Piracy

Now my first two points are issues I’ve taken with the way publishers and developers conduct business. How then does Piracy end up on the list? Surly I only have to worry about it if I chose to pirate. Well as I said in the intro I want to discuss problems with the industry and in this part it is my intention to offer argument against those who would say Piracy does not harm the industry.

Now this is possibly the most difficult of the three topics to discuss. Piracy, by its very nature, is unquantifiable. There is no way to accurately measure just how much of a problem it is. Peoples reasons for pirating are numerous and varied. Even if there was a way to count how many unofficial digital copies are made of a game there is now way to know just how many of them are actually being pirated. Any single copy just be someone using it as a digital back up of the product they’ve legitimately purchased, It may be someone trying to bypass the inconvenience of DRM and may even be the same person re-downloading a copy because their pervious one was lost or damaged.

Even the term Piracy is disingenuous. What we are actually talking about is copyright infringement. Piracy originally referred to an act of robbery committed at sea. We’re not talking about someone stealing another person’s pen here but serious acts involving taking some or all of a ship’s cargo, sometimes even the ship itself. This usually amounts to very significant sums of money that can damage the economies of multiple countries, ruin business overnight when their creditors come for their pound of flesh, often accompanied by acts of violence which can include multiple counts of murder.

Next to that, the newer definition referring to the unauthorised reproduction of copyrighted material seems rather innocent. You’re not even depriving anyone of a physical product. What harm could it do? I wasn’t going to buy a copy any way.

This tends to be the basis for most of the arguments I see defending piracy. If the copyright holders have not lost a sale then they haven’t been harmed.  The most obvious argument to this method of thinking is that whilst this may be true in any individual case, the odds of it remaining so in every case would be comparable to successfully navigating an asteroid field without any of the main characters on board. A logical counter argument is that the publicity generated by these pirate copies generate extra sales to offset any lost and may even increase the total number sold.

All of these arguments have valid truths in them but it’s impossible to win any argument with them as there is no way to measure any one against the other. That’s why my point has nothing to do with numbers because it’s simply a concept, concept of value.

If I haven’t lost all my readers by now then I’m sure to lose more when I start talking about economic theory so instead I’m going to tell a story about a Vampire merchant, a magician and a human.

This vampire has discovered, with considerable effort, a way to contain breathable air in a bottle! This particular skill holds little use for him; he hasn’t had to breathe in several hundred years. However, savvy merchant that he is he realises that this bottled air might be valuable to someone else.

Luckily there is a human nearby.  “Humans need to breathe air” the vampire thinks to himself, “Surely this human will pay me something for it.” Yet, after the vampire’s sales pitch the human replies “I’m sorry good sir, but I will not buy your bottled air” adjusting his monocle. “Not for $100, not for $1 nor for a drop of blood. For, you see, should I wish to have some air all I need do is inhale.” As the human straightened his top hat and walked away the vampire realised that if the supply of something vastly exceeds the demand then, no matter how much that thing may be desirable to a person, they are not likely to pay very much for it. A products value is, at least in part, determined by its scarcity.

Later that day both the vampire and the human find themselves locked inside a vault. There is a time release on the door set for one hours time so all the vampire need do is wait and he can walk out. The human, however, has a problem. There is only ten minutes of breathable air left in the vault. Suddenly he’s become much more interested in buying that bottled air.

This limited supply of breathable air has made the bottled air valuable, the human would be willing to pay all the money he has for it, as the minutes go by and he used up the oxygen in the air he’d willingly give all the blood he could spare. As the ten minute mark approached he might even consider trading his top hat and monocle.

However there is a third person trapped in this vault. A magician whose talents are such that, after getting a look at the Vampire’s fantastic bottled air, is able to manically conjure them at will. He tells the human he’s more than happy to conjure one for him should he but ask.

Do you think this would have any effect on the value of the vampire’s bottle? Of cause it would.

Similarly, if the vampire was a publisher, the human potential customers then the existence of pirates, the magician, must have some sort of effect on the value of games.

I’m not saying that, regardless of what some companies like to claiming, piracy is killing the entire industry. There is more money in video games every year. The biggest problem with piracy is it gives companies an excuse to do things like invasive DRM and it’s even one of the main excuses companies use to try and gain control over the internet.

