Sins of a Solar Empire blog: on copy protection, or the lack thereof

Sins of a Solar Empire: on the lack of Copy Protection in their games - Image 1One of the interesting reasons why Stardock Corporation makes a lot of money off of its games is because of the company’s ability to maintain good relations with their consumers, and ultimately, to make those consumers a part of their fanbase.

One way they’ve done this is by removing copy protection from their games, yet creating incentive for people to stick to buying the original, and that’s the topic they’re discussing in their recent blog post for Sins of a Solar Empire. More on this after the jump!

Sins of a Solar Empire: on copy protection - Image 1

In a recent blog post from the folks at Stardock Games, the author talked about the nature of Copy Protection in games, and why Stardock’s games didn’t seem to have any. According to the post, it was about creating a new system that created incentive for consumers to actually buy Sins of a Solar Empire, instead of pirate it.

Stardock’s system of not having copy protection focuses on producing a greater incentive to buy games rather than steal them by having great post-release service and support. Making a comparison to their earlier game, Galactic Civilizations 2, they noted that the money they made from Gal Civ 2 was based primarily on digital sales.

As the author of the blog post explained the nature of copy protection:

Any system out there will get cracked and distributed. But if you provide reasonable after-release support in the form of free updates that add new content and features that are painless for customers to get, you create a real incentive to be a customer.

As I mentioned earlier, Galactic Civilizations II was success in terms of actual sales, critical reception, and most importantly, satisfaction by strategy gamers.

With the game going gold, it’s certainly about time for us to learn the fate of Sins of a Solar Empire. Their strategy of going without copy protection has proven to be a relative hit among strategy gamers, and it’s certainly bound to make its mark when the game hits store shelves.

In the meantime, all we’ve got to do is make the all important decision: Will you be buying the game digitally, or in a box?

Via Sins of a Solar Empire Blog

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