So, I’ve been playing Mafia Wars on Facebook for a few months, and have become completely frustrated with it. Enough so that I doubt I’ll play anymore. I could probably rant for hours about the problem, but … well, no. Actually I WILL rant a bit about the problems. With any hope, someone who is working on the game will read this. Fat chance.

Like so many online games, the chief problem is that too much development time is spent on expanding the game than fixing existing problems. It is difficult to speak of the game’s problems without getting into the mechanics of the game, but let’s just say that the player relies on energy, which is spent on jobs. And the game is excessively stingy with energy, particularly after the first 100 levels or so. Strangely enough, it is at this point that some elements of the game become pointless: like money. My character had billions of dollars, and nothing to spend them on.

At this point, the game comes to a screeching halt. The developers throw up roadblocks to attempt to thwart your advance in the game, forcing you to do jobs over and over again in order to gain items you need to finish other jobs. And the payoff is virtually nothing. It becomes frustrating and tedious. So you never really finish, unless you’re a glutton for punishment or obsessive compulsive.

There is, unfortunately, no lack of these types playing the game.

Of course, if you’ve ever played an online game against a band of obsessive compulsives, you know you simply cannot win. I’ve run into the same problem with players on Xbox Live, especially in FPS games. Within a week of a game’s release, they’ll have amassed so many experience points, unlocked all the extras, calculated the optimum weapons loadout in order to decimate their enemies. That’s all well and good, but they make the game miserable for everyone else playing. The same goes with Mafia Wars, where level 3000+ character (I kid you not) come down and beat up on the level 40 noobs, killing any fun they may have been having with the game. This happened to me so often early on, that I very nearly gave up on the game.

The response by the developers has been silence. Basically, they’ve been adding new sections to the game, rehashing the rules, but never fixing the fundamental problems. And as one skips from one area of the game to the next, the advantages accrued by long-term players increase exponentially. New players are saddled with changes to the game rules which cripple them, extending the time necessary to complete the early levels (giving the game more ad views, of course), but exposing them to all sorts of frustrations.

I guess this is inevitable with any game like this, where the model is constantly evolving. It’s like playing Monopoly, only to learn that halfway through the game, suddenly your hotels are worth half their value, and you can only collect when they are landed on with even rolls of the dice. Suddenly you feel cheated: all that work you put into the game has suddenly been erased, and for no good reason.

Any online game requires a good-faith effort on the part of the game-masters to keep the playing field level. New rules are fine if they apply to everyone. But that’s not the case in Mafia Wars. Long-term players are often not effected by the new rules. Old players retain properties, for instance, while new players are denied them. Again, changing the rules sucks the fun out of the game.

One of the more egregious errors was the release of high-level equipment to just about everyone playing the game. So level 20 players suddenly became outfitted with some of the best equipment in the game, erasing all the work other players had put into the game collecting (at some effort) high-level items. Not only did this skew some of the fights in the game, but it obviated a whole subset of game items, making the entire middle section of the game pointless. Pfft.

So, I’m not playing it anymore. I’ve got a bunch of useless digital loot, if anyone wants it.

tags: gaming, whatever
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The new Harry Potter movie comes out in just two weeks, and I’m pretty sure I won’t bother seeing it in the theater. The movies have never captured the feel of the books (save for maybe the third movie). Nevertheless, I am a fan, and the videogame version of the sixth book in the series came out the other day. Having some extra bucks left over on my GameStop card, I decided to pick it up.

I liked the last game in the series, which let me roam all over Hogwarts. Had the game been in any other fictional universe, I probably would have been bored out of my mind. But it was Harry Potter, so I liked it. A little. Much can be said for the new game, which is not as good, in my opinion, as the last, but entertaining enough for the seven dollars I paid for it.

You’d think that the game would be able to explore parts of the book that the movie couldn’t, due to time constraints. And this did happen in earlier games in the series. But now the games are not videogames based on the book, but based on the movie. And I can already see some places where the movie jazzed up the book in ways that are … well, let’s just say they are very, very bad. Bad enough that I don’t want to see the movie now. It’s strange getting this preview of the movie’s failings in videogame form, but it’s not the first time it’s happened, and likely won’t be the last.

So the game is the book’s narrative twice removed. Butchered first by the movie, the game takes the butchering one step further. Not only do we get the crappy screenplay version of the plot, but we get it with lousy voice actors and with character models that look like a cross between robots and zombies. But I get to wander around Hogwarts again, which is really all I want.

