- Joined
- Nov 30, 2014
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- 240
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Martial Arts teaches to use turn every situation to your advantage.
Instead of trying to fight the Piracy, use them to your advantage. If you are selling your game, utilize the very fact that Piracy may aid you by convincing a larger number of people to play your game. Most people dont want to steal, but we have all been burned so many times with very expensive very low quality games that people no longer trust publishers enough to pay money for an unknown product. It is one thing to get a crappy tasting burger, youre out a buck, but once you feel you didnt get what you paid for, you wont be going back. The business of food is based completely on repeat business. Buying one burger from a shop once will not be enough to keep that business going for extended periods of time. Software is the exact opposite, where a product is purchased because it is new and different, and as a result, there are risks to trying anything new. And this is why so many people are skeptical of the quality of the new product they are trying, because it is new and different. People just dont want to get burned by paying a lot of money for a very bad, buggy, DRM ridden game.
Many publishers take the mentality that their profits come before all else, including customer satisfaction. Lets say you were experimenting with food and came up with a dish you thought people would like. You sell the new food to a customer, and they are completely dissatisfied. You probably would not even charge for the meal and reconsider why the customer did not like this. Publishers cant afford to do that, so they demand that you pay for something you are completely dissatisfied with. The result is the same. The consumer, your customer, will become unwilling to pay for something new, and thus, want to "try it before they buy it". Hence, your game will get Pirated. But lets dig deeper. What kind of reactions do the Pirates have to your game? Did they enjoy it? Did they hate it? Pirates are people too, just people that feel they are the ones getting ripped off. They feel like they are getting ripped off because they very frequently are getting ripped off, and they project those experiences onto any and all game developers. Understand where the Pirates are coming from and you can use this understanding to your advantage.
I've always wanted to see someone go the opposite way. Not to just "give up" on Piracy. That is nothing more than to tell you to "shut up" and "put up", and causes nothing but a continuation of the problem that results directly from both sides being unwilling to change their way of thinking. What I want to see is someone put out a game, and have the balls to say "I know someone is going to pirate this game. If you play this game and do enjoy it, please pay for it" and put that message somewhere at the end of the game. This says to the people who have been burned that you want to earn their trust by providing them with a quality product instead of expecting them to pay for an absolutely unknown quantity and take all the risk onto themselves. Businesses are not willing to take part in that risk, despite the ever growing trend to put the burden on the very customers that help them to survive. We need to change our way of thinking completely.
There used to be a time when people rented movies and video games from mom and pop stores. The price of the games to purchase new averaged about $50 bucks, while the cost to rent may have been only $2 or $3 bucks. The risk that we project is the cost. When we pay $50 bucks and get a game that we can only hope we will like, we feel like we came out on top. But when we pay $50 bucks and feel like we have been taken advantage of, we no longer feel the risk is worth the reward. This is why used game stores exist today, and mom and pop video shops used to exist a long time ago. The risk is heavily mitigated by the very low cost of a rental vs the high risk reward system associated with a purchase. There are no more rentals today, but there are discout games. If any one of us were to demand everyone pay $50 bucks for a game made in any flavor of RPG Maker today, most people would simply not purchase it. Thus, there needs to be an adjustment to the risk vs reward paradigm that allows the customers to feel that they are not being taken advantage of. Either charge less for some game we create, or to offer refunds to people who are not satisfied. The Refund idea does work, in fact, it works very well, just not as a business model for video games. Refunds work much better in the food industry where there is an expectation of product and service consistency. Thus, we are stuck with charging less, and what a customer would consider to be a "reasonable" price, or a price that is low enough that it mitigates the risks in the risk / reward paradigm.
Since we are no longer able to return to the "rental" model of business for gaming, we need a new way of thinking. We need a new way of making sure the customers are truly satisfied. One way is to lower the cost. But another would be to ask people to pay for the game only if they are satisfied with the game. If they are not satisfied, tell them that you want to listen to what they have to say as well. Validate their thinking and make sure they feel like you are willing to consider their situational assessments as well. "Did you like my game? If so, please pay for it. If not, please let me know why you didnt like it". We cant please everyone every single time. There are a lot of AAA titles that I have played that I have not been very happy with at all. This would only be amplified if others thought the same thing, but many people did enjoy the games I did not like. I have also tremendously enjoyed games that other people have absolutely hated.
The point is that we are not going to be able to make everyone absolutely happy with the games we create, but we can make people happy by the way we treat them. When we start treating Pirates for what they really are, People, we start to see things differently. A Pirate is a potential customer. They might not enjoy your game, and that isnt always on you. But a Pirate that is treated with respect and understanding of why they feel they must do the things that they do can turn that Pirate into a potential customer, and for any of us that ever hope to make a few bucks by selling games, that can be a very profitable thing.
