On the day on which BluRay’s BD+ DRM was cracked, one company seems to have finally understood how to do business in the modern world. Brad Wardell, CEO of Stardock, says pirates don’t matter, and he’s right.
He points to Trent Reznor’s conclusion as the logical way forwards: “[pirates] weren’t customers, they might never be customers, so spending money to try to stop them serves no purpose.” Indeed, just because someone downloads your game/movie/music/book doesn’t mean they would have bought it. As Reznor and many others have discovered, giving away your material for free actually tends to increase sales. After all, I don’t imagine NIN’s latest four CD instrumental album gets a lot of radio/MTV play, so how else are you going to promote it?
Wardell makes another very good point too – that it’s better to make games which run well on the majority of people’s hardware, rather than aiming for the almost mythical hard-core gamer with a top-spec PC. While most gaming and hardware sites are pretty hard-core, most potential customers are not so it makes sense to give them something that doesn’t make their two year old PC look inadequate. Wardell’s comments seem to be born out by his sales figures.