I’m still fascinated by the crappy stories game players are forced to sit through. Even the so-called “good” videogame stories are complete crap. I think back to Mass Effect, lauded by many as having one of the best stories of 2007. Of course, anyone familiar with SF could see that massive portions of the story were lifted from the later seasons of Star Trek: Enterprise. ENTERPRISE! Of all shows to crib from, they pick the (arguably) worst of the Star Trek series, and some of the most contrived subplots. Ick. Or the stories for Halo 3, or Metal Gear Solid: Guns of the Patriots. The stories are attrocious, despite the fact that (unlike movies) they have up to 20 hours to play with in terms of storytelling, and unlike books have the power of great visuals.

Both benefits are completely squandered. It’s unfortunate that some of SF’s best storytellers couldn’t help write some decent game scripts. Or, as I’ve said before, decent film scripts. Sure, the genre is different, and has different demands, but I’d like to see someone give it a serious try. The best game stories are about as coherent and thought-provoking as Transformers 2 (my review of which was posted just the other day). That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but we should be demanding better.

The worst thing is that most gamers don’t even realize that these stories are complete crap. Let’s be honest here: Harry Potter’s sixth book is fantastic. It’s a great story, and has moments of amazing adventure and genuine emotion. And I’d love to see those things on the screen, but it just isn’t going to happen. If I enjoy the movie, it’s because I’m superimposing my love for the book onto the movie. If I love the game (or just like it), it’s because I’m doing the same. But it shouldn’t be that way, should it?

tags: Books, gaming, harry potter, movies, science fiction
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In the past I’ve noticed that some tech reaches an almost ridiculous pinnacle before a quick demise in the market. The most recent example of this is Blockbuster Video, which up until a few years ago was a seemingly unbeatable force in movie rentals. Until, that is, technology made movie rentals moot. Old fashioned. Silly. Now Blockbuster is on a long, slow spiral of market death.

I’ve been wondering the same thing about video game consoles lately. There are three major gaming consoles this generation: Nintendo’s Wii, Microsoft’s Xbox 360, and Sony’s PS3. Nintendo seems to be winning this fight for the moment, with Microsoft firmly in second place and Sony bringing up the rear, at least in terms of sales. Some transparency here: I own an Xbox and a Wii. I play on both of them, although the Xbox is what I usually end up playing. I don’t have anything against the PS3, but I don’t much like Sony as a company.

The problem with three consoles is obvious: games are expensive to make, and to assure that developers make their money back on games, they are usually developed for either the two HD gaming consoles (Xbox and PS3) or for all three (although ports to the Wii tend to be very different). This defeats the purpose of having different gaming consoles. Despite fanboy enthusiasm, both consoles are roughly equal in performance. Neither has games that look dramatically better than the other. And mostly, the games for both are the same. So it’s a massive drag on game developers to create the same game for two completely different consoles. And since the Xbox is essentially a PC, it is far easier for developers to make games for the Xbox and PC than for the PS3. Developers want to make money (and gamers should want them to make money), so they make decisions based on the widest installed base of platforms. That’s been the PC and Xbox this time around.

But what if the console didn’t matter? What if game developers could be assured that everyone could play the games, no matter what hardware they had? What if they had no hardware at all, really?

That’s where OnLive comes in. It’s a new system for renting video games. Yes, renting. If there has been any new development in media over the last few years, it’s been the media-as-service model, where you pay for broad access, rather than paying for specific titles. Like Netflix’s on-demand system, you pay a fee and you watch what you like. So far, indications are that this model not only works well in practice but is extremely popular. But will it work for games?

How it works is simple: rather than buying a console and individual titles on DVD, you purchase a box. The box is not a console, per se, it is simply a network device that receives signals from a gaming controller and sends them over the internet to the OnLive server, where the game is running. The server sends back streaming video (720p resolution, which is the most common on HD gaming systems right now) of the game, which the box sends to your TV.

Initial objections were obvious: what about lag? After all, the signal’s got to go from the controller to the box over the internet to a server somewhere across the country, then the signal has to be processed, the game reacts, and then the video has to be compressed, sent back across the internet to the box, then to the TV. What about lag? So far, it looks like the company has that problem licked.

