So you?ve been talking a lot recently about VC games, and how you want them to be account-based, playable on all future?Nintendo?consoles, and not controller limited, etc. Also, you talk about how you don?t like Steam, because of the DRM. But Steam is account-based, games playable on all capable computers, not limited to any input device, etc. Isn?t Gaben?s ?Kinder and Gentler DRM? exactly what you want from Nintendo?s online shops? If I had to answer my own question its that you have different standards for console and PC digital downloads, especially since the way GoG treats the customer is unrivaled. But I?m curious for that classic Malstrom take.
Thanks and keep up the great work, I can?t stop reading your shit every day.This is a great email since it allows me to elaborate further.Short Answer:Gabe ?A Kinder and Gentler DRM? Newell is alien and foreign to the history and spirit of PC gaming. In other words, Steam as a ?platform? isn?t PC gaming at all. It is console gaming using PC hardware. I find this as ridiculous as playing dumbed down PC games on consoles. Steam is the Xbox upside down. Having to have the Steam client present to play any PC game is as absurd as PC gamers paying for online with Microsoft?s PC games.
The experience of console gaming has always used the hardware. Console Hardware, to the modern Game Industry, is nothing more than DRM. But to gamers, console hardware is the essence of the console experience. It is why people collect old hardware. But PC gamers do not collect old PC hardware because the PC gaming experience isn?t dependent on the hardware.
I literally cannot play NES games anymore because televisions have dramatically changed. And the further we go into the future, the more past consoles there are. We cannot have a dozen consoles hooked up to the television set. Iwata made this point in 2006 when introducing the Virtual Console.
You have to have Nintendo hardware to play Nintendo games. This hasn?t changed since 1985.
Gabe ?A Kinder and Gentler DRM? Newell is attempting to radically change the relationship of the PC gamer to his games. Nintendo?s Virtual Console is maintaining the same relationship console gamers have always had.
The Virtual Console is infinite backwards compatibility. Having to buy your Virtual Consoles games for each Nintendo hardware breaks what the Virtual Console is about.
Long Answer:
Ultimately, the discussion isn?t really about DRM as it is about the nature of piracy itself. In a corporate blockhead view, the shallow assumption is that piracy is just everyone wanting to get YOUR product (which is oh so amazing) for free. It is more complex than that. This is why slapping a DRM doesn?t clean up the problem in a tidy way.
Piracy is not a new thing. It has been around forever with video games. Anyone telling you piracy is ?increasing? is wrong. Piracy was also highly prevalent before the Internet becoming mainstream. Ask any Amiga or Commodore 64 user.
There are numerous reasons why people pirate games. People in smaller or remote markets, such as Russia, pirate the game because the game is delayed for release in their region for years if not ever. When someone has no legal way of buying the product, they are driven to pirate it if they want to play it. So one good way to reduce piracy is to release products simultaneously worldwide.
Some markets are crushed by state taxes on entertainment goods. The product?s price is twice or three times as expensive because of the taxes. This drives the people there to piracy. There is not much a game company can do about this situation. In 2008, Reggie Fils-Aime went down to South America to try to convince the nations there to stop taxing games so much. Obviously, not much changed.
Many piraters are kids around thirteen years old. They don?t have money and cannot easily get money. They do, however, have a ton of time on their hands. They spend that time trying to pirate games. These piraters aren?t so much of an issue because they wouldn?t have purchased the product anyway.
There are some people who pirate just to try out the game. I remember when World of Goo came out and there was so much hype over the game (and the game had no DRM). The developers noticed a huge amount of people connected who did not purchase the game and assumed all the people playing were interested players. I think World of Goo was finely produced boring game that is grossly overpriced and so lame that no one mentions it anymore. This situation can be solved by putting out demos to the games as well as putting additional value in the purchased version than just digital program.
And there are pirates who aren?t interested in the games but see cracking and pirating as the game itself.
