Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
Honestly, if you're like me and like Valve but think VU can jump off a short pier...
Buy it on steam. It's cheaper for the best deluxe extra (HL1:Source) and as I understand it, VU sees no/little money for it.
"America has done some terrible things. But I know that Americans don't cheer when innocents die." -Dave Barry
I Appologize, maybe 'stupid' was the wrong wording. I could understand if this was just 'another game' that nobody cares about. It'd be something if this was an EA game that was just one of the hundreds they pump out a month, at the expense of their employees health.
Valve actually works really hard to make the community better. They are involved, they worked hard on this system to distribute the game and cut OUT the middle man (therefore in the long run, probably making it less expensive for us, the end users.) Plus, they spend an extended ammount of time developing and tweaking it, to be the *BEST* gaming experience it could be. Ive only played it 3 hours, and Im convinced they not only put their skill into making it, but their heart and soul. They took the time to give you everything you could possibly want, wrapped in a neat distribution package with a nice card labeled "STEAM" on the top, and you are hung up on 'not being able to use the internet at home, so im going to steal it instead!'
It angers me that instead of just getting off your lazy crack, dragging your box to a friends house and using his internet to do the *ONE-TIME Authentication* to unlock the game, you are going to go through the effort of downloading, cracking, burning, just so you can not pay for these peoples hard work.
I am sure its not by choice that 'you dont have internet' at your main residence, but there are alternatives to stealing. This is one game worth supporting the developers, and I think it's sad that something so miniscule as an authentication process (to gaurantee that the game isnt 'cracked' in the first place) would DRIVE you to doing just that.
Maybe stupid wasn't the right word, but if you can fill in the blank for me, feel free.
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".