By Bruce Everiss on Aug 17, 2010 in Business, Culture, File Sharing
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Video games are a form of intellectual property, like books and film, that, once they have been created, can be copied. Copying a game is a lot cheaper than buying it because the copier is making no contribution to the cost of making the game in the first place. But, obviously, if everybody copied there would be no revenue for games makers and there would be no games.
There are two main forms of game piracy and circumventing DRM (copy protection). There is...
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By Bruce Everiss on Jul 17, 2010 in Business, Game Development, Licensing
2
The gold standard in the games industry is currently the AAA blockbuster console title. An investment of perhaps $10-20 million or even more from a big publisher on a big team over a couple of years are required to make these offerings. And the global marketing costs run into the millions as well. The result are games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Grand Theft Auto IV, Halo 3 and Assassin’s Creed 2: Well-crafted global best sellers. And they can...
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By Bruce Everiss on Jul 16, 2010 in Business, Digital Distribution, File Sharing
0
Over $300 million dollars was stolen off of just one game, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, in 2009. Obviously, Activision had much more stolen from it with other titles, but MW2 is by far the worst affected. According to TorrentFreak, a staggering 4,100,000 copies of the PC version of MW2 were stolen and 970,000 copies of the Microsoft Xbox 360 version.
Thieves using bit torrents are indulging in the biggest orgy of theft in the history of humanity. When they...
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By Bruce Everiss on Jul 16, 2010 in Convergence, Licensing, Video Games
1
Before we start, I do know all about GoldenEye 007, the exception that proves the rule. This was made by Rare at the height of their pomp, yet ironically by a very inexperienced team there. It sold over 8 million copies back in 1997 and is considered a seminal game in the development of video gaming as a media. But one success in 30 years of trying does not make video games spun off from films a good idea.
Compare and contrast GoldenEye with Avatar from...
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Scott Steinberg is the CEO of 