Corporate Dinosaurs and the Internet Comet

Why is it that I go to wikipedia to find out when new Futurama and House episodes are going to air?

I've been to the respective official homepages of both of these websites all of once each; I either could not find the information I wanted, or had to search to the point that it was a pain in the ass. Sure, there's plenty of fun and interesting behind-the-scenes tidbits, trivia, and cast interviews, and I would positively watch those things every time I visited the respective sites.

But you see, I don't visit the sites. The only reason I ever seem to visit official sites like that is in search of schedule information. I would then be sucked in by the extras, and spend hours at their site, seeing their advertisements, even watching promos for other shows on their networks.

Working in a job so intricately tied to marketing has really made me more aware of various marketing related subjects. One thing that I continually return to is how the big media companies just do not seem to get it. There is a legion of consumers who would happily part with their disposable income in exchange for music, movies, and TV shows, if they felt like they were getting a fair shake...

Yet corporations have let greed and fear alienate the consumer masses. Greed prevents them from offering prices that are conceivably fair, considering how easy it is to illegally obtain the same product for nothing. Fear prevents them from letting consumers truly own their digital property, which is truly its own topic and something I've mentioned before.

Though I am against piracy, I can understand where the general consensus justifying it comes from. My own personal frustrations trying to utilize lawfully purchased software have left me with a very bad impression of DRM, and serves as perhaps the most effective argument against its use; DRM punishes the legitimate consumer, while serving as a delaying strategy at best when it comes to piracy.

And so the big media corporations continue to alienate their legitimate consumers while remaining wholly ineffective at stemming the piracy tide. They also continue to make their official websites cumbersome and annoying, giving ground freely to alternative sites that have information displayed more readily.

I'm left to wonder if it isn't the end of days for media corporations struggling vainly in a post-internet world that daily becomes less hospitable for bureaucratic red-tape giants.

The Paradox of Gainful Employment

Before, I had all the time in the world but literally no income. I played games I already owned, but was unable to justify the purchase of new games at full price. I was like a miser, eagerly awaiting Steam sales and price reductions.

Now, I have a great job that gives me a decent amount of disposable income with which I can purchase all the games my heart desires. (And I have a big heart, which has an equally big appetite for games.) Of course, this disposable income is due to my working all the time. In other words now that I have the money for games, I don't have the time!

Life is so paradoxical.

I finally finished playing the first Bioshock. It took me forever to finish it, but this was not by my design.

First of all, let me say that I purchased the original Limited Edition version of Bioshock for one reason, and one reason only: the Big Daddy figurine. I mean, sure, I had heard all the excitement behind the upcoming release and I love me a good FPS game, but (as previously noted) I tend to not purchase new releases.

Since I had it, though, I figured I'd go ahead and play it. Yadda yadda yadda, a few years later it was finally working... but after I had played a few hours I got side-tracked and it was another two years before I could finally revisit the game and put it to rest. I happened to beat it while Bioshock 2 was on sale, and figured that was a pretty good opportunity to continue my adventure in Rapture seamlessly.

Of course, I immediately had issues with trying to get Bioshock 2 working. This time, however, instead of a DRM issue the culprit was Games for Windows Live.

In theory, I like the idea of GFWL. Achievements are fun, and now that I own an Xbox 360 (yet another sacrifice I've made to help fight the recession) I enjoy the integration between the PC and the console.

In practice, however, more than 50% of my experience with GFWL has been with it as a gatekeeper, jealously preventing my access to the games I've paid good currency to obtain. But maybe that's a topic for a whole 'nother day...

Long story short: it took multiple reinstalls (which, in one of the few downsides to digital delivery, means several hours a pop) in addition to hours of consulting The Oracle, and finally an entirely separate download of the GFWL client prior to installation of Bioshock 2 before I could finally get it to let me play the damn game.

All I'm saying is: Anyone else nervous about problems getting Bioshock Infinite to install and run properly?

Piracy Isn't Hurting Any Companies!

At least, that's what 45% of the GameFAQs community believes.


Recently, their daily poll featured this question: "Do you believe piracy is a real problem for the video game industry?" Over 31,000 responders feel that piracy is OK because "they're still making billions". Another 6,000 feel that stealing games somehow makes the victim-company more money than if their product wasn't stolen. I can't say that I'm surprised, given the human capacity for rationalizing something that we want to believe.

Smaller developers can suffer and even go under if their games are pirated. Furthermore, even if the bigger companies won't be hurt too bad by piracy, rampant theft of their product only encourages them to come up with increasingly more draconian DRM measures... this ultimately hurts legitimate customers. That's right, piracy doesn't only hurt the developers and the publishers... it hurts your fellow gamers.

Sure, we can bitch and moan and say that the big companies shouldn't treat their legitimate customers like the enemy, (and I will no longer buy from certain companies precisely because of such an attitude,) but at the same time I don't think its entirely fair to get mad at a company that's just trying to protect its product from being stolen. The responsibility rests with those who steal.


The poll results can be seen here.

