InstantAction's Louis Castle

I would argue that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, or Need for Speed: Shift, any of these games have such an immediate curve appeal to somebody. If you were able to actually easily access those games, with 500 million people on Facebook, you would have millions of people playing those games in a week, too. Easily.

It's just that you can't. It's just so challenging, it's so difficult to get to that content. You have to buy a box. You have to hook it up to your television. You have to use this funky controller. It's not where you are. You have to make a point to say, 'I'm going to go play a game instead of watch television.' All of those things are barriers to seeing this ubiquitous entertainment happen. Facebook, through their interface, allowed Zynga to show us exactly what games will be. That's the way games need to be distributed.

Yeah. The big publishers, having just come from one, look at the PC business and say, 'The only way this survives is if we can find something that makes piracy irrelevant.' The dumb ones are trying to stop piracy through protection and secrecy. You know what? Pirates are going to beat it. Build a better mousetrap, get smarter mice. They're going to crack it.

Our system is very difficult to crack, but I would never say it can't be cracked. Of course it can. But the reason it's difficult is different from the reason other people are. We're not out there trying to do a copy protection scheme, DRM. What we're really doing is we're offering a service which is hard-drive management, which never puts the entire game on the system. That just makes it very difficult to steal. You can do it, it's just harder. We encrypt every single packet with an individual for security to make sure that the right person is getting the packet. Then we tie it in to all the different networking features with your social network. So now that makes it even harder yet, because you'd have to rip all that out to get it to work.

What I always ask myself is, forget about the pirate for a second. People focus on the actual act of piracy and the pirate breaking the game. That's not the problem. If you think about it, those people are few and far between. There are maybe a few thousand in the entire world. Those guys don't hurt you. If all of those guys ended up stealing your game, and each of them bought a copy, frankly, to steal it, you actually sold a lot already, right? So they don't bother you. The problem is the consumer can find the pirated content easier and acquire it more easily and cheaper than they can acquire the official content, with all of the features intact. That's the problem.

What InstantAction does is it says, okay, let's attack it from the difficulty, first of all. Let's make it really hard. Well what's the consumer going to do? They could go to a pirate site, risk getting virused, download the game, which is going to take them on BitTorrent five or six hours on a cable modem. Or you can go play it on Facebook or InstantAction for free in 10 minutes. Instantaneously if you have a Gaikai feed.

Well I can tell you, from a consumer's point of view, I'm not going to the pirate site. I'm not going to wait hours to get something that may or may not be the real thing when I can go play the real thing for free right now. If I'm playing it for free for a while and I really like it, I'm not going to mind paying a buck or two for every so many minutes, or buying items, or paying subscription fees. Those fees are not the issue. Once the game is compelling the consumers will pay because they want the content. They've shown that time and time again.

Will they pay in small amounts? Yes, they'll pay small amounts over time. Will they pay 50 or 60 bucks? Probably not. But that's okay. You don't have to charge them that way. You should be able to charge them in incremental fees. Once you do that though, you've both eliminated the reason that the consumers go to pirate sites, and made it very challenging for those people who host those pirate sites to bother to crack your games. If you're doing it for a commerce reason, you'll never spend your time. If you're doing it for the challenge, okay, you'll crack it.