DRM vs. Unfinished Games 462
Rod Cousens is the CEO of Codemasters, and he recently spoke with CVG about how he thinks DRM is the wrong way to fight piracy. Instead, he suggests that the games industry increase its reliance on downloadable content and microtransactions. Quoting:
"The video games industry has to learn to operate in a different way. My answer is for us as publishers to actually sell unfinished games — and to offer the consumer multiple micro-payments to buy elements of the full experience. That would create an offering that is affordable at retail — but over a period of time may also generate more revenue for the publishers to reinvest in our games. If these games are pirated, those who get their hands on them won't be able to complete the experience. There will be technology, coding aspects, that will come to bear that will unlock some aspects. Some people will want them and some won't. When it comes to piracy, I think you have to make the experience the answer to the issue — rather than respond the other way round and risk damaging that experience for the user."
You're going to charge me $30 upfront, right? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:No. (Score:3, Informative)
You're right about the Humble Indie Bundle. They only made $1.3 million, that's shit!
Re:Dear game industry (Score:5, Informative)
You need to reread the snippet you quoted, very carefully this time, and go for comprehension of what was said.
People who don't want to pay to play your games are never going to pay to play your games.
People who want to play the game but are unwilling or unable to pay for it are very much included in the "people who don't want to pay to play" category.
The problem with DRM is that it takes a lot of us who were formerly in the "willing to pay to play" category and, because of the restrictions imposed by draconian DRM solutions, puts us in the "no longer interested in risking spending more time getting the game working than we spend actually playing it" category.
I have not purchased a game in some time (Myst: Uru was my last game purchase), and after having to go out and find and purchase an old DVD player because the game refused to play on a DVD drive capable of burning (lest it be copied, I guess), and dealing with SecuROM and a reinstall of my OS so I could burn music CDs from music I had purchased, and God only knows what other dumbfuckery I've had to cope with over the years, I decided I had had enough of having my system fucked with every time I wanted to spend $60 for a few weeks of entertainment.
I'd love to try a few games out here and there, and my wife and I used to be heavily into puzzle-type games (Myst series, Obsidian, Sanitarium, etc), and I used to enjoy an occasional FPS LANFest, but eventually I decided I pretty much needed a separate computer from the one that did my finances and email so I could reload the OS after each game to wipe out the latest crap introduced by the DRM. And, of course, that meant buying another $175 copy of Windows XP because, guess what? It had DRM too.
I decided bicycling and kayaking sounded like more fun.
Re:hmm (Score:4, Informative)
Uhhh, WTF?
If I go into a store and see a product hanging on the wall saying "Game X, $10" and I buy it, I PAID FOR IT. If I get home and find out I need to buy a "code" to play this game, I'm pissed.
And that's exactly what happened with some games I bought through a local Office Max. SD cards with some old arcade games for the Palm. Heavily discounted/closeout, like $5, but nothing on the outside said anything about having to buy a code to play anything. I get the games in the Palm, wham, thanks for buying us, here's 10 seconds of demo, now go to this website and get the registration code for $x. Fuckers.
The problem with DRM is publishers retaining control on stuff you already paid for, after the fact.
Yeah, like those games.
Re:FU - Things are already worse (for consumers)! (Score:3, Informative)
Please, god, will someone release a finished game? When's the last time that happened?
I happened this year actually, when Torchlight was released by Runic: http://www.torchlightgame.com/ [torchlightgame.com]
This is what a small game should be like. The best $10 I ever spent on a game, hands down. I want more of these type of games. It's just very refined. I don't need the Epic Tale of Games to have fun and Not every game has to be a blockbuster release to make money.
ORLY? (Score:1, Informative)
It seems to be working for Ubisoft. There still aren't a good cracked version of the newest Silent Hunter. The one you see on torrent sites only contain the tutorial. This is almost half an year later now.
You need better torrent sites... Silent.Hunter.5.Battle.of.the.Atlantic.PROPER.READNFO-ViTALiTY
Re:Isn't this just DRM in little pieces? (Score:3, Informative)
The battle isn't in the crack teams' favor these days:
The PS3 has been shown to be 100% secure after the years it has been out.
I believe GeoHot [neowin.net] might disagree with you in that regard
HD satellite is still unbroken.
Really? Which satellite network? BEV is cracked, as is N3 (So Dish) - Google "N3XT"
FairPlay for movies still has not been cracked, and no, using the analog hole or a program like SoundTaxi to "record" the played movie is not a crack. That is a transcoding.