Nintedo's Next Big Thing

When I saw this article in the Japan Times, I knew I wanted to share it with my vast legions of readers.

I've previously written about my views on piracy, as well as a treatise on Nintendo being the only true innovator in the gaming console industry, so I'm aware that I'm in danger of repeating myself.

I merely offer this under-development hand-held featuring 3D capabilities (which do not require special eye-wear) as further proof that Nintendo is the only company that's doing any real innovation. The others merely continue to make consoles more graphically powerful, but for reasons unknown do not seem to possess the creative spark necessary to do something meaningfully different with subsequent generations of their products.

As far as the undisclosed anti-piracy measures they mention, I'd say that makes a good deal of sense. Outside of the States, there's an incredibly popular underground product called the R4. It is a small DS-game-sized cartridge with a slot for a micro SD memory card, and includes a USB port for the memory card. You download pirated DS game roms, transfer them onto the memory card (which also contains the R4 firmware), thus enabling you to play whatever games you want without having to go through the trouble of actually paying for said intellectual property.

It is big business in Asia; I recall street vendors in Osaka selling them every few blocks in the electronics district. They used to be widely available in actual stores, but they've been driven underground due to a crackdown by Nintendo. Supposedly they're a big ticket item in Europe as well. I'm not surprised that Nintendo views this as a major threat to their revenue, and it does seem rather unfair that the developers of the R4 are making a tidy profit by selling a means to easily steal the hard labor of game developers.

I vaguely wonder if human morality will catch up to the concept of intellectual property at some point during my lifetime?

Here there be (more) pirates

Just an update on my previous exploration into the realm of loot and plunder on the high seas...

So apparently Ubisoft recently announced their own style of DRM that's going to be included with all future titles. It requires constant internet connection to play. It takes the other DRM that I described as invasive and makes it look quaint.

I doubt I'll ever play another Ubisoft title again.

Update: (March 6th)
A pirate group announced that they cracked Ubisoft's latest protection efforts! Read about it here.

Here There Be Pirates

Piracy.

Nowadays, it has a cool vibe. People love to talk like pirates. We have those movies with Jack Sparrow. Piracy is considered "cool".

Maybe that's why piracy of software, especially games, is so widely accepted?

Almost everyone would say that stealing is bad. And almost everyone I know has pirated at least a few items of intellectual property. Songs, movies, TV shows, and computer games.

There has been a lot of debate about the issues surrounding software piracy, these days. The big corporations keep implementing more and more invasive anti-piracy protection (generically called Digital Rights Management, or DRM), which tends to only punish the people who paid for the product. The pirates crack software easily, while the paying customers have to deal with tons of issues directly caused by the (ineffective) protection.

For example, I bought Bioshock when it was first released. I brought it home, naturally excited to dive right into such a highly anticipated game. However, when I put the game disc into my DVD drive, it failed to run. I continued to check, and tried all sorts of trouble shooting methods, but determined that it was only Bioshock that couldn't be read, and that although it could be read briefly, something was killing it from being accessed.

Next I checked on the web, only to find out that tons of people were having the exact same issue. It was well over a year before I could finally get the problem solved, and only then by buying a new computer. To this day I have no idea what prevented it from playing on my old one, but as a paying customer I was well pissed off.

Another time, I was living abroad when Spore was released. I bought a digital delivery version of the game since that was the only practical way for me to obtain it. I was soon dismayed to find out that during my entire life, I would only be able to install my copy of Spore three times. Ever. This was highly offensive to me, once I realized what I had paid full price for. (This was later updated to be more generous, but that's beside the point.)

Some few companies have a novel approach to the issue. Stardock, for example, points to the ineffectiveness of "protection" efforts, and acknowledges that this tends to work only as a punishment for paying customers.

Stardock generally doesn't use any DRM for their software, but any software updates have to be downloaded directly from them, and require a purchased license in order to do so. I like this business model; they provide a base product that works but then they continue to make it better through extensive post-release updates. It does not treat the customer like a criminal.

Also, it in essence turns pirated versions of their software into really good demos, requiring you to pay to get access to the updates. I would be interested in knowing how many people pirated their stuff first, really liked it, and ended up paying to buy the license and get updates.


In order to provide an alternative to the invasive DRM options currently available, Stardock has developed a new form of software protection: Game Object Obfuscation (GOO). You can read about it here. It sounds interesting, and certainly appears to be better than the other alternatives.

And though Stardock's unusual policy of no DRM is commendable, I can sympathize with developers who think that's a scary prospect. Because like it or not, piracy is entrenched and popular.

One thing I see again and again is the rationalization of piracy. I am sick and tired of the flimsy justification for theft of intellectual property. If you pirate software, don't try to justify it.

Realize that you're stealing someone's property. And it isn't just a faceless corporation, but a team of  developers who are likely overworked and underpaid. I think that the anonymity of the internet allows the human element to disappear from the equation, which produces all the ridiculous lines used to explain why it is OK that you pirated your games.

Besides, people who come up with silly justifications sound really lame.