What Would Matt Do

Updates at the bottom.

Why do PC gamers amuse me? Because they get so cranky, so easily. Or maybe I’m just getting to old to get caught up in all of the drama. Let me start at the beginning.

 

Back in the day, when you purchased a bigger game, there was often copy protection. Sometimes in the form of a disk with a bad sector in the right spot, sometimes the game would ask what the fourth word in the sixth paragraph on page twenty-three was (I love and miss you Dragon Wars) and sometimes a guy would stand behind you and tell when to install and when not to (or was that just me…). Not long after that, games started shipping on that new fangled media, CDs. Copy protection started including a CD Key found in a manual or requiring you to have the disc in the drive. Then more recently, came online registration. For instance, when I installed the Company of Heroes expansion and logged in my ‘wzrd’ (that’s so you can find me in CoH) screen name, it already knew I had purchased and registered the original game, so I didn’t even need to install it. Nor did I need to keep the DVD in the drive after that. I DID need to be connected to the internet though.

 

The problem with all of that fancy shit? None of it works. All of it can be easily hacked in today’s world of the internet and bit torrent. You can literally play the game before you can buy it. The full game, completely free and easy. Pretty reliable these days even…you don’t have to jump through a lot of hoops, it usually works just fine and you can often get patches as they come out. So what stops people from just downloading a game, like say Call of Duty 4 or Crysis instead of buying it? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. And that’s where the controversy comes in. Lets start with some words from one Michael Fitch. He works at a good sized publisher and he’s more than a little frustrated with the whole process:

Piracy is huge. It’s mind-bogglingly huge. We’re not talking about a hundred thousand people pirating a game, we’re talking about a hundred thousand people pirating a game every day, for months. We’re talking about games that are selling 500k-800k units being pirated 5M-10M+ times.

[and]

Look, two years ago, I didn’t really appreciate the problem myself. I didn’t understand just how big it is, what the impact of it really means. I’ve learned the hard way, and the reason why you’re seeing more and more of these stories isn’t because there’s some kind of developer/publisher conspiracy going on to attack the pirates, or because narrow-minded PC purists don’t understand that piracy isn’t the only problem, it’s because the problem has grown a lot, and we have much better ways of measuring it now than we ever did before, and when you take off the blinders and look at what’s actually going on, it’s frightening.

That’s a man really upset with the situation he’s in. I’m not saying I agree 100% with him (if you read that thread, you’ll see I had a few questions to be sure), but that’s not really the point. This point is that he works for a publisher and is probably a pretty good representative of how they feel from all I can tell. They see millions of downloads on games that don’t sell great and wonder, "Are we working our assess off here to just give this shit away? Can we fix this? Should we get out of the PC game side all together?" We, the gamer, don’t often see it from the other point of view, but that’s literally what publishers are doing right now. Either working around it (Brad Wardell style) or often refusing to get involved on it. Or at the very least, not being exclusively PC these days.

"We are suffering currently from the huge piracy that is encompassing Crysis," said Yerli. "Similar games on consoles sell factors of 4-5 more. It was a big lesson for us, and I believe we won’t have PC exclusives as we did with Crysis in future."

Now that’s partially just an excuse. Crysis had a lot more problems than just piracy, but still, it is a factor. If they had released the exact same game on the console, they’d have sold more, almost a guarantee. Though, one of the big problems with Crysis was the huge system requirements, so saying it would sell more on the console is both true and not really a valid point. Crytek picked the worst offenders for piracy (hardcore gamers) and created a game that only they could play…and then those same people downloaded the game instead of buying it. Well, that’s the theory anyway, no one is exactly sure if people that download games instead of buying them would actually buy them if they couldn’t download them. That’s a big question.

 

 Now we come to the meat of the story. Some publishers are trying to new draconian methods that may or may not work out in practice. EA is the latest to announce some extreme Digitial Rights Management with Spore and Mass Effect (the PC version of course).

"After the first activation, SecuROM requires that [Mass Effect PC] re-check with the server within ten days (in case the CD Key has become public/warez’d and gets banned)," said French in a post on the BioWare forums.

If customers do not come online after ten days, the game will cease to function.

"After 10 days a re-check is required before the game can run," added French. "..An internet connection is not required to install, just to activate the first time, and every 10 days after."

The check is run when users activate the game’s executable file, with the first re-check coming within "5 days remaining in the 10 day window."

