The industry, all the time,
is a function of differing desires.
Gamers desire to play
games. We want to play them, because we want to enjoy
them. Moreover, most of us want to play them with as little
hassle as possible. Tycho over at
Penny Arcade was arguably
very pissed off yesterday, because
he couldn't play a game
purchased on DVD thanks to "copy protection" nonsense,
and then tripped over another bit of "protection" in a demo
he'd downloaded:
I haven't discussed it for a while because I find it so frustrating, and I honestly believe that nothing could change their approach to software protection. What made it come up again was the copy protection that came along with the King Kong demo. Oh, you heard right: the wave of the future is apparently copy protection on freely available software. I'd never have known, either, if it hadn't made me restart so it could load fuck knows whatever bullshit memory resident. Is it still there now? Watching?
Right on the heels of seeing
Tycho get seriously upset (that is to say,
cussing more than he usually does), I come in this morning
to see a supposed
"market research report" sitting in my inbox. Let me be
frank: I see this all the time. Not a week goes by wherein
those who edit various gaming publications don't see some
report or other on "piracy" or other dangers to the
industry, whether it's linked by another site, something you
report on yourself, find sitting in your inbox delivered
from some PR company or other, or in the worst cases, posted
to Slashdot.
For some reason, though, I
took the time to look at this one. And this one's actually
dangerous. The RIAA's campaigns against music sharing were,
and let's be brutally honest, stupid. They weren't good
business sense for pissing off customers (you can't accuse
100% of your customer base of being crooks and expect them
to like you). They weren't good business sense because they
took the focus off of RIAA companies establishing a
legitimate web presence. They weren't good business sense
because they took the focus off of developing decent music
acts. In short, they were entirely representative of the
fact that RIAA companies have no good business sense.
MPAA actions have been silly
as well, and I honestly expected better. These people
weren't, I felt, nearly as stupid. Catching people who are
camcording movies? I have no problem with it. Making DVDs
difficult to copy/backup? Yeah, I suppose I don't like that
nearly as much - I'd really like to see a program, for
instance, that would distill a 2-hour movie into 600-MBish
file to play on my PSP with no worries. I already paid for
the movies when I bought the DVD. And I'd like to be able to
take a few favorites and make pure copies, just in case I
should somehow manage to damage one of my discs beyond
repair.
And when the MPAA started
putting "trailers" before the movies I went to see in the
theater, trying to guilt trip everyone about how awful movie
piracy was? Honestly, I tuned them out. About the time they
start throwing around sob stories is about the same time I
stop caring.
This so-called report,
however, is a bit much. It's indicative of how companies
like Macrovision, which sell the various copy protection
methods that consumers absolutely hate and that pirates get
around without a second thought, manage to sell their
product to gullible and/or stupid executives at various
companies. In other words, this is the marketing tactic that
was used to put "copy protection" on the FEAR collector's
edition DVD release that managed to piss off Tycho to such a
large extent.
On their
"Executive Summary" page is some of the most annoying
stuff I've seen. It looks like the same sort of market
research stuff you see out of the RIAA, which have always
been roundly criticized by gamers and even industry execs on
the hardware side for having bad methodology and for
assuming their results and then massaging the data to fit,
rather than strictly analyzing the data at hand. Even after
downloading their "report" at the
download
page (it asks for an email but you CAN just put in
garbage and be forwarded to the download link) and reading
it, the report is just a wordier version of their "key
findings" section. No real, concrete data, no information on
WHO the "respondents" were who were polled or what the
questions were.
In other words, nothing
concrete, but a report that would probably give any PR/Marketroid
that was handed it a good scare and send them running to try
to get their company implementing Macrovision's products. "50%
of CD/DVD are distributed and sold without any form of
content protection as standard"
- it's another way of saying "50% of the industry didn't pay
the Macrovision tax." Likewise with the report salting in
"recommendations" throughout that company executives
implement "protection" all over the place - and of course,
they're expecting to buy it from Macrovision, the same
people who commissioned this "report."
Equally annoying are their
constant assertions of "casual copying" and "Rip & Burn
Culture" dropped in to the report; these are nothing more
than scare tactics. Again, to the industry execs: most of
your customers do not want to pirate. There is no joy
in doing so, for them. Large-scale pirates will get through
any form of protection you may throw at them in very little
time. "Casual Copying" is equally a joke, because the same
tools the pirates use are freely available 90% of the time,
or an altered executable that bypasses the protection is, or
something else. And we gamers don't like to use them - we
don't like going to the seedier side of the 'net to get
something working, that ought to have worked right out of
the box.
CD-Keys for an online game,
or for the online component of, say, Quake 4? No problem. We
understand the need, and we buy the game expecting that.
What we don't expect is draconian copy protection schemes
that want to load up some spyware-style application into
memory to run our game. We don't want to find out that our
particular CD or DVD drive is from a brand you didn't
support, or that the little scratch that got into the disc
is messing up the copy protection, or catch the disc
constantly spinning up in the middle of play for no reason
because the game checks every 3-5 minutes to make sure it's
still there. When we see this behavior happening, when it
causes our game to crash, we will go and get the
tools to fix it, because we don't want to put up with
crashing games.
If I had to compare the
experiences I've had with Macrovision's various "copy
protection" schemes, or Tycho's experiences, I'd say we are
getting back to the days when games were packaged with "copy
protection" that said users needed to pull numbers off a
secret decoder ring, or type in the 23rd word of the 3rd
paragraph of page 27 of the manual, or some other silliness
that caused gamers to tear their hair out after paying $40+
for a game only to have their dog eat the manual.
Copy protection isn't
worth it. It's not worth it because the casual copiers
aren't your threat, and the "solutions" are just going to
piss off your customers.
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