The benefits to this are enormous. First, the box itself (because it has no media drive, no advanced processors or memory) is relatively cheap. Second, no one needs to mass produce all the game discs and crap that goes with the game to the retailer. Third, because all the games run on back-end servers, there is never a need for individuals to upgrade their consoles. All the hardware upgrades go on the back end. Once a new generation of games is announced, everyone has access to them without buying new hardware.

I still have some reservations. First, that’s a lot of computing power at any given moment. It also requires that everything be done over the internet, and I’m not convinced that current infrastructure can really support that much active bandwidth. But it’s also clear that both computing power and bandwidth are increasing at decent rates. And an Xbox 360, for instance, compared to current desktop computing power, simply is not that demanding.

For developers, the boon would be fantastic. They’d no longer have to worry about developing games for multiple consoles. Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony might be out of the console business, but the business model has been dead for some time: console makers take losses on console sales up front in order to make money on the games. It remains to be seen what would happen with online services such as Microsoft’s popular Xbox Live, but they might survive in some other context.

In short, I think the idea is great and worth pursuing, but it probably needs some development before it’s market-ready.

Oh, and there’s the real benefit to all this: the death of endless, pointless, ridiculous fanboy arguments over which console is better and/or has better games. That benefit alone is enough for me. Sign me up.

tags: gaming, markets, technology
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I can’t imagine too many people who think video games aren’t too expensive. Wii and PC games retail for $50, while Xbox 360 and PS3 games retail for $60. They are expensive enough that most gamers do the play-and-trade shuffle at Gamestop. Occasionally I buy a full retail game (if I’m particularly interested in playing it) and trade it in when I’m done, usually knocking $20-30 off my next game. I might play four or five games a year, but I rarely pay more than $30 for them.

Gabe Newell of Valve (makers of the Half-Life series, and creators of the Steam internet distribution service) seems to think that games are too expensive as well:

On the PC-only Steam service, a wide range of prices are attached to games, and attractive weekend deals throw more pricing variability into the mix. Although Valve was initially afraid that volatility or variability in pricing would confuse or anger its customers–or even cannibalize retail sales–Newell says that was not all the case.

In fact, it dramatically increased sales. Illustrating his point, Newell showed the results of a Left 4 Dead promotion Valve ran last weekend, which cut the price of the game in half to $25. The discount (and promise of new content for the game) rocketed sales of the game on Steam by 3,000 percent.

That doesn’t surprise me. Heck, if I could have picked up Left4Dead for $25, I probably would have. But I don’t play on the PC, I play on the 360. Dang.

Anyway, Newell says that it’s easier to play around with pricing via Steam than in retail channels, and he’s right. Steam allows some price variability, allowing the market to find a sweet spot. Some failed titles might have sold much better had the rigorous $60 price point on the PS3 and Xbox 360 been alleviated. Very few titles appear on the market for the less-than-$60 retail price.

Honestly, the $60 price raises game expectation. Gamers expect a certain number of playable hours, modes, features, graphics, etc. But not all games really have $60 worth of content in them. Microsoft has the Xbox Live Arcade system, where games appear for anywhere from $5 to $20 on their online service, but those games are almost uniformly of lower production value. The two-tiered system doesn’t really allow for quality games at mid-range prices. Big sellers like Fallout 3, Halo, Metal Gear Solid, and Grand Theft Auto might not suffer from the $60 price point, but a lot of other games do. By the time their prices drop on the shelves, they’re out of the public mind.

I think a better price point for most next-gen console games would be $40. Some bigger titles could come out at $50 or $60. I think it’s great that Steam is experimenting a little with this, but I’d like the experimentation to extend to the console market as well. Better to get this all sorted out before the next console generation comes out. Indeed, if the console makers could give their machines adequate disk storage, an online distribution service like Steam could work very, very well on consoles.

tags: gaming, markets
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There’s a video floating around (it can be viewed here) of a tech demo for an interesting game concept.  Most people seem to want to mention last year’s Portal when talking about it.  But the only real similarity with Portal is that it’s from a first person perspective, and it’s more a puzzle game than a shooter.  The idea is that the world is blank (the demo shows both white and black backgrounds, depending on the location), and you shoot paintballs which explode on the walls, showing you where the walls are.

Now, I really enjoyed Portal, even if I felt the first 80% of the game was tutorial and only the last level any real challenge.  I liked the idea of having a puzzle game that was from a first-person perspective, and I liked the game’s humor.  And I’m looking forward to the inevitable sequel.  So I’m open to the idea of more games in this mold.

