Tech & Biz

EA Admits Piracy Does Not Equal Lost Sales

by Jordan Yerman | October 1, 2008 at 12:21 pm

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Electronic Arts, that titan of the gaming world, has finally figured out that the alternative to game piracy isn't necessarily buying the game. If price is a factor, then the alternative is simply not getting the game at all. This realization dawns in the wake of a full-on PR disaster triggered by EA's DRM-crippled Spore release.

Electronic Arts says that it understands how an illegally downloaded copy is not, in any way, a copy that was lost as a sale to the company. Mariam Sughayer, who is working for the corporate communications department of EA, says that “Stepping aside from the whole issue of DRM, people need to recognize that every BitTorrent download doesn’t represent a successful copy of a game, let alone a lost sale”. Understanding this, the company is getting ready to shift its approach so that it rewards the customer rather than punishing everyone for the sins of pirates.

I'm not advocating illegal filesharing, but crippling your product to the extent where piracy is the only to get the thing to work is a horrible business plan by any measure.