Lose your connection for some reason? Sorry, you can’t play ME or Spore anymore (if you lose it for 10 days straight). Are you a valid customer who bought the game at the store? Did you have a problem installing it? Then you might be screwed. They upped the number installs allowed because people were running into problems and being locked out of the game they legally purchased. And that brings up another point, what happens when those registration servers no longer exist? What happens when EA or whatever publisher decideds they no longer want to run those servers… Will you no longer be able to install your legally purchased game and have to go download it somewhere?

This whole issue has the internet aflame. Well, not the whole internet, but the subset of PC gamers that read websites and post on forums. From RPS:

The other thing that strikes me is that PC piracy is clearly on their mind. On one side, you have them trying strong DRM methods to try and secure more traditional PC game fare. On the other, they have things like Battlefield Heroes where rather than trying to fight piracy, they create a game that completely bypasses piracy as a worry. I wonder what else they’re thinking of.

There are currently two hundred and thirty one comments on that post alone. It’s like that all over the gaming internet. Gamers are getting up arms. Most of a PC gamers want to play Spore. Most of us have been listening to the hype, wondering if Will can pull it off. Now, we’re going to have deal with crazy DRM stuff if we buy the game. We’re going to have to hope we don’t have any install problems. And we’re going to wonder, in three or four years, will this game still work? Will EA still allow me install it?

Taking all of that in the picture, along with things like Sins and GalCiv2 having no copy protection at all and making us PC gamers feel like we’re getting a bit of the stick. And I don’t give a shit.

That’s right, I don’t care at all. As a matter of fact, I think EA is taking the right move. I think they are doing exactly what they need to do if they can manage to make sure the game isn’t hacked and distributed online for the first week or so, they will do exactly what they need to do. And they may influence their sales, who knows. What they are really doing those is making people on their side of the industry feel good about releasing PC games again. If this works, and they get good sales on both games, or at least with Spore (since ME is just a port), they will have made a point, at least in their mind. That point will allow more PC games to get made and may actually help in the industry as a whole.

 

Yeah, I know. I’m now officially down with The Man™ and their abhorrent practices, but this isn’t about them anymore. This about saving our collective industry. This is about slowing down piracy a bit so those trying to pull the hard earned green backs from my and others wallets can feel better about releasing more games and they can quite blaming piracy when mediocre games don’t sell well on the console.

I think the real question at this point, is will their DRM methods work. And by work, I mean, will it help them sell more games? Maybe. I think it might. It might also go down in flames. Spore might have all kinds of install problems as everyone tries to register at the same time and the servers get bogged down. The game might have problems that require reinstalls, it might not be working 100% great with SecuROM when it releases. Who knows…

 

What I do know is this. Most legal PC gamers don’t know about DRM or what it means to their game experience. All they want is the game to work when they buy it. If that doesn’t work, this will be a big fail for EA. If there aren’t a mess of problems at the launch, they might actually pull it off. I also know I won’t be buying Spore on day one. Unless they release a demo that convinces me before that. DRM or no, I’m not fully sold on the Spore concept and that they can pull it off correctly. And to be perfectly fair, the DRM on it will definitely add to the wait and see mentality. You need to prove to me it’s going to work as simply and as quietly as you claim, before I completely buy in.

Here’s a simple way to tell if it works or fails. Is it easy to install and doesn’t require any extra activity from your average PC gamer? Does the game stay off bit torrent sites until at least a few days to a week after the release of the game? Does the DRM not factor into the game experience at all? If so, you, EA, have a win on your hands. If you can’t manage those three things for 98%+ of your customers, you failed. Plain and simple. Oh, and the internet is going to own you for it.

 

What Would Matt Do: I’d calm down and see how it goes down. Remember, if you’re aware of the DRM that will be on Spore and ME, you’re not the average gamer. Lets see what happens once the average gamers experiences this first hand. Lets see if EA can pull this off. And lets see how long they run their servers. One note to EA though: After about 2-6 months, patch all of this DRM shit out of the system. There won’t be a need for it then.

 

Update 1: I think Penny Arcade covers what everyone fears EA will actually do pretty well.

Update 2: Looks like Mass Effect is scaling back it’s afore mentioned DRM plans. That’s great. The same rules apply to this version for me to look at it like a success (people were just complaining about VERY similar setup for Bioshock PC last year, so it’s still something unusual, this level of DRM). I’m glad to see they got rid of the 10 day check. Now if EA will do the same thing for Spore. The biggest thing here though is to keep it out of bit torrent sites before the game is released. If they can do that and don’t have too many fuckups on release, it may be useful. If not, it’s EA as usual.

Update 3: And now Spore is doing the same thing. I love the fast turn around.