BioWare to combat piracy through customer loyalty
Ask a hundred PC game developers about piracy, and you're likely to come away with at least as many ideas on how to keep games from being flown beneath the Jolly Roger. There's even those who have thrown up their arms already, sailing instead for calmer console waters or opting just to keep piracy 'in perspective.' However, when it comes to Mass Effect dev BioWare, fighting piracy is as trivial as simply making games that people want to buy by nurturing customer fidelity through DLC and engaging multiplayer options.
"That's ultimately the best, most successful path to prevent piracy," noted BioWare's co-CEO Ray Muzyka, "to have players that want your games, want to believe in them and think they're high-quality and realize they're going to get a lot of value out of them as platforms for long time afterwards." It's a great theory, though we imagine that getting players to want your game isn't exactly the problem; it's getting them to open their wallets for them that's the trick.