So, how to stop piracy? Like the others piracy will never be stopped completely, harm minimization is the key. While I’ve previously been urging people not to spend their money, now I say spend it. To reduce the damage piracy does to one of our favourite past times all you have to do is buy things you think are worth paying for. As much as companies will notice when you stop paying for things they pay attention to when you do. Reward companies that shun invasive DRM, that make enjoyable games by giving them your hard earned cash.

There are companies out there who realise that the best way for them to combat piracy is not to fight them head on whilst trampling all over their customers but provide a better experience to the customer then the one the pirates do. If other companies see you giving your money to ones who follow this business model they are sure to follow.

To summarise, while DLC, DRM and piracy are not inherently evil the damage they do to the video games we all love is real and wide spread. While these things will never be defeated completely, they can be fought. The best way to do this is to be a smart consumer. Try not to buy into marketing hype, stop and think before you buy something. Try not to pre order and wait for reviews. If you’ve pirated something you like, when you get the money, pay for it. The marketplace is the world’s biggest democracy and you can help chose by voting with your wallet and every vote counts.

Digital Rights Management

Now we’ve come to Part two of my grudge list, Digital Rights Management.

DRM is a general term used for the methods used by publishers to try and protect their intellectual property from unauthorised use or reproduction, though there is possibly room for ulterior motives. For this reason part two and part three, piracy, are very closely related.

Once again, I’m not trying to say DRM is evil. People and businesses have every right to try to protect their intellectual property the same way everyone has a right to put a lock on their door to try and protect their physical property. Where it starts to negatively affect gaming is when it worsens or degrades the consumers experience.

There are many different forms of DRM, most with their own disadvantages to consumers, but I’ve decided to concentrate on the latest from, always online DRM, as its becoming increasingly popular and has protection to be the cause the most damage.

Time for an anecdote!

I personally loved Bioware’s Dragon Age: Origins. I thought it was a fantastic game in dearly every respect. There were, however, a few things that nearly ruined the experience. The first thing that caused me grief was the way they chose to advertise their DLC. They did so in a way that was like taking my suspension of disbelief, placing it on a rock and then hitting it with a sledge hammer. We’ve already discussed why I don’t like this kind of thing. However, when I discovered that the version of the game I’d bought already included this DLC I soon learnt just to ignore the walking billboard.

My second major gripe was with the first time I’d noticed always online DRM. Now Dragon Age: origins entirely single player game so there is no need to have to be connected to the internet to access any part of the game unless the developers/publishers decided to make it so. I soon discovered that whenever I launched the game it would try to connect to Bioware via the internet to verify my copy of the game and any DLC.

This in itself wasn’t much of an issue for me as, although I don’t have the most stable internet connection, you could still play if it was offline. There was, however, a catch. They disabled any access DLC you’d unlocked if you weren’t connected to the internet. Worse yet, if you were audacious enough to try load a game before the program had finished connecting to Bioware it would automatically assume you were blocking it from the internet and thus must be a filthy pirate, disabling your DLC accordingly. The only way to resolve this seemed to be to completely quit out of the programme and start over again.

This wasn’t the end of the world, merely a temporary inconvenience. Bioware even did a very good smoke and mirrors job to hide the DRM by integrating it with an achievement tracking and social system. Yet in the back of my mind I felt angry at them for treating me as though I’m trying to cheat them whilst also knowing that if I had pirated the game I wouldn’t be having this issue.

So here we have a practice supposedly to prevent piracy that decreases the enjoyment for paying customers and yet has so little affect on pirates that they are actually receiving the superior product.

As a further example, I bought Ubisoft’s Might and magic: heroes VI on sale at the start of this year. At the time I was unaware that this also had a version of always online DRM that prevents you from using any of the games most powerful items and characters when not actively connected to their servers – even when on single player.

When I’d downloaded and installed the game, I was unfortunate enough to discover that Ubisofts Heroes server was offline. This meant that, through no fault of my own, I was unable to obtain full access to the game I’d just paid for. Somewhat annoyed I decided to play anyway, figuring I wouldn’t get the powerful items until much later in the game. I put several hours into the game before I decided to save and call it a day.

