, then you have wall­pa­pers and other things, and this makes it super value for money. At the same time, if you are in a store get­ting for 49 dol­lars or Euros a game which has 16 pages man­ual and one DVD, you know, unless the game really knocks you down, that is not that big of a value. So we are try­ing to build a value for the con­sumer, and the amount we are talk­ing about, it’s in many cases an impulse pur­chase. If you have a good offer you just go for it and buy it, and that’s what we are after.

On adding value and coop­er­at­ing with pas­sion­ate pirates:

Guillaume Rambourg: We believe that GOG.com is on a dif­fer­ent seg­ment, right? Our num­ber one com­peti­tor since the very begin­ning is aban­don­ware, all those web­sites giv­ing away games for free. The thing is to take peo­ple from aban­don­ware to let’s say a more legal road. As Marcin explained, we had to put quite some heart and val­ues into the prod­ucts, and fun­nily enough, this is some­thing that makes me smile all the time, but we turned many aban­don­ware web­sites into affil­i­ates. This shows that if you put the right val­ues and the right mes­sage into all games, and you stress the con­ve­nience for the users, you make a spe­cial focus on the ease of use, everybody’s fol­low­ing. And they have a ready to go pack­age where you have all of the flavour of the past in a sim­ple pack­age, basically.

On piracy and DRM:

Marcin Iwinski: We come from a coun­try where we know some­thing about piracy. When I started CD Projekt with my high school friends, there were no legal chan­nels for game dis­tri­b­u­tion. The mar­ket was 99.9% piracy and our com­peti­tors were always pirates and not other com­pa­nies. Whenever we were releas­ing a game it was avail­able on the street, you know, CDs priced at one fifth of what we were ask­ing for, so it was all about value. This is in our opin­ion the only way to go.

Of course, we don’t agree with piracy, we don’t like piracy, but if you put a really strong pro­tec­tion DRM peo­ple will always find a way around it. Unless DRM is not part of the game. I’m really annoyed when I see exam­ples of com­pa­nies who release sin­gle player games and they ask you to be online. I think it’s just bol­locks, pretty much. Frankly speak­ing, I have my note­book and I’m going, I don’t have inter­net access. Though peo­ple wouldn’t like to think so, there’s no inter­net access in many places in the world where you go, or it costs a lot of money, so I’m not able to play the game.

In gen­eral: improve your prod­uct instead of break­ing it with hor­ren­dous DRM restric­tions, cre­ate a com­mu­nity of loyal users, show that you care about the con­tent you are sell­ing and offer some­thing pirates can­not. Constantly add value and be persistent.

Sounds intu­itive and sen­si­ble, right? I urge you to read whole article.