Valuing Content: Dragon Age

I wrote yes­terday about the dif­fi­culties of selling media content when people can get some­thing more-​​or-​​less identical without paying. It looked a bit bleak. In this – more positive – post, I’m going to look at some of the ways media owners might persuade people to pay for their content, focusing on the good, bad and ugly methods built around the recent Electronic Arts games release Dragon Age. A hotly-​​anticipated title, developed by role-​​playing game spe­cial­ists Bioware, the pro­duc­tion cost millions of dollars and took nearly six years. I think it would be fair to say that it had to be successful.

Like other media owners, computer games pub­lishers have a hard time with piracy and other unau­thor­ised dis­tri­bu­tion. You know this is true because you were a teenager once yourself and you copied disks and down­loaded cracks. In my case, it was copying cassette tapes of Spectrum games. It’s really quite a big problem: 2DBoy, the pub­lishers of indie puzzle game World of Goo, had a built-​​in mech­anism for tracking every copy of the game in cir­cu­la­tion. They dis­covered that 90% of those copies were unau­thor­ised, and that’s dis­counting any versions whose dis­trib­utors had found a way to cir­cum­vent the tracking. While that doesn’t mean that game pub­lishers only get 10% of the revenue they would in a world without piracy, I think we’re likely to agree that it’s probably a fair chunk.

Distribution

When Dragon Age came out, I had several options for getting hold of it.

I could go to a shop

• advant­ages: I get a box, a disc and a printed manual.
• dis­ad­vant­ages: I have to go to the shop. I might scratch or lose the disks. I have to put the disk in the machine to play. Costs £40.

Or I could buy it through a digital dis­tri­bu­tion service like Steam (it’s like iTunes for games, basically).

• advant­ages: I get it right now; Steam looks after the install­a­tion and any patches; can’t lose or scratch the disk.
• dis­ad­vantage: need to be con­nected to the Net to play; no printed manual; costs £40.

Or I could download an illegal, cracked copy through PirateBay or similar.

• advant­ages: I get it right now. No need to jump through copy pro­tec­tion hoops. Costs nothing.
• dis­ad­vant­ages: err… might get caught.

So, the method that earns EA no money is, in many respects, the most con­venient. They should probably try to dissuade me from doing that somehow. Here’s what they’ve done and what they might have done.

Digital-​​Rights Management

Games pub­lishers have tra­di­tion­ally responded to the threat of unau­thor­ised copying by intro­du­cing more and more soph­ist­ic­ated forms of copy pro­tec­tion and DRM. You have to have the DVD in your drive to start the game. The game requires you to enter a unique serial number. It might check this number against an internal algorithm. More recently, it’s likely to check the number against a database on the publisher’s server – a key that’s used more than a few times will be black­listed. It might check that key every time you play. Dragon Age employs all these methods. But it doesn’t really work very well as a means of protection.

First, it’s a pain in the neck for legit­imate cus­tomers. Why should I have to go hunting through my discs every time I want to play the game? What’s with this trillion-​​character serial number? Hang on, my Internet con­nec­tion is a bit flakey – what do you mean I can’t play? These methods aren’t just incon­venient; they are also dis­respectful. They treat paying cus­tomers like poten­tial criminals.

Second, the pirates appear to be really rather good at thwarting copy pro­tec­tion. Cracks to make a game playable without any of the above are easily obtained. So it turns out that the only people who are incon­veni­enced are genuine cus­tomers. Nice work!

Score: 1/​5

Enrich the Genuine Copies

In recent years, the idea of giving ‘extras’ to paying cus­tomers has gone by the board somewhat. I recall buying games in the nineties that came with 2–3 dif­ferent manuals, a map of the in-​​game world, a poster, occa­sion­ally nov­el­ties like a metal figurine or a sound track disk. Nowadays, games come in DVD-​​style boxes and so the pos­sib­il­ities for nov­el­ties are rather limited.

Nonetheless, EA have actually done quite well with Dragon Age on this score. Rather than physical extras, they come in a virtual form. My box came with a coupon with two extra serial numbers I could enter into the game. These added new content to the game: a couple of extra adven­tures and unique items and powers to make my char­acter stronger.

I had to register my game with the pub­lisher in order to unlock this content and so there’s no way for pirates to get hold of it. I really like this idea: the illegal copy is impov­er­ished while legit­imate buyers are rewarded. And thinking about gamer psy­cho­logy, I believe it acts as a strong motiv­a­tion to get the real thing. Those using unau­thor­ised versions will know that their char­acter isn’t as strong and hasn’t got the same resources as those belonging to users who bought it. Gamers hate having a ‘lame’ character.

Unfortunately, Bioware slightly botched the exe­cu­tion. Using the premium content requires the game to check in with the server every time it is run, spoiling the exper­i­ence for those with a flakey internet con­nec­tion or wanting to play the game on the move.

On a more positive note, the title is being actively main­tained by the developers. Two patches have already been released with a third in the works. Once again, it’s unlikely pirates will be able to use these, again making their copies inferior.

Score: 3/​5

Sell a Platform

But EA did more with add-​​on idea than simply providing bonuses for registered cus­tomers. It has built Dragon Age as a platform as well as a game. You can go onto the site and purchase Bioware points to spend on extra chunks of content, such as the Return to Ostagar expan­sion. Again, you need to be registered to buy and use this content, which once again devalues the pirated releases. Since the game’s launch, there’s only been one piece of addi­tional content to purchase, with a further expan­sion due in March.

The developers also released a toolset for the game allowing users to create their own tweaks and content for the game that can be dis­trib­uted and installed in a similar fashion to the official add-​​ons.

Score 4/​5

Build Community

The toolkit is just a small part of the ways that the pub­lishers have attempted to foster a com­munity around the game. Registering the game auto­mat­ic­ally creates a MySpace-​​style profile page for every user which auto­mat­ic­ally records achieve­ments within the game and your character’s progress. You can add comments and screen­grabs, and the site comes with the normal tools to twitter/​facebook/​tell others about what you’ve managed to achieve.

While I think this is useful for games, it’s not espe­cially so in this case. Dragon Age is a res­ol­utely single-​​player game so there is no par­tic­ular reason why anyone should be remotely inter­ested in another player’s progress, unlike, say, mul­ti­player games like World of Warcraft or Eve Online. Oh well – I’ll still give points for good intentions.

Score 2.5/5

Conclusions

A mixed score overall, then, with overly zealous DRM casting a shadow over some more insightful ideas to make piracy a poor option for users. Nonetheless, it appears to have been rel­at­ively pal­at­able to users, with over 3.2mn copies shipped by the begin­ning of February. At £40 a unit, not including any after-​​sales of extra content, that equals um… squil­lions in revenue.

The key to good practice here is giving cus­tomers more than they expected, rewarding their pat­ronage, hooking them in as they exper­i­ence the game and up-​​selling them with extra content to extend the exper­i­ence. These sorts of ideas might easily be applied to other media forms, such as a music CD or a magazine sub­scrip­tion. If I pay, give me more, exclusive extras that add a lot more value to the legit­imate edition than the unau­thor­ised copies. Make it easy for me to use it as a want to. As we all know, the bits and bytes of any digital product can and will be copied by people who are determ­ined to do so. However, if you make those ones and zeroes just a fraction of the whole product exper­i­ence, then there is still a business in making media.

Share this post:

Possibly related:

• Valuing Content: Nine Inch Nails
• The Trouble with Social Content
• The Value of Content in a Stream