Indie Developer Positech Games is releasing an incredible game called “Gratuitous Space Battles“:

Positech developer Cliff Harris made big headlines on SlashDot when he wrote an open letter to pirates asking why would they steal from a small indie developer. He got some surprisingly frank answers and posted them on his blog. He took many responses to heart and made some changes to see how the pirate community would better receive and actually buy his product.

Unsurprisingly, many pirates didn’t.

After all that trouble, I certainly hope that he makes some gratuitous amounts of money with this beautiful game.

It seems that the gaming industry is moving away from DRM in reaction to what happened with Spore and its DRM fiasco.  Now it seems that EA is releasing the Sims 3 with no DRM, only the CD-key for copy protection.

Personally, I see this as a good move because so much money is wasted on piracy protection that proves ineffective.  However, my hope is that this does not embolden more blatant theft because of how much easier it will be to pirate software.

While I believe that smaller indie studios such as 2D Boy shouldn’t have DRM, the big studios suffer from the “stick it to the man” mentality that many pirates espouse.  So a piece of me thinks that this may be a bad move.

While draconian measures of DRM are a bit much, some level of copy protection should be in place.  As a consumer, this gives me a good feeling that the big corporation out there is protecting the money I spent on investing in their product rather than feeling like a fool because everyone else got it for free.  As an indie, I believe that DRM is a bad idea.  But as a big publisher, I think that some DRM is a good idea, because it gives me, the consumer, a feeling of due diligence put in by the publisher.

Also, I believe that DRM is good against having the product being resold on the market by GameStop.  I believe that the creative minds behind the game should get the money due to them, rather than the middleman who is good at recycling used games.  But hey, it’s still a free market and people are willing to shell out their money “gently used” games.

The key, I believe is that the price is too high for most AAA games.  Once that price is brought down for a new game, revenues will go up and there will be more new games bought than used games at a discount.

According to NPD marketing research, consumers will spend equal to or even more money on entertainment this year than last year.  This is great news for the gaming industry in general – though I’d like to think that indies have even more chances now than ever to make a mark because people will still be searching for the greatest value for their money.

“Even in the face of a down economy, entertainment remains a popular spending category,” says NPD analyst Russ Crupnick.

“Most consumers say they’ll continue to purchase at least the same amount of many entertainment categories in the coming year.”

This makes me wonder if the bursting economy was just an excuse for the big-AAA gaming industry companies to “right-size” its projects because all signs show that the entertainment industry would not be affected by the economy. Well… Except for the massive “adjustment” the stock market made in the last few months. But even then, the creators of Grand Theft Auto IV who sold over 13 million copies, still took major losses, so why wouldn’t their stock fall in the open market?

I believe that the current models of business for the entertainment industry are unsustainable – not without a substantial increase in technology for the creation of game content or a completely different business model, such as fostering more downloadable content “episodes” of an established product.

The amount of effort it takes to create high-quality game content versus the payoff it makes is getting more and more marginal as technology increases and there is a significant shift to DLC and multiplayer experiences to create a “long tail” effect on keeping a game alive in the market and making money.

The other factor to consider is that the  NPD study seemed only to focus on the US market.  The world economy in general is in deeper trouble, and more than likely there will be a dramatic spike in piracy in the coming year.