DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest

SimCity. The game you love to hate. Or hate to love. I don’t know, one of those. I actually like the game and I find myself quite addicted to it. So it’s unfortunate that the game, in it’s current form, is a broken mess. Therefore, I’m treating it more like it’s an early beta version, and using it to learn how the game works, rather than be too emotionally attached to my metropolis creations (since I’ve already lost a city to one of the numerous city destroying bugs, I can’t afford to be too attached). My advice? Don’t pay full price for the game until most of the time wasting, soul crushing bugs have been fixed.

On to the news roundup …

A major decision in the U.S. Supreme Court this week, and a win for “common sense”. The court upheld the “first-sale doctrine”, overruling previous lower court decisions that ruled this doctrine did not cover foreign based works. It all came about when a textbook maker sued a eBayer for buying cheaper textbooks from overseas and selling them on eBay. The lower court initially ruled in favour of the textbook maker, and awarded a ridiculous $600,000 in damages to them. But subsequent appeals ensured the case was heard in front of the highest court of the land, and finally a copyright ruling that makes sense.

Had the ruling, which had a 6-3 split, gone the other way, it would have meant that websites like eBay, game stores, and even libraries, would be under new scrutiny in regards to goods originally purchased from overseas. Even garage sales would have been under threat if “first-sale” did not apply to foreign based goods.

Rooting for such a radical new interpretation of the copyright law, that would severely limit the rights of consumers, were the RIAA, the MPAA and even the Obama administration, a reliable friend of the former two.

While the principle of first-sale is sound, and now reconfirmed, copyright holders have already found many ways to bypass this anyway. Through the use of complicated licensing terms, and DRM, game, movie and music publishers have found it easy so far to prevent the resale of digital goods. That’s why you can sell your iPod, but not the music collection contained within, and why game publishers go to extremes to discourage the sale of second hand games (using one time activation codes and whatnot). I would imagine the marketplace would be far more competitive, and consumer in a far better position, if “first-sale” was vigilantly applied to digital goods too, but that’s just me.

——

Web music piracy is just as dangerous as home taping was

Common sense would dictate that there isn’t a one-to-one correlation between piracy and lost sales. But what if there’s a correlation between piracy and a *gained* sale?

That’s one of the conclusions to come out of a new European Commission report into music piracy, and it finds that the links between piracy and lost sales are tenuous at best. The study was limited to only looking at website visits, and found that for every 10% increase in visits to websites offering illegal music downloads, there was a 2% – 4% increase in visits to legal music sale websites. The report did not have data on actual music transactions though, but these statistically significant results should not be ignored either.

Overall, the study found that in a hypothetical absence of illegal music downloads (not gonna happen!), people aren’t going to jump straight to buying music, something that’s plainly obvious to most people I would gather. So instead of being the big revenue killer that piracy has been thought of, it may well be a simple matter of “trespassing of private property rights”. As a content producer myself, I can see how, even without revenue loss, the “trespassing of private property rights” might otherwise make me extremely annoyed – nobody wants their private property rights to be violated – but I also understand how everything in the Internet age works, and that having my content pirated, while still annoying, is also a badge of honor of sorts. If my content wasn’t being distributed without my authorisation, it probably just means my content wasn’t good or popular enough in the first place. And if it gets pirated, then it’s up to me to leverage the popularity of my content and monetize it, and there are definitely ways to do this.

The Internet has democratized the natural selection process for content. Instead of publishers having a large hand in selecting what we should and shouldn’t be consuming, the Internet allows the consumer to make their choices directly, bypassing the publishing industry altogether if necessary. That’s what scares the companies that’s represented by the RIAA and the MPAA the most, because they don’t want to lose control. DRM, while being advertised as an anti-piracy tool, is really just a new way for Big Content to maintain control. That it doesn’t work to stop piracy isn’t an issue at all, not when it successfully forces consumers to use content only in the ways publishers want them to.

Just like how if you want to play SimCity, you have to buy it from Origin and play it via Origin. If you don’t like it, you can’t simply grab the Steam version because there is no Steam version.

I think I’ve played every Sim City game ever made, and I simply love the series, even the demented way SimCity 4 managed traffic, or the way you ended up with a city full of Arcologies (and police stations) in Sim City 2000. And this is why, despite the horrible DRM and the known issues with it, I, and many other SimCity fans, still went out and purchased the game. It’s this kind of loyalty that EA has exploited to their advantage, at the expense of everyone else, and not too dissimilar to the way Blizzard launched Diablo III.