I'm sure the QTFairUse guys would have done it, had not Apple C&D'd them into oblivion.
HDCP has been out for a while, still unbroken.
Really? Are you sure about that [freedom-to-tinker.com]?
Recent iPhones are still not jailbroken.
Really? Ask PlanetBeing [twitpic.com] about that.
Windows 7 activation has yet to have a reliable bypass that doesn't turn the desktop black.
Really? 'cause I'm using This release [thepiratebay.org] (For educational purposes only, of course), and have no black desktop on either x86 and x64. As long as you don't install KB971033 (Which can be blacklisted in Windows Update), you're just fine.
Re:double-dip (Score:3, Informative)
WOW didn't trailblaze with that, SWG did
That's probably the most unintentionally funny thing I've read all day. Thanks for that.
SWG wasn't even close to the first multiplayer online game (let alone software) that required a subscription, or a pay-as-you-go model. In the 80s, online services like Q-Link, CompuServe, AOL, and GEnie charged pay-by-the-hour premium to play multiplayer games on top of by-the-minute connection fees in most cases. In the mid 90s, Kesmai, the developer of most of the games available on the aforementioned services, launched its own website, GameStorm, marking perhaps the first time a game developer was also the distributor and host of its own product. GameStorm charged a $10/mo subscription for unlimited access to all of its games, which significantly reduced the cost of online gaming. In the late 90s, games like Ultima Online and EverQuest followed suit, except they charged a monthly subscription for an *individual* game rather than a collection; a step backwards for consumers.
SWG was probably the first MMORPG that tried to expand the genre to a more mainstream audience, but it was just one of many, many "me too" games that were developed in the early part of the 2000s to try to capitalize on the burgeoning multiplayer market; a market that now dominates the PC gaming industry, much to my dismay.
Now get off my lawn!
Re:already doing this... badly (Score:3, Informative)
Strangely, Valve has combated this in Team Fortress 2, but Valve hasn't try to monetize it. The latest (11th major) update came out last week with 4 new maps, 4 new Engineer weapons, and 38 new Engineer achievements. This is the last of TF2's nine class updates. Also, fan made maps are quite popular, and some even make it into the base game distribution during updates (ctf_turbine, cp_fastlane, cp_egypt, cp_junction, arena_watchtower, pl_hoodoo, cp_frieght, and cp_coldfront are the ones I can think of).
TF2 only started with only 7 maps comprising 3 (4 actually) game types, and no unlockable weapons or items.
TF2 today has (if I'm counting right) 34 maps (26 Valve-created maps, 8 community-created maps) comprising 7 (8 actually) game types, 34 unlockable weapons (27 Valve-created replacement weapons, 7 community-created replacement weapons (Medic and Spy don't have any yet)), and 49 hats/misc items (30 Valve-created hats/misc items (3 per class, and 3 generic), 19 community-created hats/misc items (2 per class, but Medic has 3)). Note: I'm ignoring the 10 specialty hats/misc items and 2 reskinned weapons that aren't randomly dropped.
Valve is also planning on adding the winners of the Polycount Contest [polycount.com] to the game... they were supposed to announce the winners sometime this week, but that announcement was subject to Valve Time [valvesoftware.com].
Certain maps in TF2 are disliked. tc_hydro seems like a good map on the surface, and is one of three maps that has a developer commentary. Valve clearly put a lot of effort into it. However, it is easily the most stalemate-prone map in the game, which in turn makes it unpopular.
As for the new maps, the people on the OCRTF2 [ocrtf2.com] servers, which I'm an admin on, have already chosen maps they like and maps they don't. For instance, plr_hightower is disliked by some... it's a relatively small map and has this tendency for one team to steam-roll the other. pl_upward seems to be well liked. cp_coldfront is a map that we already had on our servers in its release candidates (Valve adds community maps in some updates, cp_coldfront was added in this update), and it... can be good or bad, depending on the teams. pl_thundermountain, I'm not sure about as we don't seem to play it as often as the others; I thought it was interesting, though, even if the map does sometimes get stopped before it reaches the final stage.
TF2 has the advantage of being part of the Orange Box [steampowered.com]. OB had an MSRP of $50 at launch in late 2007, and has an MSRP of $30 today. It also includes all of HL2 (original plus both episodes), Portal, and TF2. On Steam, TF2 alone [steampowered.com] sells for $20... but a boxed copy from Amazon [amazon.com] sells for $9.99. The boxed copy needs to be registered to a