This more complex view of pirating was almost the exact words of a game developer right before he joined Blizzard in the 90s (where he started on the original Starcraft). Keep in mind that Blizzard?s rise to fame was Warcraft 2. Warcraft 2 grew so fast mostly due to spawning. You could play multiplayer games off of one Warcraft 2 CD (which continued, to a lesser extent, with Starcraft). Westwood?s rise is also largely responsible for shipping two CDs with Command and Conquer whose only difference were the campaigns (GDI or Nod). One copy of Command and Conquer or Red Alert could allow two people the ability to play with each other. (Why PC gaming hasn?t done more of this boggles the mind. Console gaming allows multiplayer [local] with one cartridge/disc, why not PC gaming?) DS games early on had ?download play? where you could buy one DS game and play against many people. Bomberman DS requires one copy to play with 8 people. This allowed ?DS parties? and its absence is definitely a factor in the falling popularity of the Nintendo? handheld from the DS high.)
Remember that in the 90s, I was more of a ?pro-beta tester? and ?game journalist? (oh that word!). I got to talk to the people inside these companies. A developer from Baldur?s Gate (or was it Icewind Dale?) said to me that his company said to not worry about piracy because pirates are people who wouldn?t buy the game anyway. Short and to the point.
Since that time period, my thinking on piracy has become aware of how piracy affects the value relationship between the gamer and the games. When someone downloads every NES, SNES, and Genesis game to run on emulators, what happens? The person might play a few but then not touch them anymore. Why? To put into the context a young man would understand, it is like a Nice Guy?s approach to women. The Nice Guy goes up to the woman and gives her a car, commitment, gifts, all sorts of things that she doesn?t have to work for. She loses respect for Nice Guy and dumps him for Jerk Boy. Getting things for free makes you not value it and lose respect for it.
The hardcore say, ?I do not pirate because I want to reward the developers.? What they should be saying is: ?I don?t pirate because that would destroy the value of the games in my mind. I?ll end up with a ton of games I have no incentive to play because I made no investment in it.?
Free-To-Play is rejected by established companies like Nintendo for many reasons but the main one is that it destroys the value of gaming. It is also becoming more well known that steep sales devalues games such as the Steam sales. The reason why the Steam user has a list full of games he never plays is because the price didn?t match the value.
I do not think piracy will ever go away. Just like crime in society, it will always be there. A government that tries to impose zero crime would end up destroying any society. In a similar way, a game company trying to enforce zero piracy will only see a backlash because the gamers will feel the company is being ?tyrannical? as their anti-piracy measures are hurting the experience for normal customers.
Over my many decades of gaming, I?ve learned that game companies and game developers are egomaniacs.? They automatically assume everyone wants to pirate their game (not true) and that the reason why people want to pirate their game is because their game is incredible (not true).
Retail stores have it much tougher. The company purchases the product, pays for its shipping to the store, pays for a worker to display the product, only to have someone steal the product. That?s actual theft. The retail store not only loses the money they paid for the product, they are losing the money they paid for the shipping and for the worker to hang it up. Video game piracy is much more tame. At worst, the pirate won?t be buying the product he downloaded. If Wal-Mart and department stores can keep going and even thrive with these problems, I think game companies are protesting too much.
It?s an unrealistic expectation to think piracy will ever be 0%. So what is motivating this mindset with game companies? I think it comes from the same place where you see anger at used game stores. The anger is not so much at the used game store as it is dancing around the fact that people only trade in games that aren?t good. If the game had high enough value, it would not be traded in. One of the highest motivations for pirating is because people have gotten so burned on paying for crappy games. They want to take a test drive to see if the game is actually any good. The World of Goo creators believed the hype that their game was truly ?spectacular? and assumed pirates wanted their game for nothing. But it is more like the pirates heard the hype, tried out the game, and rejected it for being quite poor. You don?t hear any commotion for a World of Goo sequel, do you? It?s because the game wasn?t as well received as the hype indicated.
Every game company believes their games have ?tremendous value? when most gamers disagree. So the kneejerk reaction is to impose DRM.
PC gaming does not truly understand console gaming. If it did, PC gaming would not have declared the permanent death of game consoles in 1984. So when the NES arrived in 1985 and stuck around, the only value PC game companies (like Electronic Arts) saw of the game console was DRM. Piracy was rampant on the Commodore 64 and Amiga. When the Genesis came out, Electronic Arts went so far as to blackmail Sega to ensure they could operate how they wanted to on the system. There is no respect for game console manufactors except for the hardware to provide DRM.
Computer games tried different types of DRM. They did ?find a word in the manual? to Code Wheels. This was done because PC-gamers were legally allowed to back-up their disks because disks were prone to failing. Since the DRM couldn?t be on the disk, they put it on something else that came in the box. None of it worked.