The dreaded SimCity “rollback” error, that could reset the city you’ve spent hours building

But what seemed like launch glitches with the DRM, now seem like a much bigger issue, as while servers are now widely available, the whole online based gaming experience still leaves much to be desired. Updating cities in the same region can be cumbersome, often taking minutes, even though the instantaneous change is what’s needed. Some sync fails to occur entirely, until one logs off and logs back on. Server still become unresponsive at times, forcing gamers to wait 10 or 15 minutes at the city loading screen, with no explanation for the wait. And for no reason, changes made to the city can be lost and you’re forced to rollback to an earlier version (or even lose the city and region entirely, in some case). And it seems that forcing some of the processing online is not only not helpful (and not an efficient way of doing things), it’s producing gameplay bugs in the game’s traffic and trading management systems.

EA and Maxis defended the use of always-on DRM by saying that some vital game functions had to be pushed online for processing. While this may be true for those playing the game with friends, hackers have shown that this statement is false when it comes to those playing single player games, by producing a hack that allows offline play. As a bonus, the mod also fixes many of the issues that plague the game.

But the hack also allows public cities to be taken over and destroyed, it seems, suggesting that EA and Maxis’s always-online DRM isn’t doing it main job of protecting the integrity of the system from hackers. Again, not too dissimilar to what happened to Diablo III.

As I said a couple of issues ago, a good DRM, or “always-online” implementation, has to be invisible. It should sit in the background and not ever have to make the gamer aware of its presence, while doing everything it is designed to do, including anti-piracy and anti-hacking, and if possible, should bring added value to the game. The SimCity always-online implementation does exactly the opposite in all of these areas.

That SimCity attempts to add an online component to single player gaming isn’t the problem, the problem is that SimCity doesn’t do this properly. Even if we call SimCity an online game, even though most of its gameplay elements can be done offline, the problem is that SimCity is still just a really bad online game. And that’s inexcusable.

While I’m pretty confident that there hasn’t been a lot of pirated versions of SimCity being used by people – the legit version is broken enough as it is, no one will bother with the pirated version, and with SimCity doing good business, does this all count as a financial success for EA and to a lesser extent, Maxis? Fellow game developer, and creator of the mega indie hit Super Meat Boy, Tommy Refenes, says that successful anti-piracy, if it meant ruining it for paying customers, doesn’t make financial sense at all.

Super Meat Boy has been pirated at least 200,000 times, but has sold millions of copies – the creator isn’t too fussed about those 200,000 “lost sales”

Speaking from his own experience with SimCity, a game he purchased but has subsequently requested a refund for, Refenes goes on to explain how losses due to piracy is not something a company can put onto the balance sheet, as it’s not something you can even calculate with any degree of accuracy. On the other hand, angry customers returning products is something that ends up written in red ink, and has long term repercussions that may be irreparable (see Ubisoft’s DRM Adventures).

Refenes also explains that because there are infinite copies of something digital, it is entirely different to say the theft of a physical copy of something. Stringent security measures at say KMart, where Refenes used to work, may help to stop the theft and return the stolen item back to store shelves, with a measurable loss prevented, the same cannot be said of digital piracy, he says. “Your game is infinitely replicable at a negligible or zero cost (the cost bandwidth off your own site or nothing if you’re on a portal like Steam, eShop, etc). Digital inventory has no value. Your company isn’t worth an infinite amount because you have infinite copies of your game. As such, calculating worth and loss based on infinite inventory is impossible. If you have infinite stock, and someone steals one unit from that stock, you still have infinite stock. If you have infinite stock and someone steals 1 trillion units from that stock , you still have infinite stock. There is no loss of stock when you have an infinite amount … it is potentially one less sale but that is irrelevant. Everyone in the world with an internet connection and a form of online payment is a potential buyer for your game but that doesn’t mean everyone in the world will buy your game.”

It’s something that I’ve mentioned before, but the way game publishers are using DRM these days goes beyond a simple comparison of physical versus digital. It’s not just that they are employing security measures, it’s that they’re employing really really bad and intrusive security measures. The equivalent of DRM isn’t a security guard at the entrance of the store, it’s the equivalent of a pat-down search for every customer that leaves the store (or a full body cavity search in the case of always-on DRM – a traumatic experience that will be relived in your head every time you use said product). No store would do that and risk losing their once loyal customers, so why do game publishers think that this is okay? The only reason I can think of is that unlike most stores, game publisher’s products are exclusives. You can’t simply go to a more customer friendly store and buy the same product, you’re stuck with SimCity from EA’s Origin.

Or maybe not. Maybe there *is* a more customer friendly store, and more than one actually, and not only do they not punish you for spending your hard earned money, they’re not even charging you for anything. That store’s name is piracy, and in the battle between free with a side helping of guilt and not free with a big chunk of frustration, the choice that doesn’t frustrate wins most of the time.

It’s NPD time, this time for February 2013. Once again, the Xbox 360 was the most popular console in the U.S. market for the month of February, selling some 302,000 units. This beat the PS3’s 263,000. The Wii U languished at the bottom, selling only 66,000 units, 70% of which were the deluxe model of the console.

