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Developers vs. Publishers
An anonymous reader writes "CNN's Chris Morris takes a look at the increased animosity of late between game developers and publishers in the latest installment of Game Over. The column examines this weekend's catfight between Valve and Vivendi, where Vivendi threatened to sue Valve for authenticating copies of Half-Life 2 that had been sold before the retail embargo date; the misery that is crunch time and the recent campaigns against Electronic Arts miserable working conditions."
So they require an online activation? Whoopty-hoo.
And please don't bitch about online activation if you're posting on slashdot (unless you mail in all your posts to the editors).
So they want to curb the piracy. Good for them. Sure it looks like it's already been cracked and is out for download, but they did a fantastic job by not having it on torrent trackers before it ever came out.
And no, I'm not a rabid fanboy, I just happen to like their distribution method, it works fine for me, and saved me a trip to the store. But then again I also happen to buy my music off iTunes, so that probably puts me in a minority here.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
One thing the article does not make clear is whether or how Vivendi wants Valve to deal with these premature requests for authentication. If it's purely a legalistic matter - demanding that Valve delay the authentications until the agreed-upon date, I'd say that it is probably a fair, if unpopular, request. If it's to be a punative measure - demanding that Valve blacklist any DVD key that requrested early authentication, I'd say Vivendi can go soak their heads.
Virtue finds and chooses the mean.
Aristotle, Ethica Nichomachea
There has been a hell of of a lot of coverage about EA and their 'crunch time' work ethics. I wonder why this is such a big story all of a sudden. Is it just that it has finally starting to become known outside of the (relatively) closed community of IT development? I'm not a software guy, so I have no first hand knowledge about the issue however, I remember hearing about major crunch-time pushes from way back when Apple was a big player. Didn't Jobs demand that people stay at the office for 40-50 hours consecutively for the development of Lisa and Mac?
It seems to me that now the industry is making so much cash that pehaps there is an expectation for some tension to be slackened. With the release of GTA:SA, Doom3, Half-Life2 and Halo2 there has been a very widespread understanding of just how big the gaming industry (and by corollary, the software industry at large) has become. An industry of such size with such resources should not be able to treat its core employees in such a fashion. All big business has hit this stumbling block at some point. Manufacturing had to deal with unionisation. The entertainment industry has suvived the creation of the Guilds (which are just unions). Anyone who is a hockey fan knows that there are unions in pro sports. So why are there no unions for programmers? Is it because they move from company to company? I don't think so, actors and directors, for example, work on different projects for different studios and have protection from exploitation.
So what is up with this? Why is it that thousands of intelligent and motivated professionals are allowing themselves to be exploited and treated so poorly?
Authentication may stop pre-release pirating, but I highly doubt it will stop HL2 from being cracked. The only reason I can see for authentication to a steam account is to stop reselling of their games. Technically, it is against the EULA to sell a Steam account, and Valve has even said on their forums not to do so or your account will be banned (would link but forums are down). Even if they didn't though, selling an account is a much bigger pain than selling a game or cd key since you can't move games from one account to another. I really think Valve should allow people an easy way to transfer games between steam accounts.
This would have been the first post, but it was delayed due to pending litigation between myself and my publisher ^_^
Really, its sad when a publisher, who really didn't do anything to produce the game, makes loyal fans (who in turn are going to buy the game and therefore pay their salaries) wait just 'because thats how they want it.' In the end, they are only hurting themselves AND the developers, because most people will get angry over something as little as this and NOT buy the game. (Ive heard many people say they wouldn't support Valve or VU because of the constant delays and BS between the two companies.)
Considering how good this game is, I doubt anyone will actually stick to it and NOT buy it, but thats all due to Valves Hard work. VU just gets to laugh all the way to the bank.
Its Deluxe, son. Deluxe!
The answer to the problem of profit-hungry publishers doing everything they can to keep developers under their thumbs is direct distribution, probably via Internet. It's the same answer as for underappreciated musicians, except even more-so: marketing for computer and video games tends to be far more word-of-mouth driven, since there's no equivalent of a Top 40 radio station for games. In fact, for a game like HL2 or Halo 2, the tremendous cost of marketing could practically be eliminated without affecting profit margin too badly - not necessarily a deal-breaker, since most developers prioritize "making a fun game" over "making metric assloads of cash".
Bad management and employee exploitation are wrong and should be stopped. Just please keep in mind that EA isn't the alpha and omega of programmer abuse.
While likes of Valve & ID can afford to fund development of a game themselves there are a lot of smaller development houses who are employed by publishing houses to develop games. I'd even hazard a guess that the major of games publishers fall into this catagory. The question [that a lot of people are asking] of how to remove the publisher from the loop extends to more than just getting the game onto the customers PC . Don't get me wrong, I liked the steam process and bought my HL2 from it. I love the idea that 100% of my money went to valve and not split between the shop and the guys who printed the box. So the prime question facing game development today is not "how do we do away with the publisher?" but "how do you fund new game development without a publisher?". I'd like to see a system where you could develop mini-games using the source SDK or an open source engine and sell them on a steam service for $5 a time or at a price that compares with renting a game from BlockBuster. Turn the games from monolithic creations into episodic series. Small games that equate to an evenings entertainment, both financial and in terms of enjoyment, positioning themselves alongside movies and TV as entertainment mediums. A subscription gaming network episodic games. Now that would scare the TV giants.