The Game Industry thought the Compact-Disc would be the DRM to ensure 0% piracy. That didn?t work either. One of the reasons why early CD games were full of nonsensical stuff like Full Motion Videos was to bloat the game size to make it harder to copy. When CDs moved to DVDs, the same hope and expectation for DRM existed. And once again, they were dashed.
With the Internet and online gaming, the Game Industry finally thinks it found its DRM holy grail. But all these online DRM attempts are being broken and games are just as easily being pirated. Even World of Warcraft can be pirated and played on pirate servers. It has become so absurd that game companies are now saying, ?We must build a community around the game. A community cannot be pirated.? Actually, it can.
The Game Industry has never respected game consoles and only treated them as hardware versions of DRM. After the Genesis, there was the PlayStation 1 and 2 the Game Industry jumped on. Despite the hardware DRM, used game stores grew at an alarming rate (I remember places like Funco Land back during the 16-bit era, but NOTHING to how widespread used game stores would be when the PlayStation came out). The rise in used game stores is consistent in consumers perceiving the Game Industry games to be of low value. It has gotten to the point where with the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, the Game Industry intends to implement online with every video game. No more single player games. They think this will finally solve things. And as always, the Game Industry will be wrong.
Gabe Newell did not design Steam to make PC gaming more popular. PC gaming was already tremendously popular before the Valve Corporation was even made. The purpose of Steam was to provide DRM to PC games. Gabe Newell correctly analyzed that PC game companies kept putting out PC games for game consoles was because the game console hardware was acting as a type of DRM. If Steam and its online could do the same, then these PC games would also be released on the PC.
Steam is not the solution. It is part of the problem. The reason why people pirate games or sell games to used game stores is not because of the lack of DRM but because of the lack of value. These games just aren?t worth buying. On console gaming, the consumer at least knows that if he buys a bad game, he can resell it. Steam does not have that option. So how does the Valve Corporation get people to buy crappy games? By doing periodic Steam sales where prices are MASSIVELY cut. This allows gamers to risk buying a game they are not sure of the quality. But the other effects of gamers getting stuck with a huge backlog of games they do not play is a consequence of this low value.
The solution is to increase the value. The solution is to create good games. The solution is to release excellent packaging. I?ve gotten emails from people surprised I?m so passionate about game packaging and how I?m the only place they?ve seen it. The reason is because without the game packaging, the game loses value. Someone ask Nolan Bushnell about whether or not the elaborate Atari cover art added to the value of the games. He will tell you that they had a major impact. I remember Yar?s Revenge coming with a comic book.
Above: This is really cool. It definitely added value to the game.
What is more of a solution is what Good Old Games is doing (gog.com). Their approach to remove piracy is to increase value. This is done with having the games run on whatever operating system you have and including the manuals, documentation, and extras with the game. Some of these extras are what GoG does on their own such as providing soundtracks. The games are available worldwide at a universal price point. And GoG has grown faster than ever because I think they are on the right track.
Gabe ?A Kinder and Gentler DRM? Newell?s approach is to simply give a ?kinder and gentler DRM?. How about more value? You don?t see Valve Corporation interested in that. The only work the Valve Corporation is interested in is work that leverages the consumer from achievements to user generated content. It?s like the Valve Corporation is interested in doing everything with video games except making them or increase their value. The reason why a closed Windows 8 platform is such a threat is because it is direct red ocean. Steam is already a closed platform. It?s no different than a game console. Windows 8 is a ?kinder and gentler? DRM than Steam can ever be and Newell knows this. Why open the steam client for DRM when the operating system does the same exact thing?
What is going on with gaming consoles and Nintendo is a different story. The issue with PC game companies revolves around DRM. With Nintendo and their old games, the issue revolves around the definition of backwards compatibility.
If someone purchased Super Mario Brothers for the NES, purchased it again with Super Mario All-Stars, with the 25th Anniversary release of Mario on the Wii which is All-Stars on a DVD, on the Virtual Console, on the Gameboy Color, and on the NES Classics series for the Gameboy Advance, this person has purchased Super Mario Brothers six times. If Nintendo says, ?You need to purchase Super Mario Brothers again for the Wii U Virtual Console,? the gamer will say, ?Fuck you!? and just storm out likely abandoning the console altogether. This has been my response to the Wii U.