So once again, we have a double digit decline for retail sales, and both Microsoft and Sony will hope their new console will have a better start than the Wii U.

There’s a lot of talk about the casual gaming market, previously dominated by the Wii, now taken over by mobile apps. Most of the talk has been about how popular smartphones and tablets have gotten. The Wii U even tried to jump on the bandwagon by adding a tablet into the mix, but it doesn’t seem to have worked. But surely, it’s the value proposition that has had the most dramatic change. The choice is now between paying $50+ for a console game that you probably don’t even have time to play, versus a 99 cent game that you can enjoy at a moment’s notice in your spare time. It is comparing apple to oranges, but entertainment is entertainment. Just like how video games become a better value proposition than movies and music (and why it has necessitated the lowering of the price of these forms of entertainment), app gaming has become a better value proposition than console gaming. It may really be that simple.

But I’m sure someone will find a way to blame piracy for everything.

With the 2,000 word barrier broken according to WordPress’s word counter, it’s time to wrap things up. See you next week.

A belated Happy Chinese New Year of the Snake. I was born in the year of the Monkey, and they say only the Monkey can handle Snakes, so all your Snakes better behave yourselves. Those born in the Year of the Snake should also wear something red on them at all times to deflect bad luck, preferably something given to them rather than something they’ve bought themselves.

In this first WNR for the Year of the Snake (technically not true), there are quite a few news items to go through, so let’s get started.

Joining the list of people who really shouldn’t be downloading pirated videos may be FBI employees, caught downloading hit TV shows such as Homeland and Dexter. They join employees from Hollywood studios, the DoJ, congressional offices, national parliaments, anti-piracy lobbyists and many other places where they’re pretty sensitive about this whole Internet piracy things.

And even if they weren’t downloading at work, something most people would probably not do, many are probably downloading in the privacy of their own homes.

While this highlights how widespread the “problem” of piracy is, to me, this isn’t actually reason to take harsher action against it. I liken this Piracy Plague® to jaywalking, something that almost everyone does (while knowing they probably shouldn’t), and that they do get in trouble if they’re caught doing it, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s not exactly a high priority for law enforcement (even though jaywalking, unlike pirated downloads, can lead to a life and death situations, so it’s actually more serious than piracy will ever be). I guess the difference is that there is no such thing as an anti-jaywalking lobby group (Car Manufacturers of America? ), so nobody cares.

The other major difference being that there is no monetary loss involved, although that’s debatable with piracy as well.

But there also exist a difference in solving these two problems. If it is identified that people are jaywalking in particular area, and it’s leading to a public safety issue, I would hope there’s an effort to find out why people are jaywalking excessively in this area, but not in others. Perhaps the lack of pedestrian crossings could be the issue. But for piracy, there’s strong pressure against finding out why it happens, with the focus is instead on labeling people who download as criminals, and leveling penalties against them. So instead of adding a pedestrian crossing to fix the problem, the focus would instead be on an ad campaign linking jaywalking to terrorism or something like that, and then setting up a hidden police presence around the corner and fining those that get caught, all the while ignoring the real cause of the “infringement”.

SoShare promises to combine the best of cyberlocker storage with BitTorrent technology. It might run into some legal headwind, mind you …

But soon there may be a new and better way for these FBI agents to get their Homeland fix. BitTorrent Inc has launched a new cyberlocker storage service that promises unlimited uploads, and unlimited transfer limits, and uses BitTorrent technology to speed up downloads. The new service, SoShare, has just been made live as a public beta test, and only requires a browser plug-in in order to utilize the BitTorrent based enhancements.

SoShare works by allowing the the uploader and downloaders to use their own bandwidth to help other downloaders speed up their downloads, much like how BitTorrent works. A master copy of the file is also store on SoShare’s servers to allow downloading to continue even if the original uploader is not online.

So with BitTorrent coming to the under pressure cyberlocker scene, the most immediate question that comes to mind, at least for me, is the copyright question. A quick look at SoShare’s copyright policy shows all the typical DMCA related information, but as SoShare does store a copy of the uploaded file, therein lies the danger from a copyright point of view. SoShare will have to be extra responsive to DMCA takedown requests to protect themselves. So far, the service is offered for free, with no monetization and no financial incentives for uploaders, which should also offer some additional protection if the service is ever accused of “incentivizing” illegal uploads.

But for downloaders, SoShare downloading may be a better bet privacy wise than BitTorrent downloads. While not much is known about how exactly the service works, one would hope it does not easily make public the details of all connections to the download swarm like BitTorrent naturally does.

——

In other news, The Pirate Bay is threatening to sue an anti-piracy group for copyright infringement. And no, I did not mix up the subjects in the preceding sentence.

