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The End of Copyright
Gamasutra has an article from the ever-interesting Ernest Adams on the future of copyright as regards creative works. From the article: "If we're going to go on making video games, the publishers have to find a way to make them pay for themselves. One approach is an advertising model, although I'm reluctant to say it because I hate the idea of ads in games. Another is to treat games as a service rather than a product. With broadband distribution, I think this is increasingly likely: you won't ever have a durable copy of a game, you'll download it every time you play it. Each instantiation will be unique, personalized for a particular machine and Internet address; encrypted to discourage hacking; and expires after a few hours. After that you'll have to download a new copy."
"Each instantiation will be unique, personalized for a particular machine and Internet address; encrypted to discourage hacking; and expires after a few hours. After that you'll have to download a new copy."
And that will be the official end of me every buying a game again as long as I live. Under no circumstances will I pay for software usuage with that type of model. I simply won't do it. That also goes for things like MS Office 12, Windows, whatever. If I can't purchase a disc/drive/etc that contains a copy of the software that I'm free to use OFFLINE, then I'm done with non-free, non-opensource software. Windows XP is hard enough to deal with, having to activate it over the net or phone - but if I had to do that everytime I used the damn thing...
This sounds like a bad implimentation of Steam, which has proven itself to be a pretty darn good system. Flaws, yes, but I can play lots of games without finding the CD, download new games, play locally or online, pay a very reasonable price, and have an overall GOOD experience with gaming. I even play Half Life 1 on the same account, which I bought in 1998, and they still support it without putting the CD in.
I don't mind paying for stuff that works and represents a good value. Its the Sony "steal GPL and infect your computer" crap that tempts me to abuse bittorrent. Valve Software (the makers of Steam), however, will continue to get my hard earned dollars.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
The guys either nuts or doesn't know what he is talking about. Take this for example:
Forget notions of what their rights may be in law; the idea that a band or an author should be paid millions upon millions over the next several decades for something that it cost them at most a few thousand dollars to make, just feels silly to most people.
Lets see... J.K.Rowling took nearly two years to write the latest Harry Potter novel. At a low salary of $50,000/year (yes, I know she is in England), that comes out to $100,000 alone. Yeah, doesn't feel really silly to me, especially given that that doesn't come out to much per book.
Lets see, if Copyright ends, no more GPL, so anyone would then be able to sell software with GPL'd material without having to open source it. Any company/individual can redistribute code someone else wrote for free (Someone writes WoW, someone else copies the code and re-implements it on their own network) so we have the death of programs in one sense.
Studio makes a new hit movie, and now someone else is redistributing it for free without paying the actors or producers a dime.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
That's fucking retarded, seriously it is. without Trusted Computing customized and encrypted doesn't mean shit, the key has to be sent along with the encrypted block. without copyright law Trusted Computing wouldn't have legal support keeping it "uncrackable" so none of this shit will work.
the way to do this is to make it an actual service not some steam clone with extra chromasomes. for example buying an online Key gives access to official company run hookup servers and company run game servers for match-type games
paying a monthly fee gives you access to the official supported MMO server.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Why are we so obsessed with predicting that things will die, when most likely, they won't?! *sigh*
Seriously, even with a fast connection and a fast machine, this is going to make the simple act of sitting down and playing impossible. You'll sit down, select which game to play, stare at a "downloading, please wait" screen for a few minutes at very best, then sit watching a "loading, please wait" screen for a little while longer.
Frankly, fuck that.
Looks can be deceiving. Or CAN they?
Absolutely correct. One of the great things about having a disc, even one that has copy protection on it, is that when you want to play the game, you throw the disc in and let it start. Okay, it has to search for the copy protection, but at least it doesn't require a mandatory connection to the Internet to do it.
Looking at it from a legal perspective, if you buy the game and then are not allowed to play it, doesn't that constitute grounds for a lawsuit? Here in the States there are clauses in most state/commonwealth laws that make illegal any actions that constitute "services unrendered" when the purchaser has continually acted in good faith. So, you - for whatever reason - lose your Internet connection or you're somewhere (such as with a laptop on international travel) where Internet access is not easy to get. Ooops! Sorry! You have to download a new, encrypted version in order to play! You pay, but you don't play! Why would "services unrendered" not apply? Ah, yes, such terms could be hidden in an EULA. Well, as Sony recently found out EULAs are not necessarily enough to cover deceptive or nefarious practices.
I'm not a lawyer, so what I've said might be baseless. Even if it is, I really despise anyone who thinks that it's fair game to potentially deny someone the ability to use a piece of software that is legally purchased and legally used in good faith. This is as despicable as when UbiSoft required all "Ghost Recon 2" users to "phone home" for authentication even for a LAN game that had no Internet traffic whatsoever. No Internet connection, no LAN game. Sorry, you lose. Once again, only the legal users were punished because the hackers knew how to get around it.
encrypted to discourage hacking
Oh, puh-lease! Good hackers will have decrypted code available in no time with any copy protection completely stripped off and available on Usenet. What's sad is that the game companies still persist on thinking that copy protection works.
Why don't they do something more practical -- like include value add items like the old "Ultima" series used to do? I remember that some of the things that always made people want to buy the game besides loyalty and just about everything about the game* were the cloth map of Britannia and the trinket relative to that particular chapter of the game. Granted, we don't all want t-shirts, but certainly there could be more tangible incentives to make people want to buy the game.
