There’s an interesting article over on Ars Technica today about the recently released SiN: Episodes and piracy.

Within three hours of the release of Ritual’s SiN Episodes Emergence, the game was pirated and up on the ‘Net; releasing it on Steam had little effect on piracy, at least initially. When a bug in the game was discovered, Ritual patched it and released the update via Steam… and that update was applied to the game slyly, in the background. Users who had paid for the game received the update. Those who had pirated the game didn’t, but that didn’t stop them from complaining to customer support.

The issue of the cost of providing support is very briefly touched on in the article, since of course there are costs involved in providing this support.

One of the side effects of our own GTIP service is that it equally applies and provides support to all copies of game, legitimate or not, and equally generates revenue from all copies of a game, legitimate or not, so companies can continue to earn money from a game even if it is pirated. They may not make the full retail cost of the game back, but at least some of the cost can be mitigated.

How does it do this? The service is a pure question/answer service, and is not tied electronically or functionally to any particular game, and there is no ‘vailidity check’ made. The service is entirely seperate from the actual, physical game, and is an information service. It just happens that each answer sent to a question generates income, regardless of why the question was asked.

Another side effect of this seperation is that it also generates revenue from second hand games, rental game and games no longer available for sale, and can help to achieve a higher return on a title, as well as improving customer relations by ensuring that customers always get a personal response to their questions.

OK, end of sales pitch. But it also shows that providing customer support doesn’t have to be a loss.