Hmm, just found my dusty Lock-on Flaming Cliffs CD in my cupboard and got a little sentimental... However, seemingly like some other people, too, I cannot play it anymore, as I've dumped Windows a few years ago.
I was wondering, how much money might ED still be making with the first part of Lock-On Flaming Cliffs? And whether the high risk of profit loss due to pirated copies of Flaming Cliffs is still as high as it used to be. Especially, whether StarForce for the now about 7 years old Flaming Cliffs is still necessary.
I especially had to think of for instance Blizzard's actions who already removed the cd-check with a patch completely for for instance Diablo II and Warcraft III some time ago. So obviously they thought that it wouldn't be harmful anymore. I don't really think that better usability was the main incentive here - why should they care of that for these old games? I bet the main reason for doing so was more due to financial benfits other than the mere distribution of these game themselves. For instance: Sales for online cd-keys (which are practically impossible to fake). Or indirect advertisement for the series and/or the publisher, resulting in higher sales for the newer games. So basically seeing older game versions as a new kind of "demo", not directly a demo for the new game, but a demo for the publisher, the genre, the series, the awesomeness of the developers - to increase the desire and sales for the newer games.
I guess removing the StarForce protection from LOMAC FC 1 would already be a great step to easy the installation of it on Linux systems. And like someone here said earlier, LOMAC is a very specific game, it is "technical". So I think so too, quite a lot of Linux geeks that don't know of LOMAC yet would probably like it / buy it.
Also note, that I'm not asking anyone to release the first Lock-On parts for free, nor do I want to encourage people to pirate games online instead of buying an awesome game which a lot of people have put a lot of hard work in. That would probably be too risky, no one has ever tried that before and could very likely go totally in the opposite, wrong direction. I'm only asking for some small, controlled easing of distribution to increase viral marketing and profits for ED on the one hand and to satisfie some old customers on the other.
I'm not an economics person at all and I'm probably very biased because I just badly wanted to play LOMAC again a few minutes ago :). However I'm curious whether something like this sounds reasonable to the ED finance guys or whether I'm talking total bullshit :D.
tl;dr: Would the profits for ED increase for Lock-On products, especially newer ones, if the distribution/installation of older versions were eased, e.g. by removing StarForce from LOMAC FC 1?
Cheers, T_X
PS: And somehow the sentence "The greatest risk for an artist is not piracy. It's not being heard, not to be known instead." just came to my mind, can't remember the author of it right now.
