The recent court ruling against The Pirate Bay operators "will slow down the 'overt' sharing," Acclaim exec and former game designer David Perry wrote on his personal blog. "But it's an impossible battle to win."
"It's like Sony when they release new firmware updates for the PSP handheld because hackers keep breaking the previous one," Perry explained. "After countless firmware updates, at some point you accept that this battle is going to go on forever."
"Jail-broken iPhones being another example. It's actually impressive to last a full 24 hours before the next crack happens," he added.
Perry believes that the only way for media companies to combat piracy is by reducing prices and focus on convenience, quality and access.
Unfortunately, Perry "don't expect media companies to consider this option, they will keep charging more and more and more and more (just like the video game industry is doing), the prices will continue to rise, and piracy will be fuelled. I call it the money wall and we just keep making it higher, making the barrier-to-entry worse and worse. It doesn't require an MBA to see that's not a good strategy."
Gaming industry is in a slightly better position as they provide interactive content. "Our industry has very smart people too, and so if anyone can get this right, our industry can. But the solution isn't to fight in courts, or to play 'revision ping pong' with hackers, it's to move forward and design convenience, quality and access at a mass market price. That's what will get people to pay, even if there's an inferior pirate version available on some dodgy website."
"At Acclaim.com, ALL our games are free to play, you only pay if you fall in love with the game. For me, there is no better business proposal for the gamer. Secondly, if file sharers share Acclaim game files, they actually save us money (as we don't need to pay for delivery bandwidth)," David Perry concluded. "We have ZERO piracy, and file sharers our are friends!"