If such a person ?pirates? Super Mario Brothers to play on the PC after purchasing it half a dozen times, it is technically piracy. But the consumer behavior is showing Nintendo the way to go. It is not realistic to expect gamers to have every Nintendo console connected to a TV especially when old consoles are having problems displaying on newer TVs.
Forcing Nintendo fans to buy games they already own is like putting out hardware that breaks down. When the hardware breaks down, the consumer spends his entertainment dollars into replacing the console instead of buying more games. This is why Nintendo hardware is intended to not break down easily. In the same way, having people buy games they already own is removing entertainment dollars from buying new games. That new third party game that appeared on the E-shop? Sorry. We can?t buy it because we?re too busy re-buying Super Mario Brothers yet again.
There is also much value that can be added to the Virtual Console games. The original box art can be displayed. The original manuals can be put up. Soundtracks can be downloaded. Imagine owning Super Metroid on the Virtual Console and be able to play that soundtrack on your Wii U whenever you want. I imagine many people would buy games just for their sound tracks. GoG has shown us the way. Tip guides or old Nintendo Power articles can be put up for the games. Nintendo focuses on ?connectivity? with the Wii U, but wouldn?t it be cool if we could send those tip guides from the Wii U to your smartphone so you read about video games when you aren?t at the home console? You know, like how Nintendo used to do during its golden age of the 80s and early 90s?
The Virtual Console is all about backwards compatibility and buying games you missed out on. With it, I would always buy the Nintendo console because that is where my game library would be located. And no matter what game console I buy in the future, I can always play Super Mario Brothers.
?But Malstrom!? says a reader. ?If you can play Super Mario Brothers on a version you haven?t played in the current generation, this means Nintendo isn?t getting any money from you at that very moment.? What makes you think they would get money if they didn?t have it available? The difference is that I?m playing old games on the NEW GAME CONSOLE instead of playing old games on the OLD GAME CONSOLE. On the NEW GAME CONSOLE, I am part of the installed base and potential market to new games. Without it, I?m not part of the install base.
Nintendo might say, ?But we would have to update some of the Virtual Console programs when we go to new platforms.? Yes. But how hard is it to update displaying these VERY OLD GAMES that are easily emulated on ANY PC MADE IN THE LAST DECADE? Wii U might have issues with Gamecube games. But 8-bit games? 16-bit? N64? Get out of here. In fact, there can be some improvements done like the NES emulation can do better on the coloring. The Wii VC makes the NES games look too dark.
If Nintendo said, ?We cannot release Super Mario Brothers 3 yet on the Wii U because we are still tweaking its emulation,? we would laugh at Nintendo because the emulation is simple (because even I can do it folks), but we wouldn?t be bothered by a temporary absence. We?re just sick to death of being forced to buy games we already own.
?But you can play these games on the Wii U. There is a sequestered Wii mode on the Wii U.? That is not backwards compatibility. There is absolutely no reason why, say, an 8-bit game has to be in ?Wii mode?. It?s a freaking 8-bit game. It does not require specific Wii hardware in order to work.
How Nintendo approaches the account system is the most important decision it will make since the release of the Famicom. Iwata better make the correct decision. What is holding Nintendo back is this bizarre ideology of ?integrated hardware and software? which is why you have to play your VC Super Mario Brothers in a sequestered ?Wii Mode? with no GamePad support. Nintendo didn?t rise because of the ?integrated hardware and software? ideology. It rose because, as Yamauchi said, the Nintendo was a ?box people buy to get to Mario?. An account system maintains this. In order to get to (NES) Super Mario Brothers or continue my game collection, I need to buy the Nintendo system.
In the South Park episode about the Wii, Cartman puts himself to sleep because he can?t stand the wait for the Wii any longer. He oversleeps and wakes up in the future where only one Wii exists and is in a museum. He gets it and cannot play the Wii because televisions of the future cannot connect to the Wii.
If Nintendo has an account system, Cartman could play Wii games in the far future. Do it for Cartman, Nintendo. Allow us to have that infinite backwards compatibility. Allow us to play games we already own on future consoles. You already do this with backwards compatibility to the prior generation. Now extend it to all generations via the Virtual Console.
Above: If Nintendo had an account system, this episode would have ended very differently.
Source: http://seanmalstrom.wordpress.com/2012/09/18/email-on-account-systems/
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