Applying the Blizzard model

I was thinking about this recently - Blizzard are making the most money (ever) for any video game out there with World of Warcraft and there is no piracy involved at all. I'm confident the money made is in the billions of dollars and they don't have to worry about piracy, the only thing they have to worry about is 3rd parties making money off their product and obviously to keep their customers by keeping the game changing/dynamic and challenging. An ideal situation, so why not look into this *model* for audio software?

Essentially, you pay to play WOW via monthly subscription - you buy the main engine and various expansions that come out over time but you HAVE to pay the monthly fee to play, this brings in the bulk of money and means the game can get bigger and better as the team working on it all get paid. How do you convert this into an acceptable business model for the DAW world? First of all you HAVE to say 'sorry no-go' to users not having an internet connection - this will exclude some users from this system but it's 2009 - internet is everywhere and is part of the whole piracy problem (not getting into this now) so one would assume that offline users were less of the problem (exceptions exist of course). You buy the DAW/plugin engine but this does not work without the monthly subscription.

But rectumfire, (in general) people dislike dongles and ilok, isn't this the same thing?

Well no it's not. What do you get for the inconvenience of using a dongle? You get to use the product out of the box and a feeling that you have done a good thing by supporting the software manufacturer. Pirates have to use often buggy cracks and every time there is an update will have to recrack etc and they do not have the support you get when you buy a bona fide piece of legit software. This is nice. However, it's often not enough to deter the pirate and make them jump into the paying model. There has to be a combination of incentive and a forced authentication (each time using software) which is how Blizzard does it. You do not need to slot something into your machine to authenticate your product!

So here we have it:

The WORLD of DAWCRAFT!!

- explore an online world of goblin engineers, moody orcish mastering professionals.. and fight the binary buccaneers for control of the..

Ok that's not what i meant.

A lot of the problem stems from the online and how open it is. People are roaming around grabbing everything they see willy-nilly with very little guilt. So take the fight to their grounds, take the fight online, force people to authenticate! As a reward they will get monthly extras (of high quality (samples/plugs), special offers, credits etc), constant bug fixing, online support and eventually you could even create an online spot where you can go and have your mixes/mastering done by pros and even get musicians to play on your songs. Take it online! A small part could be available offline but only as a result of having been online at some point and authenticated.

I think this is all controversial. Just an idea.

Many people unplug their DAW computer from the internet to avoid viruses. I only plug mine in to get updates. I would hate this.

That works for WoW, because you actually need the game server to play... just having online authentication is not enough - for example, games like Halflife2 have to connect to Steam everytime before they play, but they still get cracked the day of release.

The only way this idea would actually work, is if processing were happening on the DAW makers servers... I guess instead of offloading DSP power to a PCI card, you could stream your audio to them and have them compress/EQ it?

I don't think that's likely to happen soon (latency and all)

So pretty much your suggestion would just result in pirates pirating as usual, and people that pay monthly fees to use it hating it.

^^^Not only to avoid viruses but to kill all extraneous processes in general. While tracking the only thing I want the computer to think about is writing those tracks to the hard disk.

People buy WOW online time to interact with other real people, DAW users do not require this interaction.

have you read some of the posts people make here? i think some people are in definite need of interaction, read a big big hug.

+1 on the NO NET for A) not having to run AV, Firewalls, antimalware..ect (too many processes, driver conflicts, ect)
B)getting infected
C) getting confidential client data hacked (ie.. songs, cuts, that aren't yet released/ copyrighted)

And the Big One... if my internet connection goes down... I'm Out of a Studio??? are you effing kidding me? A for effort, Big thumbs down on the idea.

There is a ton of hacking and piracy in WOW including completely hacked games and private servers.

Sid - my original post included reference to private servers but it's not really relevant as it's extremely minor and who wants to play an MMO with a group of 5 ppl alone, defeats the whole purpose. There is some hacking in the game but it is dealt with very quickly - certainly not widespread and this is included in my pointing to Blizz eliminating 3rd parties from benefiting from the profits.

To other comments - fair enough, I see your points of view and appreciate them and had considered them before posting. I still see online authentication as a way forward but I'm certainly not on a crusade, was just an idea, multiple dongles for me is absurd and a no go and although Ilok works ok, it's really a fraction of what it really could be if they made it a little more interesting.

I also do appreciate that a lot of peepz don't want their DAW online but the idea isn't to have the DAW online all the time so there are no processes using up juice and when the connection is made it's to a reliable source - how many of you worry about getting a virus when you update from apple.com or didgiwidgismidgipidgidesign.com? It's internet on (virus checker on if you are super anal), authenticate/update, internet off (virus checkers off).

Anyways just throwing ideas around, no crusade as I said. I don't mind using one dongle.. but it had better be.. more *interesting* than it is now. I would bet that the internet will be used for auth in the future though.

Ps the point about no internet no DAW? is a very good one. I guess you would have a backup dongle for temporary offline use. Back to square one

ding ding ding

plus there's alot of people who don't/won't play wow for the very fact that you have to pay for it, plus there's plenty of free mmo's that kick the living sheit out of wow.

regardless, another problem with WoW (not sure if it was mentioned yet) but blizzard collects data from your pc... no thanks on that, if anything companies could offer a subscription for custom support or a subscriber forum for tips and tricks for their software.