A few days later when I decided to fire up the game again the servers were back on line. “Hooray!” thought I, “I can continue my saves with the powerful items!” Yet my excitement was soon extinguished when I discovered that Ubisofts cloud save service had proceeded to erase all my saved games as it didn’t match their records showing I had no saves at all (probably a problem with poorly implemented cloud saves then with DRM directly).

I’m sure that by this point I was doing a very good impersonation of rageface.jpg but, having a lot of brand loyalty to Heroes, I decided I’d just start from scratch. Then, a few days later, I find the servers back down again. I don’t even bother trying to play this time. In fact, since I first installed the game, whenever I’ve attempted to play, their servers have been down more often than not. If I happened to be mid game when I lost connection to servers I would be kicked the main menu without so much as stopping to save.  After a few weeks I gave up entirely.

I now have no intention of any intention of ever buying another Heroes of might and magic game ever again, and I’m certainly very wary of any Ubisoft titles. I also do a lot more research before buying any game to check if it has always online DRM so I know not to buy it. I pity anyone who’s bought any title with always online DRM that doesn’t allow for any form of play in offline mode.

As I’d stated in part one, business want to make money. Why would they continue a practice that seems to encourage piracy? My reasoning is that there is a combination of two reasons. It’s possible that the only thing more important to a CEO in his relationship with shareholders then to be making money is to appear to be making money. Shareholders don’t necessarily have an in-depth knowledge of the games industry so when they hear that piracy is killing the industry they will demand to know what the CEO is doing about it. DRM is something the CEO can point to and say “look, this is what I’ve done, it will save all your money!”

The second reason is simply that Piracy is quite probably not the only motive behind DRM and may well only be a convenient excuse marketing can use to justify including it. DRM can also be used to try and prevent people from lending or trading games, a practice which is much harder for publishers to villainies then piracy. Online DRM can be used to monitor customers playing habits in order to calculate how best to drain money out of the masses in the future, big brother always looking over your shoulder. But what scares me the most is that DRM can be used to stop you playing!

This is the biggest reason I dislike always online DRM. When the company decides that they no longer want to support servers for a game then it becomes impossible for anyone ever to prove they haven’t pirated the game and so said game will forever treat them as though they have. This means that DRM is giving companies the power to disable part or all of the game you’ve paid good money for and try to force you to buy their new game instead.

Earlier I compared DRM to like having a lock on your door. Well to make another physical world comparison the above scenario would be like the guy at the furniture shop saying that if you buy from him have people keep an eye on your house to make sure everything’s OK. Seems like a good idea but if when you look into it you find this means that he’ll send his boys around to your house every day whether you like it or not. The moment you stop paying your protection money they’ll break all your stuff. Think of it that way and suddenly the company that was trying to portray itself as the hard done by little guy suddenly become gangsters and bullies.

It’s not a perfect analogy but it serves the persons of highlighting the point that we should not be letting companies have this kind of power over us. One of the most common counter arguments I get when discussing this with friends tends to be “they wouldn’t do that” especially when I’ve been using Activison-Blizzard’s Diablo 3 as an example. Blizzard has a unique talent for building games in such a way that they simply have to sit back and relax as their giant pile of money grows underneath them.

I don’t have a problem with this directly. I like money. If anyone reading this doesn’t then I’ll be happy to take any they come across of their hands. Blizzard have managed to engineer their DRM in such a way that it’s in their best interest to keep the servers running for as long as possible, especially when combined with their usual development cycle making the next game in the series likely to be the better part of a decade away.

Yet even they have managed to make their DRM cost the consumer. Was there any reason they couldn’t have included and offline/LAN only mode? Does guaranteeing higher prices in the auction house really benefit the average consumer in any way? But my real problem with always online DRM across the industry as a whole. It might and probably won’t be abused by Blizzard but if the power is out there it will be abused. If we let the first companies get away with this abuse then the practice will only spread.

If we as consumers don’t resist the implementation of draconian DRM what is to stop companies from simply disabling an old game the moment a newer one comes out? If there is anything that has the potential to make me find a new hobby to spend my free time and money on it’s DRM.

How do we fight against this when companies are so very good at hiding DRM, distracting us from it or justifying its inclusion?

