Category Archives: Games

PC Gaming: Oh, How You Have Fallen

by | Business, Games
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I was just wandering around a local GameStop. It took me a minute to find their PC Gaming section – and it was tiny. They had a 3 foot x 3 foot section for PC games priced at $20 or less (apparently inventory they’re trying to clear-out), and an even smaller section for regular-priced PC games. It was literally about one foot of shelf space for all their PC games selling for $30 or more.

I asked a salesman about this, and he said that between piracy and download services like Steam, there just wasn’t much of a market for selling PC Games.

Games As Art

by | Game Development, Games, Society
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One of the questions that seems to be coming up a lot in the past few years is the question “Are games art?” or “Can games be art?” I have to admit that it’s not really a question I’m all that interested in. I like games. I enjoy games. That’s enough for me. It seemed to me like the “games are art” people were looking to get more respect for games by getting them classified as “art”. On the other side were people looking down on games, and dismissing them as “not art”. It’s almost as if people are looking to gain respect or denigrate games based on whether or not they can successfully categorize them as “art”. My own feeling on this is that games can be art, and there are some existing games that could be classified as art, but, at the same time, it seems like we’re raising the status of some existing games to higher respect than they deserve by calling games “art”. I also hate the whole mind-game of saying X is in category Y, and objects in category Y should be treated with [ respect / disdain / insert whatever emotion you want ].

Nevertheless, here’s an interesting talk by Kellee Santiago, of thatgamecompany giving a pretty good TED talk:

( via PennyArcade )

Charging for Demos?

by | Business, Demos, Game Development, Games
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I just thought this was pretty ridiculous. It would’ve made a lot more sense if this story came out on April 1st:

Crytek co-founder Cevat Yerli tells Develop that you might be paying money just for the privilege of trying Crysis 2 before it comes out. Yerli calls free game demos an antiquated “luxury” that have become “prohibitively expensive” to produce. The result: many studios will either stop releasing them or try to charge for an early test of the game. EA has already brought this idea up as “pre-launch DLC,”
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Yerli says his company hasn’t yet decided whether there will be a demo for Crysis 2 or not, though he thankfully admits that a paid demo should be “something more than a small demo released for free.” Takeaway is the same, regardless: because of the development cost of building a giveaway level or two before launch, Yerli says the days of free demos are numbered. (Source: Joystiq)

FOX News and Online Gaming

by | Games, Media
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It’s not often that a local news station will do a story that makes it into the national gaming news (Joystiq, Penny Arcade, Kotaku, Digg). And, by “local”, I mean that I walked down to the coffeeshop across the street from KDVR today, and did some work. I would’ve egged the building, but then they’d do a story about how video games make people aggressive.


(Who is that mysterious man on the roof?)
The story: Xbox a Sex Box? Child sex predators exploiting Xbox to find victims.

Random Thought on DRM

by | DRM, Games, Music, Piracy
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I was thinking about DRM lately, and one idea that crossed my mind was this: what about a system where every executable contains a serial number. The serial number would be long (and therefore resistant to brute-force attacks). It would be used whenever connecting to the (company) servers to get updates, play multiplayer games, or any other downloadable game content.

You could then install the software wherever you wanted, without any kind of server validation, but if too many computers with the same serial number started asking for the exact same update or multiplayer access, then we could assume the game had been pirated. That serial number could be automatically blacklisted from server access. In other words, if someone uploads their copy to a pirate website, they would end up harming their own copy and all the pirates could also be blocked from accessing the server. Optionally, the application could either be disabled or could start show a nag message about buying the software.

While it doesn’t actually stop anyone from using the application (unless the application is disabled, as indicated above), this system is resistant to a variety of hacks. Using a long serial number means people can’t just guess a different serial number for their copy. If they rewrite the serial number to something else (like a bad serial number), they still can’t access the server.

This system would also accomplish a couple of good things. It would allow the application to continue working even if there were no DRM servers running (e.g. if the company goes bankrupt). It allows users to install the application where they want without needing to remember a registration code (the registration code is built in). Users would never have to worry about unregistering their copies on old computers (if you computer suddenly dies or your hard drive goes bad, no problem because the only thing that matters is whether it’s asking for updates or server access). It allows the company to recognize and selectively ban copies that have been spread on the internet by pirates.

While I was thinking about this, I realized that it only works very well for software. And it works better for multiplayer games than single-player games. (If someone pirates a single-player game, doesn’t care about updates, and doesn’t care about downloadable content, it doesn’t really restrict them.) Theoretically, this DRM system could be open-sourced, too, because it doesn’t get harmed by the fact that people can see what’s going on inside the code. Plus, it would be nice to see people’s reaction to the phrase “open source DRM”. I don’t think I’d want to do that, though, because I think open-source DRM would attract too many confederates who want to either destroy the system or build-in backdoors. One other possible problem with the system is that a pirate could hack the application to point it to another server, then setup their own (open source) copy of the server elsewhere, serving up copies of the updates and other downloadable content. This would a somewhat dangerous strategy, though, because it means setting up a website. Websites can get shutdown, they cost money, and it means that their identity might be revealed. Still, I’ve seen websites that were clones of other websites, in an attempt to get some ad-traffic based on someone elses’s content.