However, while this new paintball concept is interesting, I’m not quite sure it can sustain the kind of gameplay that Portal did.  Portal lent itself to creative and twisted uses of its central mechanic, but I don’t see that in this new demo.

However, it is just a tech demo.  Who knows what else the developers can wring from it.  It will be interesting to see.  It’s worth pointing out that other “high concept” first-person variations (like the recently released Mirror’s Edge) haven’t been as good in reality as the hype surrounding them during development.  But then, I don’t want to rain on parades, here.  It’s a good thing that developers are coming up with more interesting games that aren’t all about shooting guns.  Okay, Portal’s mechanic was based on a gun, but you don’t get to kill anyone in the game (except GlaDOS, maybe).

Interesting, but I’m a little underwhelmed.  It was one of those concepts that for the first five seconds I was thinking, “That’s pretty cool.”  But after fifteen seconds or so of gameplay, I was already starting to get a little bored.  There’s been a lot of that, lately.  It was how I felt about Mirror’s Edge, too.

tags: gaming
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I turn on my Xbox 360 this morning, and what do I behold: the new update for Microsoft’s game console has been released.  So I let it download and install.  My expectations are so low as to be negative, if that’s possible.

So I’m moderately surprised when I find that I like it.  The old “blades” interface has gone the way of the dodo, and a new, slicker interface (with all the same old functionality) has replaced it.  Along with some new things like avatars (Microsoft’s answer to the Wii’s “Mii”s) and direct movie downloads from Netflix (yes, I’m sure you can hear the sound of my hands eagerly rubbing together from where you are sitting).  Excellent.

Avatars: my God, Microsoft, could you be more obvious about ripping off the Wii?  The avatars look fine.  In fact, they look a whole lot better than on the Wii because 1) it’s in HD and 2) the console has about ten times more graphical power.  That said, there is not quite as much fine-tuning as is available on the Wii (unless, as is possible, I’m missing something).  On the Wii you can size and place things like eyes and noses and mouths.  But there’s not that much control on the 360’s avatars, which seems a bit odd to me.  The real rip-off feeling, though, comes from the music played while coming up with your avatar.  It’s that same happy-chirpy music that the Wii interface always plays!  Ayieieieieie!  I can’t freaking stand it.  I actually had to mute the sound while I made my avatar.

Despite the better graphics etc., I still feel like my avatar on the Wii looks more like me than the one on the 360.  And that seems just wrong.  Anyway, it wasn’t a feature I was really counting much on.

The Netflix functionality, though, is kick-ass.  The movies stream quickly (much better than the long download times associated with Microsoft’s own movie service), and they don’t actually get stored on the hard drive (which is good, considering my 20gb drive is mighty tight on space right now).  The quality was excellent.  There’s only one hitch: you’ve got to go online to the Netflix website and put the items you want to watch in your “Instant Cue.”  Then they appear on your Xbox.  This doesn’t bother me … much.  Microsoft better come up with a way of browsing movies on the Xbox, though, or switching between computer and console will get mighty irritating.  The 360 is already connected to the internet, so why should I have to switch to my computer to select a movie?  Silly, really.

The only other problem is that the library of titles for streaming is much smaller than the DVD library, but I’m happy to see that that’s changing, and quickly.

The other big feature is installing games to the hard drive.  The console still requires the game be in the drive, but it reads from the hard drive instead of the DVD.  I moved some data around to make room for Fallout 3, and installed it to the hard drive.  It’s not substantially faster than playing from the DVD, but I did enjoy the fact that the console ran much quieter.  I recently had the console repaired for a faulty DVD drive, so it was already quieter, but it was amazing how much of a difference it made.

So far, so good.  But the real benefit of the “New Xbox Experience” (there’s Microsoft’s genius marketing department for you) is that it is so fast.  The “blades” interface was fine, if cluttered.  But it always seemed to lag when switching between blades.  Then there was list population.  It took forever.  To look at your list of Live Arcade games could take ten to fifteen seconds.  Not a problem, just irritating.  Then there was the awkward listing of game achievements.  Again, another long wait.