The way most likely to be effective is the say as fighting DLC. Pay attention to what DRM is in games you are considering buying. Try not to buy games with DRM likely to take away from your experience. I would advocate ever further measures. Customers should demand that when companies include always online DRM they should also promise that, when they decide to no longer support the DRM authentication servers, they will release a patch to remove the requirement from the game and allow access as though you had verified your copy. If they break these promises they should be held accountable through any legal means.

DRM is bad for gaming, it does a poor job of its stated purpose, preventing piracy, and there are far more unclear, often amoral motives, that don’t get stated. As with DLC our best hope is to vote with our wallets but I feel the nature of this issue is so serious that legal action should be consider where appropriate for such things as anti-competitive practices, false advertising or selling a product that doesn’t meet reasonable consumer expectations.

Dowloadable Content

Kotaku’s “The Week In Evil DLC” appears as a sarcastic article gently mocking the people who scream from the mountain tops how they’ve been wronged by every piece of DLC released. For the most part I agree with this. Is DLC evil? No. How then can I have it first on my list? First let me clarify what I mean by DLC.

As most of you will already DLC is shorthand for downloadable content, but the term really should be divided into two different categories. Paid DLC and Free DLC. When talking of the evils of DLC we are generally referring to paid DLC because, let’s face it, people like free stuff. Yet I feel free DLC can also have its bad points.

The reason I don’t see DLC as evil is the same reason I don’t see a knife as evil. It’s merely a tool, a device people use to achieve a goal. There are very few tools that can be considered inherently evil, the evil lies in the application and motivation behind the use of the tool. A knife used to cut up vegetables to feed a group of orphans could hardly be considered evil but if the same knife were used on a murderous rampage there is surely evil there. It’s the same with DLC.

The reason DLC makes the top of my list lies in its application. Most games are developed and/or published by corporations. A corporation is one of these things that tend to lean towards evil as they have only one motivation. Money. People invest in a corporation because they want to make money, they want to see a return on their investment. They hire a CEO who they believe will be most likely to give them the greatest return on their investment. This CEO isn’t needed evil either, (s)he’s just doing the job they were hired to do. They have to consider themselves and their families to consider so they do it as best as they can so the investors don’t replace them with someone else.

Pursuit of money at the expense of all other considerations has to be considered evil. This natural state of existence for corporation also provides a level of protection from guilt, the CEO is just doing their job and the investors are faceless to the masses, essentially anonymous and protected as one among many. They will do whatever they can to maximise profits, a goal with definitely includes abusing DLC. They will try and charge you full price for a part of a game and then, now they have you hooked, sell you the remaining pieces one at a time. They do this because we let them.

As businesses get smaller, down to partnerships and little independents this temptation to evil lessens. Money may no longer be the sole motivating factor. Some businesses also make games because they like them. Some corporations realise that consumer good will can make them as much money as squeezing your customers until they cry so not all businesses engage in evil practices, but right now I’m concerned with the ones that do.

For a recent example of this let’s have a look at Mass Effect 3. This is a game with a very strong brand so they have some room to experiment and see just what they can get away with. The game is released with paid DLC already available and a multiplayer mode glued on. To me this multiplayer mode was obviously designed with the primary intention of milking their customers’ dry of all their cash until there is nothing left but a broken Husk (couldn’t help myself.)

The Mass Effect games have, up to this point, been single player experiences. In the days before DLC they would have sold you the game, you would have played it and that would have been it. Now this is where things get tricky. Did the micro transactions actually take anything from the game?

Paid DLC pack that includes one of the most potentially interesting characters, a Prothean, came out with the game on release day. Now I played the game through without this DLC and didn’t notice anything missing, but would this have been included if they didn’t have the option to charge extra for it? They would have wanted to make the best game they could so the most people would consider buying it, yet there comes a point where they would be getting less back for the money spent on including extra content then the sales it generates. How do you tell DLC is something the company had taken out of the game to sell to you later, or something genuinely created to enhance the experience and enjoyment of a product past the point that would have been possible otherwise?

There is no simple answer for this. You have to look at the content and decide for yourself if it is worth your money. Even free DLC can be evil. Sticking with the Mass Effect example let’s look at the multi player.

