Piracy Helps Grow PC Markets?

The folks over at BigDownload have an interview up from the president of the PC Gaming Alliance group, Randy Stude. The PC Gaming Alliance group is non-profit organization that formed last year to help promote and improve the state of PC gaming through advocacy groups and committees aimed at getting real info out there about the PC gaming industry. With the release of their Horizon report, they have been able to show that in 2007, the PC gaming sector continued to grow and had a revenue of almost $11B. Just goes to show that PC gaming is far from dead.

One interesting part of the interview is when they started talking about the DRM/Spore issues that happened in 2008, in which Mr. Stude had some interesting things to say:

Q: This past fall a small but vocal group of anti-DRM gamers have let themselves be known. What do you think about this group and their efforts to, say, affect things like Spore's review score on Amazon.com?

A: I don't think that [those who protested Spore's DRM scheme] is anti-DRM as much as they are anti-Spore's approach to DRM. Their protest has been echoed many times on many gaming forums and the PCGA is listening...

Q: If you ask [Stardock and Valve] about the rate of piracy for their games you may find that one has rampant piracy and the other has almost none. The PC Gaming Industry's history is littered with examples of startups (including Stardock and Valve) that actually benefitted from wide spread piracy to grow a market for their future titles.

A: Don't get me wrong, I am not advocating piracy... However, how would Quake, Doom, Starcraft, Counter-Strike, or Half-Life have been able to grow widespread brand recognition without a widespread network of gamers openly sharing these games. These titles (and many more) defined the industry. Personally, my first experience with a first person shooter was with Doom (back in the day) and I did not pay for it. Id Software turned the corner and has a very successful business built on the back of the early free/open source exchange of their games...

To be upfront, Id's Doom was a shareware game, in which you got a free version of the game first and paid a fee to upgrade the game if you wanted to do so, but I think Mr. Stude makes a good case here. Oftentimes letting people have a taste of a game, if it is a good game, is the very thing that helps a developer gain a foothold in the market. With PC gaming leading the market with digital distribution of games, learning how to balance the fine line of piracy and getting people to try a good product is definitely something that behooves the industry to more fully understand, and greatly limiting the user's rights to installing a game seems to be one that the PC gaming audience is not very happy with. Check out the full interview and see what else Randy has to say.

Interview: PC Gaming Alliance's president gives us an update [BigDownload]
[via GamePolitics]