My idyllic world, I suppose.
* This does not necessarily include "Ultima 8: The Arcade Game" or "Ultima: Ascension - The Bug Ridden Piece of Sh!t With The Pathetic Storyline And Even Worse Ending That Insults The Ultima Franchise".
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
Slashdot needs to stop posting articles from Gamasutra.
Not because the articles are poorly thought-out, reflect foolish ideas or just plain suck.
No. Slashdot needs to stop posting Gamasutra articles because so many people here just don't understand what Gamasutra is or have any clue who writes the articles. Take this one for example. Ernest Adams has been working in the game industry for what.. 20 years now? He's seen a lot of stuff come and go, and has a finger on the pulse of the industry and writes a lot about it. He may be wrong or right, but he's not some newbie game 'journo' or hack. What he says is nearly always worth thinking about, and the reasons he says it are worth understanding as well.
Another great example is the article a while back by Richard Bartle, expounding the idea that permanent player death is important for masively multiplayer games. He was largely dismissed around here as someone who just doesn't know what multiplayer games are about, and a bit of a fool to boot. In fact he wrote one of the first multiplayer games, called MUD (some people may have heard of it - it's the grandfather of just about every multiplayer RPG), and has worked in the industry for many, many years. That didn't stop people taking the point and reacting to it before they understood it or thought about why he said it.
Gamasutra is a site devoted to professionals in the game industry. It reflects professional opinions, techniques and issues, and is well read by the industry. People like Ernest Adams and Richard Bartle are professionals who know what they're talking about and say things for a reason.
It seems that in the rush to react to articles, Slashdotters miss the point that they're not the target audience.
(waiting to be modded as 'Flamebait' now)
Same with pay-per-play systems here. We had an entire design built around that before, they were called arcades. Everytime you lost, you paid to play again. When you left, almost none of your work was saved besides a high score (assuming the staff didn't reset that regularly). It was good, only as long home consoles and PCs remained vastly inferior. Nowadays, arcades have gone the way of the dinosaur. Theres simply too much lack of value in such a system. At least when you buy a game, you OWN it. When you pay-per-play, its like a scam you can't win without outscamming the scammer. (Or in the case of 'never-ending games' you can never, ever win.)
Actually, I think all your example does is prove a very simple idea of economics, rather than copyright functioning properly. People value their time, and if the cost of buying an item is less than the percieved cost of that person's time, they will buy the product. As price increses, assuming time to copy does not increse proportionally, the likelyhood of a person just putting in the time to copy it will go up. So, while people may not be clamoring to copy a $15 program, it's not uncommon to find people running unlicensed versions of windows. Heck, software copying is often considered part of the reason for the success of windows. Now, with XP, MS managed to make it a touch harder to copy (not all that much, but some), so more people are willing to buy it. /..
And, while this would point to the idea that copyright protections do work, there is a bit of a hole in this. The sophistication of users is incresing. Look at the progression of electronics usage into our lives. Most of those who are old enough to fought in WWI have trouble setting the clock on the VCR. Their kids, the "baby-boomers", can usually set the clock, but are not the most savvy computer users. Many Gen X'ers grew up with Atari's and are more capable with technology. Most Gen Y'ers had a computer in their home growing up, and aren't bad with them. The next generation, will almost certainly grow up with a computer, the internet, and who knows what else. They will be even more savvy on average than those of us arguing on
Add to that the fact that P2P apps are getting eaiser and eaiser to use, and bandwidth incresing all the time. Downloading, and running a pre-cracked version of an application is getting eaiser and less time consuming.
The net result of all of this is that A) The average User is getting more savvy, B) The time involved to get a cracked version is decresing, C) Copyright software isn't making things any harder on the average user (most of the iso's on P2P networks are either pre-cracked or have a post-install executable to crack it for you.) The cost/benefit ratio which is currently driving sales is tipping dangerously, and will collapse at some point. The result will be either complete market destruction or massive price reductions, litigating is only a stop-gap on the road to one of those two options.
And here is where we get to go back to economics again, and show that they are, in fact, working out quite well. The first option is pretty much a non-option, as long as there is some money to be made, someone will make it. So, the end result will be a reduction in prices. We'll probably also see a number of businesses go under in the process. And this is exactly what is to be expected, when there is a demand for a product and the supply is artificially limited, you can expect that a black market will pop-up; and guess what software piracy is? That black market will do one of tow things: 1) Create a huge downward pressure on a product's price 2) If the product is banned completely the black market will supply the demand and make a ton of money. In the case of software it'll be the first.
The current copyright methodology is in trouble in the case of software. Copying has become easy, is becomming fast, and is becomming socially accepted.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
It seems that in the rush to react to articles, Slashdotters miss the point that they're not the target audience.
Slashdotters may not be the target audience for Gamasutra articles, but they are the target audience of Gamasutra readers. Without the game consumer on board, there are no games. Ten or twenty years ago, this was different - the resources that went into programming a game were limited enough that one or a few people could handle it easily. There was room to try new things and figure out through trial and error what gamers wanted. Nowadays, mom & pop dev houses have only a niche audience, because a big publisher can put so much into the art, level design, sound, and music that nobody can compete without sufficient financing (and, therefore, a large number of customers willing to buy the product).
Ernest Adams and Richad Bartle can say whatever they want to about the future of the games industry - if the people aren't buying, it ain't happening.