Now things pop up almost immediately.  The menus are animated, but the animations are short and smooth.  No stuttering or tearing on the screen like the old interface.  The interface is reminiscent of the Media Center interface, with up and down selecting between what were, in the past, the blades.  And options spill out to the right in 3D-flip-book (a la Apple, of course) animations.  It’s all very smooth, and more importantly, very responsive.  Unlike before where I always felt like I was waiting for the interface to catch up with me, this actually felt smooth and uninterrupted.

I didn’t really have any problems with the old interface, but I’m pleasantly surprised by these upgrades.  Very happy.  I still wish Microsoft would fix it’s video sharing interface, though.  It retains all the functionality of the past, but offers nothing new (that I can see).  Media Center is still ridiculously slow and cumbersome.  Integrating it completely into the Xbox interface would be a boon, especially if it could populate the media menus as fast as all the others.

And it was free, which makes it all the better.  Microsoft got this one right.  I’m still scouting it out for new features (I’ll have time tonight to do more than a quick once-over), and if I see anything new or surprising, I’ll probably post again.

tags: gaming, technology
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I did finally get a chance to play around with Will Wright’s (the creator of Sim City and The Sims) Spore, and was so disappointed I haven’t bothered with it since.  It’s tragically boring.  The game was billed as a kind of evolution-simulator, tracking the growth of an organism from simple stages all the way through to a galaxy-spanning empire.  Ambitious, even for Will Wright.

Well, it turned out to not be what a lot of us were hoping for.  First of all, it is terribly cute.  That’s not necessarily a problem, but the game suffers as a result.  First, there is no single-cell phase.  And the “evolutionary” part of it is really just you, the gamer, picking up random parts and slapping them on your creature. There is nothing even remotely close to evolution in this game.  I thought that it would be more a game where your actions determined what your creature was like.  There is some of that, but in the end your actions have little bearing on your creature’s design.

When the “creature designer” program came out, that bubble burst for me.  I was decidedly less enthusiastic.  I’m not the only one.

So I’m not so surprise that I hear that Maxis, the developer, had a bit of a creative split over the direction of the game: between those who wanted the game to be “cute” and those who wanted to focus on “science.”

The “cute” team apparently won, and the result is a completely boring game.

I’d enjoy a more “science” oriented game, where my actions drove evolution, not some in-between character editor.  The only really fun part of Spore is the creature creator.  And they gave that away for free.  The actual game is incredibly dull running around making friends with other creatures by dancing.  Later phases were terribly easy.  The game has sold a million copies, mostly based on hype and Will Wright’s name.  Reviews have been decidedly mixed.

Too bad, really.  There was a real possibility that this could have been a fun game that could have been a decent teaching tool.  There aren’t many of those.  Instead, the company opted to create something cute and boring.

tags: gaming, whatever
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I love my Xbox 360.  Seriously.  Despite the hassles it has given me over the last two-and-a-half years, I very much enjoy the thing.  I was a tough convert from PC gaming.  I grew up with PC gaming, and stuck with it until 2005.  Twenty years of PC gaming ran in my blood, but I gave it up cold turkey.

Talk about the next iteration of Microsoft’s console has already begun online.  In earnest, I hereby give my list of features for the next console, most of which have to do with outstanding issues with the current console:

1.  Backward Compatibility

MS really messed this one up.  Support on the 360 for original Xbox games was spotty at best.  The next console should play all the current console’s games flawlessly.  I think a good argument could be made that for cost purposes, the next console should have essentially the same development platform.  Simply scale it up, like PC games.  Better textures, higher framerates, better effects.  The 360 has already proven to be a more efficient development platform than the PS3, and by simply scaling (rather than rebuilding the platform from scratch) they can take advantage of the already well-established development teams.

2.  Blu-Ray

I have serious doubts that the next-gen DVD race has any winners at all.  Blu-Ray adoption rates remain slow, even as HDTV becomes mainstream.  TV content delivery via the Web seems on the verge of exploding.  Still, games are storage-intensive, and online delivery of games seems unlikely to catch on anytime soon.  And that means a high-density storage medium.  MS might be tempted to come up with something proprietary, but I hope they simply adopt Blu-Ray instead.

3.  Media Sharing

Right now, the Xbox is spotty when it comes to working as a media extender.  There is a bifurcation right now in format support.  Some files will play over shared network drives that will not play in the Media Center.  This is idiotic.  MS should allow any files to play, and provide codecs for all the major, common formats out there.