Instead of trying to fight the Piracy, use them to your advantage. If you are selling your game, utilize the very fact that Piracy may aid you by convincing a larger number of people to play your game. Most people dont want to steal, but we have all been burned so many times with very expensive very low quality games that people no longer trust publishers enough to pay money for an unknown product. It is one thing to get a crappy tasting burger, youre out a buck, but once you feel you didnt get what you paid for, you wont be going back. The business of food is based completely on repeat business. Buying one burger from a shop once will not be enough to keep that business going for extended periods of time. Software is the exact opposite, where a product is purchased because it is new and different, and as a result, there are risks to trying anything new. And this is why so many people are skeptical of the quality of the new product they are trying, because it is new and different. People just dont want to get burned by paying a lot of money for a very bad, buggy, DRM ridden game.
Many publishers take the mentality that their profits come before all else, including customer satisfaction. Lets say you were experimenting with food and came up with a dish you thought people would like. You sell the new food to a customer, and they are completely dissatisfied. You probably would not even charge for the meal and reconsider why the customer did not like this. Publishers cant afford to do that, so they demand that you pay for something you are completely dissatisfied with. The result is the same. The consumer, your customer, will become unwilling to pay for something new, and thus, want to "try it before they buy it". Hence, your game will get Pirated. But lets dig deeper. What kind of reactions do the Pirates have to your game? Did they enjoy it? Did they hate it? Pirates are people too, just people that feel they are the ones getting ripped off. They feel like they are getting ripped off because they very frequently are getting ripped off, and they project those experiences onto any and all game developers. Understand where the Pirates are coming from and you can use this understanding to your advantage.
I've always wanted to see someone go the opposite way. Not to just "give up" on Piracy. That is nothing more than to tell you to "shut up" and "put up", and causes nothing but a continuation of the problem that results directly from both sides being unwilling to change their way of thinking. What I want to see is someone put out a game, and have the balls to say "I know someone is going to pirate this game. If you play this game and do enjoy it, please pay for it" and put that message somewhere at the end of the game. This says to the people who have been burned that you want to earn their trust by providing them with a quality product instead of expecting them to pay for an absolutely unknown quantity and take all the risk onto themselves. Businesses are not willing to take part in that risk, despite the ever growing trend to put the burden on the very customers that help them to survive. We need to change our way of thinking completely.
There used to be a time when people rented movies and video games from mom and pop stores. The price of the games to purchase new averaged about $50 bucks, while the cost to rent may have been only $2 or $3 bucks. The risk that we project is the cost. When we pay $50 bucks and get a game that we can only hope we will like, we feel like we came out on top. But when we pay $50 bucks and feel like we have been taken advantage of, we no longer feel the risk is worth the reward. This is why used game stores exist today, and mom and pop video shops used to exist a long time ago. The risk is heavily mitigated by the very low cost of a rental vs the high risk reward system associated with a purchase. There are no more rentals today, but there are discout games. If any one of us were to demand everyone pay $50 bucks for a game made in any flavor of RPG Maker today, most people would simply not purchase it. Thus, there needs to be an adjustment to the risk vs reward paradigm that allows the customers to feel that they are not being taken advantage of. Either charge less for some game we create, or to offer refunds to people who are not satisfied. The Refund idea does work, in fact, it works very well, just not as a business model for video games. Refunds work much better in the food industry where there is an expectation of product and service consistency. Thus, we are stuck with charging less, and what a customer would consider to be a "reasonable" price, or a price that is low enough that it mitigates the risks in the risk / reward paradigm.
Since we are no longer able to return to the "rental" model of business for gaming, we need a new way of thinking. We need a new way of making sure the customers are truly satisfied. One way is to lower the cost. But another would be to ask people to pay for the game only if they are satisfied with the game. If they are not satisfied, tell them that you want to listen to what they have to say as well. Validate their thinking and make sure they feel like you are willing to consider their situational assessments as well. "Did you like my game? If so, please pay for it. If not, please let me know why you didnt like it". We cant please everyone every single time. There are a lot of AAA titles that I have played that I have not been very happy with at all. This would only be amplified if others thought the same thing, but many people did enjoy the games I did not like. I have also tremendously enjoyed games that other people have absolutely hated.
The point is that we are not going to be able to make everyone absolutely happy with the games we create, but we can make people happy by the way we treat them. When we start treating Pirates for what they really are, People, we start to see things differently. A Pirate is a potential customer. They might not enjoy your game, and that isnt always on you. But a Pirate that is treated with respect and understanding of why they feel they must do the things that they do can turn that Pirate into a potential customer, and for any of us that ever hope to make a few bucks by selling games, that can be a very profitable thing.
