Editorial: Codemasters CEO Publicly Embraces the Worst Idea Ever
Excuse me if this article doesn’t flow quite correctly, but I’m actually so filled with rage over a recent CVG feature revolving around Codemasters CEO Rod Cousens’ and his idea for a piracy proof business model that I had to go punch a bag of kittens just to abate some of my bloodthirst.
In said CVG article, Cousens states that the “middle ground” for publishers to prevent their products from being pirated is to release an incomplete product at retail and charge consumers extra for the rest of the game in an incremental fashion. This is exactly the worst case scenario that every single gamer on the planet was talking about a few years ago when everybody started shifting to the DLC model. I specifically remember a Penny-Arcade post that I’m too filled with hatred to look up where Jerry Holkins discussed his fears of this very thing. I remember reading it and going “no company will ever be so stupid that they will openly embrace a model that is so decidedly anti-consumer. If they ever did, gamers would riot in the streets.”
And now, here we are, with this great and unspeakable horror staring down at us with its thousand young. Shub-Niggurath Rod Cousens;
The video games industry has to learn to operate in a different way. My answer is for us as publishers is to actually sell unfinished games – and to offer the consumer multiple micro-payments to buy elements of the full experience.
I should point out that the writing for this has been on the walls for a while anyway. Codemasters wouldn’t be the first company to release important parts of the game in an incremental fashion in order to bleed more money out of their fans like a huge capitalist vampire, but as far as I know, they are the first company to openly discuss and support selling us incomplete games. Of course, Cousens and other publishers will feed us that this is all to combat the horrible and world ending threat that is piracy, much the same way the RIAA suing grandmothers over Britney Spears albums is just them making sure they all keep food on their solid gold tables, but it isn’t. It is an excuse.
Look, I understand piracy is an evil thing, and I understand that companies aren’t making endless amounts of money right now, but to even fathom that it’s piracy that is crippling everything is something that has no real statistical fact backing it. I won’t rehash the same arguments you always hear “defending” piracy, but they are still legitimate points. Nobody has any idea what the actual amount of money lost to piracy is, they can only assume. What piracy is to these companies isn’t a threat, it’s an opportunity to take advantage of consumers. There is no way that selling consumers an incomplete product and then holding the rest of it ransom at gun point is a positive thing. It’s an absolute scumbag business model. It will certainly make these companies more money, but so will coming into our houses and stealing our fucking wallets.
But, of course all the soulless rich old white guys that run this world are going to try and get the most money out of us. It’s been that way since the cavemen gave all their power over to the shamans and the traders. The real problem I see with this is that nobody is even acting a little bit outraged. A CEO of a video game company has come out and said selling you an unfinished product is the best thing it can do to make sure they don’t fall victim to piracy, and the vast majority of game journalists and commenters are sitting around acting like this is just another day at the office. This is like if Mike Tyson told you he was going to “fuck you until you love me” and you said “that sounds reasonable, sir.”
I’ll admit that I’m being rather fatalist here, and that maybe I’m wrong and Codemasters and the other game companies that are going to embrace this model with charge us a fair price for the complete game, and everybody will live happily ever after. The rest of the Ripten team doesn’t share my staggeringly jaded view on the corporate world, as you will hear in the impromptu Ripten podcast on the subject, but somebody has to pretend their Mario Savio. Even if the companies that theoretically move to this model start off innocent enough, they will eventually realize that they can make infinite dollars by charging us more and more for less and less. As a business model, they would be idiotic not to. You know why they would be idiotic not to?
Because everybody will pay it anyway. Look no further than the Stockholm Syndrome journalists and some gamers seem to have about this subject for proof of this. We can all pretend that these companies are going to be kind to us, just like we did when the DLC model started becoming prolific. Look where that got us. Even I defended Bethesda over horse armor and told people to just calm down when the initial raising of the voices happened over paid content and microtransacions. Don’t worry about it, I said, these companies need us as much as we need them- they won’t fuck us over. Well I’m not making that mistake again. I’m putting myself in league with the malcontents who think this is an awful idea.
I don’t really hide my political beliefs, and one of the reasons I’m so passionate about politics is a simple one- because when everything goes to shit and we’re worshiping at the alter of some supreme potentate, I can look myself in the mirror and say at least it wasn’t my fault. Well, I’m applying that to this. I will put myself on record right now that, and I want you all to remember this five years from now when we’re chained together and running from our corporate overlords, I will never purchase or review a game that uses this business model. This is beyond episodic, microtransactions, or DLC. I will not contribute to incomplete products being sold to consumers.
Neither should you.
[Source: CVG]