4.  The Unreadable Disc Error

Fix the “unreadable disc error” problem.  There’s no reason why, if a disc has a smudge on it, that the Xbox can’t pause the game, allow you to take the disc out and wipe it clean, and then try to read it again.  Right now, the game crashes and you’re out to the Dashboard.  One of my discs (for Lost Odyssey) constantly had this problem.  And when save points can be an hour apart, it’s frustrating to have the console crash, taking forty-five or more minutes of gameplay (or, in the case of an RPG, an hour of tedious level grinding) with it.

5.  A Better Dashboard

Yes, I know the fall update is soon upon us, and it is a major revamp of the entire system.  While the original Dashboard was great, over the last few years it seems to have gotten cluttered.  Something more customizable might be nice, with modules that can be moved, adjusted, or just plain removed from the main screen.  File management could be streamlined.  Downloads as well.

6.  Require HD

There’s no excuse for anything less than demanding that the console be paired with an HDTV only.  Why is this important?  Because the current-gen consoles have to take into account the fact that many people are playing on SDTVs.  The result are games where the interface cannot really take advantage of the higher resolutions of HDTV for things such as inventory screens, stats, and menus.  Not that game designers need to cram more text on every page, but it would be nice to have that option.

7.  Reliability

Enough said.

So, it’s worth pointing out that a few things in the current console are worthy of significant praise.  First, the 360’s wireless controller is amazing.  It’s a bit heavy.  That’s about the only criticism I can come up with.  Well, throw in a stiff, unresponsive, and generally worthless D-pad, I guess.  So that’s two criticisms.  I have big hands, and the few times I picked up a Playstation controller, I felt like I was going to break it.  A new controller might consider eliminating the D-pad altogether, or at least loosening it up a bit so that it can actually be used.

Also excellent is XBox Live.  I don’t play online all that much, but I’ve never had any problems on Live (save for the general rudeness of people who play online).  And the services offered over Live (movie downloads, game demos, etc.) are great.  XBox Live Arcade is, by itself, probably worth the cost of the console even if you never go out and buy a full-price 360 game.

That’s my list.  I doubt MS will listen, but we’ll see.  They’ve got, what, three or four years before the next console will be due.  Time enough.

tags: gaming, technology
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There’s an interesting video discussion over at Tom’s Hardware concerning the criticism of Electronic Arts for its DRM on the long-awaited game Spore.

Spore’s copy protection allows only three installs.  This is similar to the kind of DRM imposed on songs over iTunes, which allows five copies to be activated before the software calls a halt.  Unlike some of the other online discussions of the issue, Tom’s people actually seem to have thought this through.

They argue that EA wouldn’t have gone this route if it had looked at the numbers and saw a problem.  And it’s true: EA is a big company, and they don’t do things without market research.  And so it was pretty obvious they saw the imposition of this sort of DRM as good enough for their wallets.

Gamers don’t seem to want to admit this, but most of the hardcore gamers out there pirate games.  They don’t purchase at retail.  Some games, perhaps, they’ll buy.  But gamers play a lot more games than they buy.  And it’s hard to argue that Spore’s DRM is all that onerous to average, casual players: which is Spore’s demographic.  They’ll install the game once, and it will sit on their PC for three years.  They’ll upgrade to a new PC, install the game, and then probably play it for a week or so before forgetting about it for a few years.  The three-install DRM won’t bother them.

It’s hardcore gamers that are the problem.  They are more tech-savvy.  They know where to go to get games for free online.  They’re willing to go through more trouble to play a game they want.  And it’s not just about the price: it’s about the convenience.  They can get the game earlier, quicker, and start playing immediately.  No stores.  No pre-orders.  No waiting for the UPS truck.  Casual gamers aren’t like that.  They won’t go out the day a game comes out to purchase it.  They don’t read online gaming publications to follow every last gameplay video and screenshot.  They don’t salivate over the early reviews.  They don’t go on to online forums and defend (or criticize) games they haven’t yet played.  Casual gamers don’t know or care what a rootkit is (although they probably should).

I’m not saying that SecuROM is good software.  It’s crap, and it’s likely to muck up your system in one way or another.  But EA’s new commitment to putting it on all new games makes perfect sense, at least at a business-plan level.  It protects against casual pirating and limits the resale market.

