Spore, EA and Piracy

Here’s an important article I’ll be duplicating under Key Articles for current 2nd year GET students in the Business in Computer Games subject next year in April.

IGN Entertainment and Ipsos Media CT did a comprehensive study on video gamers. Their study revealed a number of findings, some of which I think has long been suspected by many of us who play games, but now it’s objective and statistical fact. Some facts from the press release here.

Age: “55% of gamers polled were married, 48% have kids, and new gamers – those who have started playing videogames in the past two years – are 32 years old on average.”

Social networking: “According to the research, more than 75% of videogamers play games with other people either online or in person.”

Salary levels: “In terms of hard dollars, the average gaming household income ($79,000) is notably higher than that of non-gaming households ($54,000), but the value of the gamer as a marketing target can be seen in a variety of ways.”

The more detailed press release is available here.

(Picture from http://www.bethanylife.org/)

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One of the more controversial incidents in computer gaming this year has surrounded EA’s implementation of Digital rights management in Spore.

Allegedly some gamers are actually consciously pirating the game as protest, if you believe what TorrentFreak says: that the game has been downloaded 500,000 times – making it possibly the most pirated game ever:

The editors at TorrentFreak suggest, “The idea behind DRM is that it will stop people from pirating the game, but in reality, it often has the opposite effect.”

Gamasutra has weighed in on the controversy with a succinct article that provides viewpoints from both EA and industry analysts. Its a great read, and will be bookmarked here as a resource article on the business of computer games.

(Picture from AtariArchives.org)