the interview is kind huge so take a look
http://www.shacknews.com/featuredarticle.x?id=994
Stardock CEO Brad Wardell made headlines recently with the debut of the "Gamer's Bill of Rights," a ten-point plan to revitalize PC gaming that he developed in conjunction with Gas Powered Games CEO Chris Taylor.
Always honest and never shy, Wardell has gained a reputation as an outspoken critic of many conventional responses to the problems facing the PC platform. Recently I caught up with him for a lengthy interview, covering everything from the Bill's conception to his controversial views on piracy.
What is his answer to charges of setting unrealistic goals in the interest of a publicity stunt? What does he have to say about Crysis developer Crytek's conservative stance on piracy? Does the Sins of a Solar Empire developer read the Shacknews comments? Read on to find out.
Shack: Tell me about how the Gamer's Bill of Rights came about.
Brad Wardell: The genesis of it was.. a friend of mine, who's been a hardcore PC gamer, bought Oblivion for the Xbox 360. And I asked him, "Why did you do that? You're a PC guy. Why would you want a.." I'm not anti-console, but I wouldn't want, I couldn't imagine--I was really surprised.
And he says, "I'll tell you why. I buy it for my Xbox, it's gonna work. Period. It's just gonna work. I know it's going to be finished, and I know it's going to work."
So I started talking to him, and then I got to talking to other people who are--they're not the people who hang out on Shack. These are people who are normal, day to day--
Shack: Oh, normal people. [laughs]
The people who are going to buy stuff are going to buy it, and the people who are never gonna buy it, well, who cares about them? They're not a lost sale.
Brad Wardell: Yeah, I mean, it's funny. I'm at PAX, and I'm trying to find out what's happening at PAX, so I'm logging onto Shacknews to find out what's at PAX, but I'm at PAX. [laughs]
But we're into it, we're into the gaming community so to speak. So these are just regular, more casual gamers, but they buy games. And it came up over and over again. One guy had gotten a game with Starforce on it, and it had actually messed up his ability to burn DVDs. I'm not a Starforce expert, but--
Shack: That's actually happened to me.
Brad Wardell: It did? But you know how to fix that stuff, right? Basically his solution was to reinstall Windows. And he says, "I'm done." He's not buying games from anybody, because he doesn't know what uses it and what doesn't.
And another guy bought a game, and he's in the armed forces, he's in Iraq actually. And the people there, not everybody there is in combat all the time, they're just stationed there, and they often don't have internet access. So he gets a game, it's single-player only--you can probably guess what game it is, pretty big-name game. And he can't play it because it insists on connecting to the internet to play it. And he's just like, "That's it. I can buy an Xbox 360 or a PlayStation 3, and I'm not putting up with this. It just works."
So we collected all these things, and over the last couple years we started changing our own policies to fit this. Because it's easy to go and say how the game is and how it should work if you're not going to walk the walk.
So we started saying, "Are these things doable? And if they are doable, are they doable and profitable?" Because we're not doing this because we're nice guys per se, we're doing this because we think it'll make our business stronger, and the industry stronger business-wise.
One of the first things was our copy-protection, not putting CD copy protection on there. And sure enough, that increased our sales, because you'd have a lot of people who'd buy the games, who knew about this because they knew it'd just work--knew that we're not installing anything.
And then we started doing the after-release updates a lot. Every time we do an update to our game and it gets announced somewhere, our sales at retail go up. You know the industry well enough to know that it's unusual for a game to come out in February and make it into the following Christmas season at Wal-Mart and Best Buy--but Sins of a Solar Empire is. And one of the big reasons for that is that every time the sales start to slow, we release an update, a meaningful update that gets people excited again, and the sales go back up at retail. So that was another thing. We thought, "Well, if people start doing that they'll see their sales increase."
And then the last thing was refunds. That was the one we were most nervous about. If I get a game, and it doesn't work, getting a refund. Well what if the people lie? They get the game, they make a copy.
So we started doing this to see what the impact would be. And it turns out, hardly anyone returns their game, but the fact that they know they can if it doesn't work on their computer greatly increases sales.
Shack: So are you thinking about this as more of a public relations initiative?
Brad Wardell: It's not so much a PR value, it's more of a security value. What happens is that a lot of people buy the game for their console because they know it's going to work on their console. They buy it for their PC and it's like, "What is Pixel Shader 2? I don't know what that is." And so their game doesn't work. "But I got a GeForce! It should work, right? GeForce!" "What kind?" "I don't know! An Nvidia one!"
And it doesn't work on their machine, and they go back to the store, and the store goes, "You can't return a game, you opened it." And so they're like, "Screw this, I'll just get a console game."
In the console market, you can't pull this crap.
So what we started to do is, if you send the game back to us, we'll pay you the full price you pay at retail, even though we're going to eat it. So there was a lot of nervous people around here saying, "Gosh, you could end up with 10,000 people sending back this game, which we're eating $20 a unit on it." Because our wholesale price is like $20 on a $40 game. So if someone comes back and we're sending them a check for $39.95, they're just like, "Oh no."
But it turns out people see this policy and hardly anyone ends up returning it, because it does work on most people's machines. It's like a tiny percent that don't. But because they know it will work, we get people buying it who would not otherwise. So then it becomes a question of, are you going to gain more sales because people are confident it's going to work for them, versus the number of sales you lose because people returned it. And so far it's been a no-brainer.
So then I got talking to [Gas Powered Games CEO] Chris Taylor about this last spring, and I said, "Well, you know, Stardock's kind of small." I mean, if I were a gamer and I saw this from Stardock, I'd go, "Well who the hell are they? Aren't they those Galactic Empire guys?" I mean, how presumptuous.
And Chris said, "No, we should totally do this. And if it gets enough attention you might actually get other publishers who might want to get together, and we could create some sort of like--you know, if we made a contract, then you start putting this on your boxes or something, then people can go, 'Oh okay, it adheres to whatever these principles are.'"
So from there we started working together and came up with exact principles. And we said, well, let's make them vague. And if people like them then we can start meeting with other publishers and actually make it into a more legalese thing that spells out--it's almost like a license that people have to agree to. Because obviously who determines if a game is done? What exactly is "done"? What is "meaningful updates"? What do you mean "treating players as criminals"?
So that's what we did. We announced it at PAX. And it's worked out great
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