Stardock Interview
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GameBiz: GameStop recently broke the street date on Demigod, and you've said that it could be a test case for just how rampant piracy is. Is it a problem?
Brad Wardell, CEO of Stardock: We know that piracy exists in massive levels. We don't put any copy protection on our retail CDs. We do know, because our games connect to our servers, how many people are playing the pirated version. It's huge. I mean HUGE.
Demigod may be the most popular game in a very long time based on the numbers we're seeing. That said, our position has been that 98 percent of those people would never have bought the game. I don't want to do anything that inconveniences our legitimate customers because even if I stop all piracy, I don't agree that it would noticably increase our sales.
Piracy is more of an annoying thing. It's an ego thing. You put your heart and soul into a game and you see someone playing it online who stole it. It pisses you off. You're just really mad. You have to take a step back and say, "if you had stopped them from pirating it, would they have bought it?" The answer is probably no.
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Is there a need for a PC advocacy group?
Wardell: I think the PC market definitely needs an advocacy group. I'm kind of out of the loop. When we announced the Gamers Bill of Rights and people started saying we needed to talk with the PC Gaming Alliance, I didn't know what the PC Gaming Alliance was. I hadn't heard of it at the time.
Personally I would be much happier if we could just get some standards going. Right now Stardock is too much of a pissant to get some of the things that we think needs to be done done, but I think there are things that gamers expect to be done.
Activation. All these games have activation these days. What happens if the game company goes out of business? I buy my software and now I can't play it again? There's a solution to this, and that is that you let multiple places activate the software. It wouldn't be that hard to do. You put the power in the hands of the digital distributor. If I buy some game off of Steam and down the line the activation goes away, I could go to Impulse or GamersGate and download the same game and be taken care of. That's something the PC Gaming Alliance could really jump onto.
You also have the hardware stuff. It'd nice if they put out a utility that would look at your system and tell you how good of a gaming rig you have and give you some suggestions. This is just sort of things Stardock is working on, but we're pissants. We can distribute it to people who use Impulse, but the problem is that because it's Stardock it is not like Steam is going to go use this utility. Having something under a unified thing would be a good thing than if it's Valve doing something clever. Or even Microsoft. Those are the kind of things that I'd like to see PC Gaming Alliance get behind.