This “fake” Pirate Bay, set up by an anti-piracy agency, may be infringing on the copyright of the real Pirate Bay

This all started when Finnish anti-piracy group CIAPC launched a spoof website that imitates the look and feel of The Pirate Bay, in a perhaps misguided attempt to educate the masses about the legal alternatives to piracy. The problem though is that the website wasn’t so much an imitation, but a downright like for like copy in many instances, included the CSS file, which was virtually identical to the one used by the real Pirate Bay. So much for educating others to respect copyright!

This blatant theft, which is against The Pirate Bay’s usage policies, has prompted The Pirate Bay to consider taking legal action against CIAPC, if the group does not “move on”, not just from the spoof website campaign, but from copyright enforcement in general. With The Pirate Bay generally supporting a copy-free ideal, their threat definitely did have the feel of a “not sure if serious” vibe to it. Look here, I for one would love to report on ironic lawsuits, just as long as TPB people do indeed make clear that irony is a clear intent (unlike a certain Mr. David).

Regardless, the CIAPC does deserves everything bad that happens to them, as these are the same people, if you can remember, that raided the home of a 9 year-old and snatched away her Winnie the Pooh laptop for the heinous act of downloading a song.

And in ominous news of the week, the W3C has asked the HTML Working Group to consider adding native DRM support to HTML, to placate the likes of Netflix, BBC, Google and Microsoft. These majors are hoping for a native HTML 5 solution to web video streaming, but that can only happen if DRM is present. To be fair, the requirement for DRM does not come directly from these companies, but from the overly paranoid content producers that supply these companies with content. No DRM, no content.

The January NPD US video game sales report has been released, and it’s grim reading for Nintendo’s new flagship console, the Wii U. As per the course, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 remained the best selling console for the month, with 281,000 units sold. This is actually up on January 2012, but only because of the 5-week and 4-week reporting difference between the two Januarys.

With Sony not providing any hardware sale details, but based on the Xbox 360’s “44 percent share of current-generation console sales” figure, that would most likely put the PS3 at around 200,000 units sold, and the Wii at slightly more than half of this.

Which makes the Wii U’s 57,000 (a figure that comes from sources that have access to more detailed NPD reports) rather pathetic. As a comparison, the original Wii sold 435,000 units at the same time in its release cycle, and that was with stock shortage constraints in place. The Wii U, being widely available in stores, is already looking like a flop given the dramatic fall-off from the early sales figures. Still, it’s probably too soon to tell if the Wii U is dead in the water, but unless Nintendo have some killer must-have games and apps out in the next few month, it’s not looking good at all.

Kinect beat Move because of Sony’s “stumbling failure”, more so than anything Microsoft did, according to engineer who designed the original Xbox

With such dismal numbers for the Wii U, and the Xbox 360 selling 5 times as many units, it almost feels churlish to talk about this next story. With 76 million units sold, and one in three of them having a Kinect camera connected (albeit perhaps not used … based on personal experience), and with 46 million members connected online, can the Xbox 360 and the Xbox platform really be considered a failure? Apparently it can be, according to one of the engineers that started this whole Xbox project, Nat Brown.

Brown describes the last couple of year’s development of the Xbox platform as “painful to watch”, mainly because the console will lose the “living room war” to the likes of Apple and Google, unless “somebody with a brain” starts running things.

Nat notes the biggest problem with the Xbox platform is one, indie development, and two, a good user experience. It’s worth noting that both of these areas are where the likes of iOS and Android shine, and Nat says that what Microsoft is doing simply isn’t good enough.

And Nat has a great point. Android development can be started with almost zero cost, and apps can be published for not much more. iOS development is a bit more expensive due to Apple’s more stringent requirements regarding coding environments (ie. Mac only), but it’s still well within reach for most semi-professional coders and cashed up enthusiasts. But more importantly, apps published on both platforms are given plenty of opportunities to be found and are actively promoted. On the other hand, Nat says Microsoft offers indie developers very little help in terms of accessibility, support and promotion, which has alienated “a generation of loyal kids and teens to making games” (not just kids and teens, but also 30-something guys with too much free time on their hands).

Nat’s other big gripe with Xbox is the user experience, the inconsistent nature of it all, and how counter-intuitive it can be given today’s more casual user base. Anyone who has tried to access the initially heavily promoted Kinect Fun Labs on the new Xbox 360 dashboard will certainly agree with this point – the fact that someone had to write a guide on how to access it shows how the UI has failed.

But to be fair to the Xbox 360, none of the other consoles are doing much better, a point Nat concedes as he also says that Microsoft’s recent successes have been due to the “stumbling failure” of Sony and Nintendo (Kinect vs PS Move, and the Wii in general). Might as well add the Wii U to that list of “stumbling failures” too, I suppose.

And with that, we come to the end of this week’s WNR. Hope you’ve enjoyed reading it more than I enjoyed writing it (well, given that I didn’t enjoy writing it, it’s kind of a low bar). See you next week.