Monday, January 07, 2008
Lessons Learned From the Failure of the Music Biz
Seth Godin has a list of lessons to be learned by other industries from the impending collapse of the music business:
Seth's Blog: Music Lessons
Some points that game developers and publishers ought to take note of:
2. Copy protection in a digital age is a pipe dream
This one has had "baking my noodle" ever since the Bioshock DRM stupidity happened. I still haven't come to a conclusion on this one, but there are two conflicting human responses battling it out on a battleground much bigger than DRM / Copy Protection:
#1 - Most people (westerners, at least) believe that creators of media content (a book, a movie, a song, a game, etc.) should be financially rewarded for their efforts. This is evidenced by the assumption that creators of the most popular content ought to be rich.
#2 - Most people also seem to feel that paying for something for which there is no scarcity is optional.
I'll hopefully have more to say on this one at a later date. I'm not prepared to give up on copy protection entirely, but I do believe it needs to be toned down so that it's near-zero impact on honest consumers, and that it needs to only part of a bigger solution.
3. Interactivity can’t be copied
Part of me wants to say, "Like Hell it can't!" But again - there are some germs of ideas here. Not just interactivity with the games, but interactivity with people. Like between the creators and the audience.
5. A frightened consumer is not a happy consumer.
The consumer in the information age has a lot to be frightened and worried about. Even when it comes down to a physical purchase. This weekend, my brother was complaining about the number of console games he owns that are effectively lost forever due to his kids damaging the discs.
The thing that stopped me from buying Bioshock was a concern that I won't be able to install it and play it when I want to do so. Considering that I am an occasional retrogamer, and that some of the games I've played this year came from companies that no longer exist, that's a real concern for me.
I think the games biz needs to think long and hard about how to make buying and "owning" games a better experience.
7. Remember the Bob Dylan rule: it’s not just a record, it’s a movement.
He's got an even better quote here: "People pay a premium for a story, every time." If you've ever felt that the gaming industry has turned into just something that churns out products instead of real experiences, this may be because they fell into this trap. They keep cranking out things they think I will buy instead of things that have meaning to me. The former follows the latter, not the other way around.
10. Don’t abandon the Long Tail
I think the videogame industry is finally waking up to discover this. They've been trying to bury all those obsolete games all these years, to prevent them from interfering with sales of The New Thing, which in reality is just The Old Thing with prettier graphics. And now, they are discovering that there's still money to be made there when the cost of distribution is dropped down to $cheap.
11. Understand the power of digital
And quit using my CD-ROM / DVD-ROM as a fragile dongle!
12. Celebrity is underrated
Especially in the games business. Publishers don't like to promote someone that might leave for the competition tomorrow. So rather than making sure said celebrity has no interest in leaving, they just try to hide the people responsible for the game behind a curtain, and pretend that these games are just magically produced by an unchanging corporation. And those few celebrities we do have are usually self-promoted, and too often predating the era of the game-publishing juggernauts, when videogames were still a niche business.
- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:45 AM (Permalink)
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Bioshock has reportedly strong sales and it took a relatively long time for it to be available for "free" - at least compared to other games of that public interest.
And lets not forget: Stream is DRM at its finest and AFAIK Half-Life 2 also had very good sales.
I agree with you in principle, though, and didn't buy or play Bioshock myself because of the restrictions... ;-)
And lets not forget: Stream is DRM at its finest and AFAIK Half-Life 2 also had very good sales.
I agree with you in principle, though, and didn't buy or play Bioshock myself because of the restrictions... ;-)
# posted by 
: January 07, 2008 9:53 AM
: January 07, 2008 9:53 AM
#2 - this happens at other levels, too. I work on one of the alternatives to Torque, and we're busy debating internally whether we need less copy protection to make evaluation & academic use easier or more copy protection because we're selling into markets where we expect to be pirated.
#5 - Spiderweb Software has always been pretty good about this; since you buy from them online, they keep track of what you bought, so they're willing to issue new license keys to the same email address.
#5 - Spiderweb Software has always been pretty good about this; since you buy from them online, they keep track of what you bought, so they're willing to issue new license keys to the same email address.
# posted by : January 07, 2008 10:20 AM
: January 07, 2008 10:20 AM
Yeah, that's the trick with piracy and DRM - there's no practical way to do an A/B split and compare apples to apples with that. Once the genie's out of the bottle, it's out.
While Gal Civ 2 provided something of anecdotal evidence that "you can have strong sales without strong DRM," Bioshock is apparently providing anecdotal evidence that "very strong DRM can greatly increase sales."
But we can't know for sure. Bioshock was also a very good game, had a TON of hype and media blitz behind it, and had a legacy behind it (in the form of System Shock). How much would it have sold if it had NO copy protection? What if it had only weak protection, like Gal Civ 2? We'll never know. I think it's indisputable that they sold more copies because of it (even with guys like me who refused to buy it in protest). But the questions remain:
A) How much of a difference did it make?
B) Is there another solution that would work just as well (or better) that has less impact on legitimate consumers?
