Monday 30 October, 2006
Copyrighted Dragon II
Janne wrote an excellent and thought-provoking reply to my previous entry.
As Janne eluded, one of the most obvious ways to ensure that the movies, games, music and TV will be funded in the future is to get the revenue to fund the projects would be to get more advertising involved. However, while I actually think that this would easily generate enough income (I have had a lot of exposure to this lately and believe me, advertising is a way to make Big Bucks), I really don’t like it for many reasons:
The advertisers would quickly gain huge leverage over the content producers –after all, the golden rule is that he who has gold makes the rules! I really wouldn’t like to see TV, Music, Movie and games industry dominated by advertisements any more than it already is. Soon they would start dictating song lyrics for the next Bob Dylan song and the hairstyle of the game heroes, and I would leave the industry at that point.
I think that in the long term it is solutions like Xbox live and the PS3 online functionality that will give us the revenue model of the future: game code itself is going to be free, but the actual content is charged via micro-transactions, or alternatively there is a monthly subscription fee that will allow consumers to play as much as they want, perhaps with different levels of privileges based on how much you are willing to pay.
All this is of course based on the premise that every single game console and PC will be online by default, so that the central server of the content provider would be integral part of playing the game at any time. This way the consumer could do the work of getting the copy of the game himself, and the revenue would come from him buying features and game world consumables and items, or via monthly description. Of course the games industry has to grow considerably for this to happen, or else we’d have to charge something like 120$ a month per subscriber. I think this might be where we end up, though it is further in the future. At that point the antagonism between the industry and P2P sighs would end -P2P would actually become something we actively support.
I don’t know how that will work with music or TV industry though… unless all the iPods of the future are equally connected to the web. People outside Finland rarely like license fees, so universal fee collected from everyone with an iPod or TV would run into heavy resistance in most parts of the world.
Posted by Dragon at 30 October 19:22, 2006Yes, I'm sorry that I over-emphasized advertising, but as you say, it's the way to get the Big Bugs. (Bugs?)
World of Warcraft is using an integrated Bittorrent client to download upgrades already. Which is wonderful.
Many countries already have a levy on music players - Germany even implemented a tax on all computers! It's not even very far-fetched.
It's just that my feeling is that the business models will diversify a lot in the future and will rely less on shipping plastic pieces. After all, in China, where 98% of all CDs are pirated, artists still are making loads of money. They're just doing it in other ways (public/private performances, promotion, etc).
# 2 - Dragon (on October 30, 2006 10:25 PM):
Bugs... stupid spellcheker. :)
WoW of course makes it money out of monthly subscription fee, so the business model works very well for them.
It might indeed be that the future belongs to subscription-based content. Bottom line is that someone somewhere has to pay, my biggest beef is with people who think I can live on no income, and they still expect me to bust my gut working 20 hours a day making them entertainment.
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