Cav's Place

I saw an interesting idea in an interview about Spore and the future of gaming (link goes directly to the page that answer is on). This seems to take my idea of paying only for the right to use software even further and I’m surprised that it’s coming from such a person. Of course, it’s possible I understood it wrong and his idea would mean something unpleasant for the user, but when Will Wright mentioned selling the parts inside a game, so a game like Spore would be free in itself but then you’ll pay a few cents for every part used while playing, I imagined a rather nice scenario.

For one, simply having the installation kit for a certain program wouldn’t require any kind of purchase. After all, you’re not using it if it’s not installed, you just keep it around in case you might want to use it at some point. You obviously won’t be allowed to sell copies of said kit to make a profit, but offering it for free via file-sharing would be completely legal. The license fee would only need to be paid after you install and actually start using the program, and not all at once. This could also work for other types of software, but now I mean only to talk about games.
I have problems with that idea of paying a couple of cents for each item in a game like Spore where you use thousands of them, but they could have activation codes (or patches) for each part of the game. Still talking about Spore, since it’s practically five games rolled up into one, each of the parts could cost a fifth of the price of the full game to activate, payable the first time you get to that part of the game. If you start over, everything that has already been activated will stay active, of course. If you uninstall and then reinstall the game, then you still have the codes and will be able to immediately reactivate the parts that were activated when you uninstalled. This could also work very well for RPGs that are split into “chapters”, strategy games that are split into campaigns and scenarios and so on. But don’t confuse this with what we already have, namely episodic content, that’s completely different and I think it’s a really bad idea.
Of course that won’t be a problem for pirates, they’ll just figure out valid codes and players will be able to activate everything without paying. But I think it will curb piracy because it is a fairer method of payment. You’re no longer forced to pay for something you’re not using, and you don’t need to pay for all of it if you decide to stop playing at a certain point. If you decide to start again later, you’ll simply need to pay the rest at that time. This will also encourage developers to create games that keep gamers interested from start to end, so they won’t abandon them for good at some point and therefore never pay the full fee.
The issue I foresee is privacy, as companies will try to install (pointless) anti-piracy measures which will make games “call home” to report a player’s progress and compare with the amount paid. If electronic payment will be used, as it certainly will be at least in some countries, they’ll naturally claim that it’s a way to make it easier for the players, the money being deducted from their credit card as they reach the next phase of the game, so they won’t need to quit the game, pay, get the code, enter the code and then resume playing. But that could easily be solved by a pre-pay scheme and activation codes. The player pays a certain amount for a certain amount of parts, or even for the whole game, they get activation codes for each part and then once they reach that part all they have to do is enter the code and keep playing.

Thinking about it like that, and also about how it tends to favor smaller publishers and developers, it sounds like something that’s too good for the consumer to have a chance of being accepted by the industry. But who knows, could it be that piracy will pressure them into being fair, seeing that their attempts of reducing it by using harsh methods are doomed to fail?