While Gal Civ 2 provided something of anecdotal evidence that "you can have strong sales without strong DRM," Bioshock is apparently providing anecdotal evidence that "very strong DRM can greatly increase sales."
But we can't know for sure. Bioshock was also a very good game, had a TON of hype and media blitz behind it, and had a legacy behind it (in the form of System Shock). How much would it have sold if it had NO copy protection? What if it had only weak protection, like Gal Civ 2? We'll never know. I think it's indisputable that they sold more copies because of it (even with guys like me who refused to buy it in protest). But the questions remain:
A) How much of a difference did it make?
B) Is there another solution that would work just as well (or better) that has less impact on legitimate consumers?
I think that watermarking with personal information about the buyer is the right way to go about copy protection. If a digital object I buy (whether music, video or game) is encoded with my name, address, and the credit card number I used to buy it, I might not be put off from making a copy for my girlfriend, but I would never make it available for indiscriminate copying. If I lose my mind and send it out anyway, I risk being unable to buy any more digital objects. That seems to me to be the right balance. For an honest person, that's pretty much zero-impact as long as sellers are scrupulous about false positives, and are willing to replace lost media. For a dishonest person, it is prohibitive enough that I think they would self-police.
Admittedly, there are kinks to work out in that approach (particularly, what happens if the watermark is erased) but I think it's the right mindset.
Admittedly, there are kinks to work out in that approach (particularly, what happens if the watermark is erased) but I think it's the right mindset.
As the aforementioned brother who has effectively lost most of his Xbox games, allow me to chime in :) Let's ignore for the moment that my small children love our game consoles and already know how to work them, and that the old-style Nintendo cartridges were FAR more durable than today's disc-based games. Some will argue that I should not let children touch my expensive toy. Maybe they are right, but that's beside the point.
The option I'm pursuing right now is modifying my xbox so that I can put the games on the hard drive and avoid future damage to my library of titles. Yeah, that means I won't be able to use Xbox Live. OK, that's still a much better option than not being able to play my games at all.
The question becomes, though, how do I play the games I legally own, the copies of which I possess are now ruined? You got it, I either rent them from a company or borrow them from friends, copy them to my drive, and then play them from there.
The same thing exists for a friend of mine who bought Supreme Commander. He wants to play the game on a laptop which is not normally equipped with a CD-ROM drive (it has a spare battery instead). The game plays fine without the CD once it has loaded up, but is protected by Activision's copy protection at startup.
What does he do? He has to download a minimal CD image and run an application which defeats the SecureROM check in order to play the game he legally purchased.
I agree that authors should be entitled to a reward for their authorship, but that copyright lengths should be dramatically reduced. It's time for the US Copyright office to come into the digital age. In order for you to have a copyright to your work, the process I think maybe could go something like this:
1. You provide a DRM'd version of your work for a limited period, say, five or ten years.
2. In order to get a copyright from the citizens of our nation to exclusively distribute your work for a time, you must submit a fully-functional, non-DRM version of your copyrighted work in escrow to the Copyright office prior to release to the public.
3. On the date of the expiration of escrow, the Copyright office puts your work online and archived into various media, available for a small duplication fee.
Now, I'm sure there are holes in this approach, but at least it would be a start. I do not want media moguls dictating the terms of copyright to my grandchildren in the twenty-second century. Copyright is a privilege and incentive granted by our Constitution to encourage authors to share their work. It's time we took that right back from publishers who would lock up today's works until your children's children's children's children are old men.
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The option I'm pursuing right now is modifying my xbox so that I can put the games on the hard drive and avoid future damage to my library of titles. Yeah, that means I won't be able to use Xbox Live. OK, that's still a much better option than not being able to play my games at all.
The question becomes, though, how do I play the games I legally own, the copies of which I possess are now ruined? You got it, I either rent them from a company or borrow them from friends, copy them to my drive, and then play them from there.
The same thing exists for a friend of mine who bought Supreme Commander. He wants to play the game on a laptop which is not normally equipped with a CD-ROM drive (it has a spare battery instead). The game plays fine without the CD once it has loaded up, but is protected by Activision's copy protection at startup.
What does he do? He has to download a minimal CD image and run an application which defeats the SecureROM check in order to play the game he legally purchased.
I agree that authors should be entitled to a reward for their authorship, but that copyright lengths should be dramatically reduced. It's time for the US Copyright office to come into the digital age. In order for you to have a copyright to your work, the process I think maybe could go something like this:
1. You provide a DRM'd version of your work for a limited period, say, five or ten years.
2. In order to get a copyright from the citizens of our nation to exclusively distribute your work for a time, you must submit a fully-functional, non-DRM version of your copyrighted work in escrow to the Copyright office prior to release to the public.
3. On the date of the expiration of escrow, the Copyright office puts your work online and archived into various media, available for a small duplication fee.
Now, I'm sure there are holes in this approach, but at least it would be a start. I do not want media moguls dictating the terms of copyright to my grandchildren in the twenty-second century. Copyright is a privilege and incentive granted by our Constitution to encourage authors to share their work. It's time we took that right back from publishers who would lock up today's works until your children's children's children's children are old men.
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