Confession...

[superluser]

When I first read about Amnesia, I was a bit skeptic, new studio, screens were good but couldn't find a (p)review on Gamespot, only user made ones, so I feared wasting money and first downloaded the game the non legal way, and played for a bit. Then I started to read more and more about how good this game was, and meanwhile while playing I got to see for myself how good it is. Then later I read the 'A week after release' blog entry, reading how Frictional Games seems to suffer a bit too much from piracy.

So, I bought the full Steam version now, and threw the non legal aquired copy in the trash. Because this studio really needs to grow, as if their games stay this good, it could make some of the greater studios bite the dust. Now please don't hate me for almost having pirated this game, I admit it is very wrong, and probably no excuse is good enough, but in truth I do not want to pirate at all, as legal copies simply bring so many benefits. (Updates, no extra bugs due to the rip, et cetera.)

Yeah. One point I've made before is that I can get whatever games/movies/music/whatever media I want for free. The only reason that I won't do that is because I want to support the people who made it.

This is sort of a paradigm shift in how we think about goods and services. It used to be that if I wanted a hammer, I'd mentally take how much I would pay for a hammer and compare it to how much more time, energy, and physical resources it would take and how much better it would work than tying a rock to a stick (or forging my own hammer).

Now, that part of the equation is completely gone for all sorts of digital media. The time and energy it takes to illegally download media makes it essentially free (dependent only on the capital investment on your computer, your internet connection speed, your energy bills and your spare time). We are now paying for the sole purpose of supporting the people who created it (and our self-interest in having them or others who watch their success provide more of the same sort of content to us in the future).

And that's a good motivator, for me. But it's radically different from the older model of physical property. It also suggests that the DRM model will fail, because people just don't think of digital media in the same way that they think about a hammer. Trying to impose physical unrealities onto digital media is something that doesn't pay attention to the strengths and weaknesses of digital media. Any successful model for this will have to play upon those strengths and minimize the weaknesses.

Here's a thought experiment: How could Frictional create a successful game without depending on a number of copies being sold? I don't know, but that's the sort of question that we will have to answer if we are going to develop a new model for digital media success.