Unfortunately, it’s not a system that can work for things like movies or music, because they don’t benefit from updates, server-access, or multiplayer access. Well, the other day, I stumbled on one company seems to be trying this strategy with music:

Is the World Ready for the Successor of the MP3?

A leading technology company is set to launch a new digital music file format that will embed additional content for fans including lyrics, news updates and images in what could be a successor to the ubiquitous MP3 file.
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Music labels, bands or retailers could then also send updates to the music file every time they have something new to announce such as the dates of future tours, new interviews or updates to social network pages.
(Source: Wired Magazine)

What they seem to be doing in this case is embedding a serial number in the MP3 metadata. They then update the file with new data (images, lyrics, etc) if you have a valid serial number. I don’t think their system works very well, though. First, once someone gets the update, they can pass it around to everyone else, giving them access to the images and lyrics. Also, I’m unclear on what happens if you have 40 songs by one artist. Are all 40 mp3s going to get updated with tour dates? That seems inefficient. And, what if someone had one legitimate mp3 on my system, and 39 pirated mp3s? Would that mean that the one legitimate mp3 be enough to get all the tour date and news information? While it’s generally a step in the right direction, I don’t think it’s going to be terribly beneficial to the music industry. Maybe it will help pull-in some of the music fanatics that absolutely need the best.

Battlefield Heros Free-to-Play/Pay-to-Play

by | Business, Games
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I remembered hearing about Battlefield Heroes a while ago. It was an interesting idea: they were making a decent-looking first person shooter, and it was free to play. You could buy stuff in-game, but it was just avatar customization stuff that had no effect on the gameplay. The question I wondered back then was: would avatar customization make enough money for them to pay salaries? It seemed unlikely. One possibility is that they’d get millions of players, but keep their servers load lightweight (people would play peer-to-peer, which would cost them nothing). Then, even if a few percentage paid for avatar customization, they might do okay. But, it would require phenomenal success (in terms of the number of players). I thought I’d keep an eye on them, just to see what happened.

Well, recently, they announced some changes in their system. You can still play for free, but the changes make it harder to do well in the game unless you’re paying for in-game upgrades. The game has two ways to get upgraded weapons: Valor Points, which you earn by playing; and Battle Funds, which is what you get when you pay real-world money. The new update effectively reduces the value of Valor Points and increases the value of BattleFunds.

I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt here, and say that they thought their business model would work, but after a while, decided they needed to boost their revenue. It didn’t really seem possible for them to survive on just avatar-customization alone. The whole “pay real-money for in-game upgrades” is quite a balancing act. On one extreme, players pay money for purely aesthetic changes (avatar customization). You get lots of players, people are happy, but the company is earning very little money per player. On the other extreme is a system where you can’t be an effective player in the game without paying money — the game is really a demo unless you pay some real-world money. You get fewer players, and people get more resentful over the bait-and-switch of “free to play, oh wait – you’re nerfed unless you pay” which harms the company/game reputation, but the company earns more money per player. Then there’s the balancing act of staying in the middle ground – trying to earn enough to survive and pay employees, but avoiding guilt and negative stigma of the bait-and-switch. I guess I’m not that surprised to see them shift towards a stronger pay-model, since their initial business-model seemed overly optimistic.

Link: EA restructures Battlefied: Heroes pricing; fans enraged

Modern Warfare 2 on Fox and Friends

by | Games, Society, Video
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“You bring a game into a house, nothing to stop an eight year-old kid from becoming a terrorist and shooting people.”

Obviously, John Christensen could’ve done a better job with the interview, although he probably isn’t put into too many television debates, so I can forgive him for that. It also looked to me like they might’ve been doing the interview early in the morning, and Christensen was not entirely awake. The other people were obviously better prepared for the attack. The “let’s have a fair and balanced debate” by the host was rather farcical. It seemed more like “let’s both beat up this novice and unprepared public speaker, and the fact that we give him a chance to speak will make us look like we’re providing balance”.

According to Ripten.com:

Fox contacted [Christensen] that same day with just a few hours notice. In addition to Jon never having been on television before, the segment was filmed at 3:30 AM his time, which meant he wasn’t exactly “well rested” before going on air.

Ultimately, though, game-companies are at a disadvantage because the media looks for things to talk about, wants to push people’s buttons, talk about controversy, and get credit for talking about it first. They will come after game companies because they want to drive-up viewer numbers. Playing on people’s preconceived notions is the easiest way to do it. At best, the only thing interviewees can do is hold them at bay – by providing a cogent defense of the industry. They’ll always be back, though.

Stephen Totilo, of Kotaku, does a better job of handling the press: