People do experience the game. Just not much of it if they suck. You might as well argue that you should get money off a tennis racquet because you don't win Wimbledon.
Wimbledon is not the entirety of tennis. You can experience fully tennis without getting to wimbledon standard.
If the developers spent 50% of their development time on the final level, that only 5% of its purchasers' ever got to see, you must agree that is poorly managed. But you still spend 100% of the cost on a game whether you see that end content or not.
OK, assuming we were to go along with this insane idea of charging for as much of the game as you play, how do we do that? How do game companies assess how much of the game you play and how much you have to pay them?
Simple, you section it out. Then if the company starts getting sloppy and puts out crap, people will get tired of it and stop subscribing. Instead of a product, you are providing a service, and this is the key issue. The trick is to make whatever it is you produce *renewable* and not a one off.
Sadly, that's not how it works. If a book falls apart, you don't automatically get a new copy.
True, but once you have steam and registered a copy of the game, you can install it onto any PC when you log in. The same can be done of any media assuming that you have a licence for it.
This is the difference between the old approach and the new. The old approach is entirely random, because if you have a lot of money from a succesful product, you can then use that money to make another product etc. But criticality means that a failed product is a big drain, and there is little feedback from the community etc. However, a more bitesize approach lessens the "immediate" cost, however, pleasing your customers becomes a routine service, that people will not pay if you do not deliver.
Stop looking at "games" "books" and "music" as the medium upon which they are delivered, but as the content itself. And, imho, stop looking at them as a finite, cut and polished, product. Of course all of those could be pirated - but the point is to make them available piece by piece, and only through a strong relationship make them available. There is absolutely no reason why after going into WHSmiths and buying Harry Potter & the bla bla bla, I get on the train with my laptop and carry on reading online - after all, I paid for the rights to read that material, whether it was on paper or whatever, I understand that extra costs are involved with distribution/artist in the book etc, but businesss models can be evolved to accomodate those.
Just because things are happening the way they do at the moment doesn't mean they *always will*. Music used to be 100% medium based, now people download their music and chuck it on whatever they like. If music companies had caught on years ago that this was the way to do it, they could have been minted, providing not only the music itself, but the *added* benefit, such as high quality, album cover, lyrics etc etc that all go together than simply an mp3, which is what most music has been reduced to. The same can be applied to any medium - and coming back for more and more drives up sales, not reduces them.
Books, chapter by chapter. Magazines, article by article. Games, level by level. Music, song by song. Piracy only happens in isolation, as I have said, however, it is pretty difficult to pirate the atmosphere of a live concert, it is difficult to pirate a live server, it is difficult to pirate *quality* and *validity* and extras - all you can do is make a "shallow echo" of the media itself. And anyone who knows anything about software knows it is all about *source*, why isn't this being applied to other types of media?
All we need is some good media based viruses...
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