HomeWeekly News Roundup (12 February 2012)
I might be spending way too much time playing Skyrim ...
Week 2 of my Skyrim adventure sees me fighting a dragon, two wolves, two bandits, a conjurer and a bear, all at the same, inopportune, time. It also saw an incredibly laborious trek at walking speed (thanks to having to carry too much dragon bones and scales), from the site of my latest dragon slaying, to my horse, which was “parked” quite a distance away at the nearest watchtower. Yes, I could have dropped a few items and fast travelled back home, but I’m a level 46 hoarder in the game, so I must loot everything (and I mean everything, as my prized collection of forks and plates will attest to).
Wait, what? WNR? Oh yes, that. Um, yeah I guess I better get started, not that we have much to go through since, well, as you can see I had a lot of other things to do during the week.
Following up on last week’s story about Ubisoft’s DRM foolishness – apparently, the server migration didn’t go as smoothly as Ubisoft had hoped.
Gamers soon reported that games that were supposed to be unaffected by the server outage, like Driver: San Francisco and Anno 2070, were somehow being affected as well.
It seems to be me that game publishers are happy to burden paying gamers with ridiculous levels of DRM, forcing them to jump through hoops just to play the games they’ve already paid for, but aren’t willing to step up the plate to make any sort of guarantees in regards to the uptime of authentication servers. I think publishers may find that paying for authentication servers with 99.99% uptime, an industry norm, and having to keep them running for the life cycle of the game (say 8 years), might actually cost a lot more than not having DRM, considering the actual DRM may require a licensing fee as well if it isn’t developed in-house. And since the DRM doesn’t stop piracy anyway, I do wonder how these companies even justify the expenditure to their shareholders.
And the problem with online based DRM is that you’re really at the mercy of those who control the DRM servers. When the publisher decides that it’s no longer in their financial interest to keep the DRM servers running, then your games will simply stop working. And if you try to remove the DRM yourself, you could fall foul of the DMCA.
Now, I love Steam, and I free admit I have purchased way too many games from them in the various sales. But the greatness of the Steam platform sometimes makes me forget that, in the end, it really is just another form of online DRM. Sure, they do have an offline mode, and Steam makes the authentication part mostly invisible, and then makes up for it by giving gamers more value-added features. But it also means a catastrophic loss if you’re unable to access your Steam account, if it was stolen by a hacker for example, or having it banned by Steam. And this is exactly what happened to Russian gamer gimperial, who had his Steam account banned for no apparent reason, and only managed to get it re-instated after the story of his plight made headlines. The thing is, had gimperial purchased his games the old fashioned way, on DVDs from retail stores (and those games didn’t use Steam), it’s unlikely that just a single ban of an online account would result in all of his games being unplayable.
There are several things Steam could do to alleviate the potential suffering of gamers. They should start by investing some of their vast amounts of revenue into having a telephone support line, as it’s much better to deal with a real person in real-time to resolve problems such as an unwarranted account banning, then via email. They should also outline clearly which specific offences can lead to an account banning, and when accounts are banned, the user should be notified of the reasons (so at the very least, they know not to make the same mistake the next time). And then top it up by having a transparent appeals process. And it’s not just Steam, but all online services should really have something like this (I’m looking at you Google), because losing any of your online accounts these days can be a traumatic event that creates extreme difficulties for your professional, and personal, lives.
Europeans are protesting the controversial ACTA treaty, which will force countries to adopt harsh measures to combat online piracy
While the hoopla over SOPA/PIPA is dying down, our friends in Europe (and elsewhere) have not been resting on their laurels, and protests continue as I type, in Poland, the Czech Republic, France, England, Croatia, and many other places, against the controversial ACTA copyright treaty. Thousands of people are protesting what they’re calling an unprecedented level of surveillance the treaty will encourage member countries to adopt, something many haven’t seen since the days of the communist bloc. But instead of being watched by Big Brother for the benefit of the ruling party, it’s now surveillance to help (largely) American corporations, which is a little bit better I suppose, but also a little bit worse (for example, it’s impossible to overthrow a foreign corporation). And just like with SOPA/PIPA, victory is possible, now that Germany has already distanced itself from signing the treaty. The message seems to be clear – “It’s not acceptable to sacrifice the rights of freedom for copyrights,” words spoken by Thomas Pfeiffer of the German Greens party.
The fact that Hollywood, one of the key backers behind ACTA, seems to be targeting Europe shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. Hollywood will claim the focus is due to the fact that piracy rates in Europe are much higher than say in the United States (after all, it is home to The Pirate Bay). But a new study seems to suggest that it may very well be Hollywood’s own fault for the higher than normal piracy rates in Europe, and it’s all down to something called a “release window” (or really just a fancy way of saying “delayed releases”). The reasons for the delays varies. Sometimes it’s due to short term greed, the delay in negotiating better distribution deals (if the movie or TV show becomes a big hit in the US, then studios are in a much better position to negotiate if they wait), and having multiple release windows (eg. one for Blu-ray/DVD, one for subscription TV, one for free-to-air TV) allows studios to have tiered licensing rates. Sometimes it’s also due to localization issues, subtitles and dubs and the like. But it’s mostly, entirely avoidable. The new study found that the longer the release window, the higher the financial loses that the industry has largely blamed on pre-release piracy.
