14 DAY TRIAL // On January 18 quite a few websites went black in order to protest two bills before the United States Congress and Senate, the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act, and even the mighty Google delivered a strong message against them.
The main aim of the bills, backed mostly by the movie and music industry, is to allow authorities to take out websites that are hosting pirated content without first allowing them to police themselves and remove such content on request.
Piracy, both on the PC and on home console, also threatens the video games industry and developers and publishers have sometimes taken quite strong action in order to stop it, from introducing ever stronger DRM to pushing the use of tools like Steam and Origin.
But the best thing that the video game industry has done is to accept some simple facts: not every piece of pirated content is a lost sale and offering a better experience to paying customers than possible pirates is a good way of pushing up sales.
This different view of piracy is, in part, why most video game companies were lukewarm when it came to support for PIPA and SOPA and why a number of them came out against the two bills before the January 18 blackout.
And both the music and the movie industry need to learn a couple of lessons from the video game industry:
- make products available quickly on all major markets – sure there are still three day pauses between North American and European releases, but sometimes television series only make the jump after one full year;
- make sure to drop prices significantly after short periods of time – low quality games often get big discounts on Steam one month after launch, DVDs and Blu-ray rarely do;
- create a solid platform like Steam that can deliver content from more than one publisher – Hulu was supposed to do so, but it lacks the audience and the community services of the digital distribution service from Valve.