Blogs - cyanidekoolaid

So if something is free but there is a better version of it for a cost which do you prefer? I ask this question simply why pondering online piracy trying to figure out why it's popular and what commercial media can do to combat it.

Commercial media spends so much of their time and money attempting to combat online piracy and to what result? They end up with news stories of how they sued a 12 year old kid for downloading a few Justin Beiber songs? They put a few server operators in jail? Obviously these atttempts aren't going to stop very many people from continuing to do what they do online.

The solution is obvious to me. If you're a commercial capitalist company you should believe in the system, and the basis of capitalism is offering something better than your competition. Sure your competition is breaking the law, but you can't always control that. If companies offered a better pricing schedule and better content delivery people would flock to them for their purchases. Already iTunes, Amazon, Steam, and others have probably taken a much larger chunk of the potential pirates than all of the different anti-piracy organizations together.

The features companies offer can easily make them more attractive than a free competitor. Just think of it this way: If you saw two shops one of them offering you raw hamburger meat and a unsliced bun and another shop SELLING you raw hamburger meat and a unsliced bun which do you choose? Obviously the free one. Now lets consider if the shop selling it cooked the meat for you, placed it on your sliced bun, added extras to it like toppings, and offered you superiror customer service. Now there'd still be a few people who'd go with what's free and cook it themselves but a lot of people who go with the PAID one, with one caveat: That the price was reasonable.

Reasonable pricing is paramont to combating piracy. Ensuring that you're offering people a product they can enjoy and you're offering them features they can't get from other sources will ensure they will purchase your product instead of going with the inferior free version of it.

I realize this blog is sorta late to the game on the subject as I realize many companies are already doing this. Amazon, iTunes, Steam, and many others have already made great strides on many their digital distribution system unique and desiriable to the consumer. I just hope the publishers, music studios, movie studios, game companies, and others will realize how important it is to focus on that and they'd probably do more good diverting the millions they spend on anti-piracy litigation and instead funnel it into partnering with these type of companies and offering lower prices to them. You want to eliminate your competition just offer stuff they can't.

Let's talk a bit about Steam.

I know what you're thinking "Why write an entry about Steam when you're posting on Desura?" I think it's important because Steam is without a doubt the number one supplier of games for the PC. It's quickly becoming the GOTO platform for developers and is the first thing many people think of when dealing with games on the PC. A lot of gamers aren't even interested in games if they can't activate on Steam. I recently heard someone mention that playing a DRM free version of a game is basically the same thing as torrenting it.

Now I completely agree it's up to everyone to make up their mind about what platform is right for them, however you shouldn't do that without giving other options a try or understanding the positives and negatives of each one.
Steam is without a doubt a bloated entity. It has the largest marketshare by far, and like many businesses in that position it spends more of it's time trying to maintain it's position than actually trying to impress customers and come up with new ideas. The new trading card system is a great idea, but it's still a very minor step forward in my opinion. I mean here I am on Desura with very little knowledge writing a blog post. Can the same be done on Steam? Can you customize your profile as much, even with fully collecting trading cards? Are the trading cards anything other than an attempt for Steam to gain more money by selling you games so you can get the cards for them? I don't know. Many of the "rewards' for leveling and collecting the cards seem like things that should have already been added. It also seems that by forcing the rewards to be based around collecting cards from a a variety of games they're forcing you to purchase things, either games or cards/backgrounds/etc. off the market.

It seems they already had a large collection of other methods they could have used to rewards experience, and maybe eventually they'll put that into use. Play hours, achievements, reviews, screenshots, community contributions, group activity, all these things add greatly to the Steam experience and should be rewarded but at the same time they don't actually make Steam any money. So far there is also no method for users to create any content of their own and either share it or sell it. How great would it be to create an awesome background and be able to sell it on the community market?

So far is seems Desura is focuses on it's users AND it's game developers. It wants to add features that make everyone happy and actually strive to win customers due to it's features instead of force customers into using it because it's the largest and has the most titles availible on it. In my short time using it I've really enjoyed the ability to customize my profile with disturbing images and write a blog post because I'm bored. The usability of downloading and playing games isn't much different from Steam, which is good because it makes it easier for new users to try it out. I really like the promotion they give to smaller game developers and the fact I can find games here that I can't find on Steam or other platforms that focus on the larger games.

As a user I'm going to try to focus on using Desura more, if for nothing else than to give it a fair shot and see all that it offers. I hope other users will do the same.