More importantly, pre-release piracy seems to have little effect in the US, suggesting that people are not choosing pre-release pirated versions (usually poor quality) over the cinematic experience, which makes sense if you think about it. And it also suggests there’s less urgency in the US to be able to watch a movie before it is officially released, whereas the urgency seems to be much more, um, urgent in international markets, especially if the movie has already been released in the US.
And I think the Internet is largely to blame for this urgency. The good old watercooler discussion has now moved online, and it’s now global, so the need to be able to join in online conversation about the latest movie, or the latest episode of a hit TV show, or even the latest game (Skyrim!), means people need the content, and they needed it yesterday. If they can’t get it legally, in the time-frame they want or at the price they can afford, then they’ll seek alternatives. And it just happens that piracy is the most available alternative there is. I believe there’s a huge, untapped market that can be exploited if content creators removed the artificial barriers for international releases, and by providing localization as quickly as possible. Or basically what Valve’s Gabe Newell said a couple of months ago, with proof of the success of this strategy in the fact that the notorious piracy market that is Russia is now Steam’s second largest market in Europe. Content creators should strive to make content available cheaply and quickly, before they go trampling on people’s basic rights to enact laws that will do very little to combat piracy in the long term.
There also exists the potential to monetize piracy, and while the industry might want to hold the moral high ground, at some point, they have to accept that piracy, no matter what you do, will always exist. And you might as well make money off it. As usual, Apple are pioneering the way forward, at least with the music industry, via iTunes Match. The service aims to “convert” pirated downloads into legitimate copies, all for the small price of $25 per year. And with license holders getting a share of the cash, they’re largely happy to get something that they wouldn’t have got before.
And I also think there exists a third potential revenue source – getting people to pay for thing they didn’t think they wanted, by presenting something that appears to be really good value. Steam makes this work via sales and relying on stupid people like me to buy crap games, yes even games like Duke Nukem Forever, just because it’s cheap. But not all cheap games are crap, and some have even become my favourites, leading me to buy sequels (albeit also at discounted prices). Steam, and the publishers that take part in sales, know that cheap games have promotional value, especially if a sequel is just around the corner, and so cheap games becomes a sort of discovery incentive. Piracy also enables discovery, with the incentive being that it’s all free.
An Amazon Prime membership, for $79 a year, gives you unlimited access to a library of 15,000 titles
What’s my point? Well, after getting a Kindle Fire and getting hooked on the free content that the free one month trial of Amazon Prime offered (with 15,000 movies, documentaries and TV shows on offer, unlimited free steaming for Prime subscribers), I recently signed up to a year’s membership for $79. Most of the content on there I wouldn’t consider buying, nor would I consider piracy (although some probably would) – but having had access to it for a month, I determined that $79 per year is good value for what I’m getting. That’s $79 content holders would never have gotten if they hadn’t made the content available for “free” on Prime. And on a related note, the fact that people paid for premium Megaupload accounts so they could download more pirated content suggests that even pirates are willing to pay, as long as you present them with something that’s is seen as having good value.
Speaking of Megaupload, with the file hosting industry still scrambling to ensure their own safety, it’s interesting to note that RapidShare, a leader in the field, has been calm throughout. After all, why wouldn’t they be, as they were removed from the RIAA/MPAA’s “notorious markets” list last year having been on it the previous year. So what exactly is RapidShare doing right, that Megaupload and other websites have not done? Education and enforcement, seems to be key. Education means educating those in positions of power about what RapidShare’s business model is all about (ie. not about piracy), and RS’s lobbying activities in Washington won’t have gone unnoticed. It also means actually ensuring their business model is not dependant on piracy, so no rewards program for major uploaders or referrers.
And possibly more important is the need to show content holders the site’s copyright policies aren’t just for show. RapidShare has a well staffed abuse department, that not only aims to deal with takedown requests in a timely manner, but also seeks out and removes infringing content pro-actively. Does RapidShare still host pirated content? Of course they do. But they have a business model based on legitimate usage, and they have a working anti-piracy policy, and that’s all that’s required really from a legal point of view – nowhere in any law, except for the failed SOPA/PIPA, does it say that a website has to ensure that it’s 100% clean of pirated content, an impossible tasks these days due to the user generated nature of website content.
Gaming wise, the NPD figures for January are out, and they don’t make good reading. In fact, it’s so bad that analysts are even questioning the validity of the data. I haven’t had time (I know, I know) to fully digest (I know, I know) all the figures yet, but I’ll do that and write up the analysis as usual early next week.
Despite not wanting to write a lot, and not having much to write about, I’ve somehow gone over the 2000 word mark, so I think that’s as good a time as any to stop writing. See you next week.