I play the multiplayer, It gives you something to do once you’ve worn yourself out on the story. They even released free DLC. FREE! How can this be a bad thing? Look at how the multi player is designed.  While fun, there is nothing particularly outstanding about the horde mode. You fight of waves of enemies, every now and then you get an objective to break things up a bit. As you play though it you get experience to unlock new powers and money to unlock new weapons.

Yet this all happens very slowly. It’s designed to start to feel like a chore unless you pay them extra money to speed up the process. You can’t even control what you buy with this money. It’s randomised, making it essentially gambling when you are trying to unlock a particular item. They even have the store flash up with “NEW!” every time you are on the multiplayer lobby to encourage you to look at it and tempt yourself.
Run out of things to spend your money on? FREE downloadable content that you can unlock now if you PAY for it!

They are intentionally making the game experience worse for people who don’t keep paying them more and more money. How can that not be a bad thing for ? They even make sure you have to look at multiplayer if you want to get the “best” ending in the single player story. It’s like a casino making you walk past the pokies to get to the restaurant.

Another example of when even free DLC can be evil is patches. Patches can a good thing, it means if there is a way for companies to fix issues they find in their products after it has been printed onto the discs. But what when they already know of the issues? “It’s OK,” says the boss, “we’ll just patch it post release.” Now they’ve decided to sell a product they know is broken. It doesn’t function they way the customer expects it to. Where does this leave customers without internet access? What if they never find a fix for the problem?

I did promise at the start I’d tell you how to stop these things. Well you can’t. At least no way I know of. You can, however reduce the problem. Remember the part where I said corporations (and businesses in general) want to make money? Well think of an economy as the world’s biggest democracy where your wallet is your ballot paper.

Every cent you spend on something is a vote for that to survive. If you think that the way a company is releasing DLC is evil then don’t buy the product. If you really don’t like it don’t buy any of their games, at the very least don’t buy the DLC. By all means write the companies and tell them you don’t like what they are doing but the fact of the matter is, if you still buy their product, they don’t care.

Ever wonder why there are so many Call of Duty clones out there? It’s because that series made enough money that they could hire two private armies and recrate every game. People voted billions of times that they like COD. Now people are finally getting sick of COD and its clones they are stopping buying them. As business notice this they start looking for the next billion dollar formula instead.

Remember I said I didn’t play Mass Effect 3 with the Prothean DLC? That’s because I didn’t like the way they did that, so I didn’t buy it. That would only encourage them. I’m a massive fan of the Total War games. Yet when they released Empire: Total War in suck a buggy state it was almost entirely unplayable the next game, Napoleon: total War, was the first one since Rome Total war I didn’t pre order.

It’s our responsibility as consumers to prevent businesses from getting away with being evil. Think about how we spend our money and show them that amoral practices don’t pay off. When you come across something you think is evil, spend your money on something else instead. If they don’t have any competitors with similar games you can buy a movie or go to a concert instead. There is enough choose in this world that we can chose not to buy a game and not be starved for entertainment.

In summary, DLC is not by default evil, often can be. The best way to combat it is to chose how you spend your money carefully. Everybody’s favourite celebrity, Captain Planet, says it best. “The power is yours!”

Authors Note: Owen Good, keep up the Evil DLC posts. I laugh, I cry, one day I may even be informed of something I would consider purchasing.

The Three Video Game Evils

For a while now I’ve wanted to discuss what, in my opinion, are the three things most negatively influencing the video game industry in the recent years.

Inspired to action by the “The Week In Evil DLC” articles on Kotaku as the first issue I wish to discus is DownLoadable Content is the fist I wish to discuss followed by Digital Rights Management and Piracy.

It’s my intention to examine each of these to explain why they are negative and what you can do to help stop them. It is my hope that will help encourage people to be smarter consumers by encouraging thought on topics may may not have considered closely before. It will be split amongst the following three posts.

I should also add that the examples I use are not intended to single out any particular companies as villains or heroes. These are things I see as problems with the industry as a whole and any examples are just the best I could think of at the time from my own personal experiences. As long as this article is, I’ve been forced to oversimplify and skim past may points worthy of further discussion.