Penny Arcade – The Changing Face of Digital Media and the Games Industry

For a games publisher to release a game for 1p sounds like some sort of commercial suicide – when that very game is the last throw of the dice for an otherwise dying franchise, it seems on the face of things to be an absolutely insane move.

With the game now available at full price (a lowly £19.99 – hardly expensive) across Europe, the 1p offer has given the game a major boost, raised its profile and given the soccer management genre a much needed shot in the arm.

Interestingly it’s also been relatively difficult for pirates to grab a copy of the game on the torrent indexes until around two weeks after full release. The game was launched on September 11th across the UK and Europe in various language versions – pre-launch buyers were informed via email that their download was available which involved a sticky bit of automated online activation; some buyers were frustrated by bad internet connections and poor server responses.

For a game to take so long to appear as an illegal download on a torrent site so long after its launch date marks a success in both the war against piracy and the backlash against DRM. While there’s little chance of there ever been a repeat of the Demigod debacle (a poorly executed release which resulted in the game servers being annihilated by pirated copies of the game) the games industry has been taking the piracy question more and more seriously ever since the theft of the original version of Half Life 2 back in 2003.

Electronic Arts meanwhile received a huge backlash from fans concerned by the destructive nature of the DRM that was packaged with The Sims 2 – this anger grew and grew over the intervening years until with the release of The Sims 3 EA announced that no DRM would be used. The reason? Nothing to do with the way in which the DRM destroyed the game, but everything to do with Spore, the previous release from Will Wright which had been heavily DRM’d with SecuROM... and ended up as the most downloaded game on the torrent network as gamers queued to get a version of the game without SecuROM.

There have been plenty of lessons to be learnt in the battle against piracy, but the real story here is the success of the 1p offer and the subsequent press coverage for Championship Manager 2010. The game held the number 1 spot in the PC games charts for two consecutive weeks and a month after release was still in the top 5.

With the old enemy releasing the next installment of Football Manager in late October however, Eidos will be keen that their new game proves it is more than a low price, overnight sensation and that it holds its own in the PC games sales chart.