Most of the people online who are complaining about the DRM are pirates.  They are simply using the DRM as a justification for pirating.  They say, “Hell no, I’m not playing this game because of the DRM.”  But they were never going to buy the game.  They were going to (or already have) pirated the game, and are probably playing it already.  And so it’s a wonder they are even complaining about the DRM.  By putting SecuROM (which has been thoroughly and completely hacked over and over again) on every game, EA has assured that pirating will continue, and with relative ease.  In short, this move has signaled that the PC game developing community is pretty much resigned to pirating.  And they don’t seem to care.  That’s the part of this calculation that most of EA’s critics don’t seem to recognize.

This latest dustup is nothing new.  Games have had DRM for decades.  SecuROM is a particularly irritating piece of software, but other games have had irritating DRM of other brands.  PC gamers: get over it.  Seriously.  Because you know what?  The more you complain, the more likely that EA and other PC developers will pull out of PC gaming altogether.  In fact, it looks like EA is beginning to build an excuse for doing just that.  And pirates are giving them good reason.  If there is any reason for EA’s decision to place SecuROM on every game it publishes, this is it.

tags: drm, gaming, technology
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Electronic Arts’ new game Spore by legendary game designer Will Wright (creator of The Sims and Sim City), is set to come out tomorrow, but copies have already been popping up online.  The standard argument is being made: copy protection on video games is a hassle, and encourages people to pirate.

There is a lot of truth in this.  A few years back, I purchased a game for my PC that I couldn’t use because the copy protection had some problem with my system.  Eventually people realized that the game didn’t like systems that looked “hacked”: that is, computers that had been put together by enthusiasts, rather than bought in a store or online.  I returned the game (I don’t even remember which one it was).  And that was one reason why I stopped playing games on my PC.

What happens most of the time is that people download the no-CD cracks for games so they can play without putting the CD- or DVD-ROM into the drive.  The discs do get scratched, and there’s no *need* for the game to be in there.  Of course, the no-CD cracks are usually all that’s needed to play illegal copies of the game.

So, EA paid a ton of money to SecuROM for copy protection that didn’t even make it to the release date.  It’s really pointless.  In the end, the only people who have to deal with the copy protection are the people who actually bought the game.  Everyone else is enjoying DRM-free gaming.  Many of these people do actually go out and by the game, by the way.  But not as many as the pirates claim.

It doesn’t take a genius to see that this system is broken.  And it’s why PC gaming is all but dead.  Stardock, another company that makes PC games, recently released it’s Sins of a Solar Empire game, which has sold decently (but is no best-seller), without copy protection.  Of course, anti-DRM types are crowing about this.  But I’ll tell you, illegal copies of *that* game were floating around weeks before the release.  So claims that getting rid of DRM will end piracy are just idiotic.

Console gaming is appealing to developers because the system is closed.  To play a pirated game on, say, an XBox 360, you’ve got to physically modify the console.  Open it up, void your warranty, and go through a bunch of steps that most people aren’t willing to even consider.  Very few will ever do this.  It guarantees that developers will get paid for their games.

Gaming is bigger business than Hollywood these days.  And games have budgets pushing quickly into blockbuster movie territory (the budget for this spring’s Grand Theft Auto 4 is rumored to be up near $100 million).  There is no reason to expect developers will not go through extensive steps to make sure they recoup their investment.

Do you want to know who ruined PC gaming?  The pirates did.  Sure, they don’t want to admit it, but by making games available early and free, they destroyed what had been the most creative ecology for making games.  Consoles today owe a lot to PC gaming.  They wouldn’t exist without PCs.  And pirates destroyed it.  Pirating early on in the PC era was never as big a deal as developers claimed, but once the internet took off, it was just a matter of time.  It takes me about an hour and a half to download a standard DVD worth of material that makes up the average PC game.  That’s it.  Ten years ago it would have taken me days or even weeks to do so.  Developers responded by trying to protect their games, and pirates continued to make things difficult by cracking security.  Why is there DRM out there on games that make it hard to play them?  Because of piracy.  Why are there hardly any new games for the PC that aren’t tied to massive online communities?  Because of piracy.

Some claim that cracking security is inevitable.  That developers were painting big targets on their game by adding in security.  Bull.  SecuROM is not new.  It’s been broken dozens of times.  There was no new challenge here.  They broke security because they wanted the game for free and to make a point.  Well, their point is made.  It’s unlikely many new games for the PC will ever be made, unless things change dramatically.

I hope they’re happy.

tags: ethics, gaming, technology, whatever
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