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The Imagined Future of PC Games
PC Gamer has up a five-part series prognosticating the future of PC gaming. (part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5) Graham Smith, Kieron Gillen, and a few other PC games folks make some big-picture predictions about where console gaming's aging sibling is headed. Some of their predictions are fairly safe ("6. The mouse won't die, and graphics cards will get more powerful."), but others may be a bit contentious: "4. Steam and similar services will crush PC piracy. There's been a lot of talk from developers - old rivals id and Epic chief among them - about piracy making it harder for them to justify developing PC-only games. There's so little profit in it, apparently, that the poor fellows are left with no choice but to stray from their beloved home-platform and develop for consoles too. And yet the only games out there with a zero percent piracy ratio are all PC-only: MMOGs. They have a headstart in the anti-piracy crusade: connecting to a central server is an integral part of the game, so verifying that the user's CD key is unique can be done without much fuss. And no one's going to complain that a MMOG requires an internet connection; that's pretty obvious from the concept itself."
And yet the only games out there with a zero percent piracy ratio are all PC-only: MMOGs. They have a headstart in the anti-piracy crusade: connecting to a central server is an integral part of the game, so verifying that the user's CD key is unique can be done without much fuss.
Not all MMO's have been PC-only (and of those, there has been piracy, PSO anyone?). Further, I'd argue that connecting to a central server with a CD key is not proof against piracy. Finally, the primary financial outlay surrounding an MMO is purchased time, not software.
Don't get me wrong, the pressures facing the PC side of the industry are very real. But if we're talking about means-to-profit, piracy is not the main threat that the MMO's face by a long shot. As with many things, the fulcrum is much lower elsewhere . . . account phishing and gold farming are by-and-large the most profitable way to attack the system.
I'm also very curious about the implied assertion that game piracy has been licked in the console world.
M
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If you're playing a MMO than you're wanting to be playing online. Paying for a game that you're playing alone and it still requires a high speed internet connection is just asinine. All they'll do in the long run is push more folks to consoles where they don't have to put up with that.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
As much as I think people will not be fond of services like Steam (Comeone, they're pissed enough when people start DRMing their music service, what happens with the games?) I think services like this will probably be the future of gaming. And look on the bright side. Such services might improve online games with otherwise few players. =P
It'll die. PC gaming is terrible compared to console gaming.
So, is me and a mate sharing an account considered priracy? It's not like you're restricted to one character. I know at least a few MMOs that don't even prohibit simultanious logins..
Almost all MMOs that require a boxed product don't do any "CD Key" checking.. it's all based on the account.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I am reminded of Douglas Adam's Electronic Thumb from HHTTG: half the electrical engineers in the galaxy are working on fresh ways of jamming the signals, and the other half are working on fresh ways to jam the jamming signals. There are ways to get around CD-key authorization besides using someone elses - I believe that people have already found a way to disable the Registration request in the Adobe CS3 beta, by deleting the file that reminds CS3 it still needs a registration number. Piracy is only realy a wide-spread problem after games are succesful enough to be widely pirated - otherwise it's too hard for the average user to find a pirated copy. By this point, the game has made enough revenue to be profitable. It's just the publisher's constant desire for insane profits that forces devs to move to consoles.
Not all MMO's have been PC-only
Exactly. WoW is PC and Mac. Spore will run on Wii, DS, and PC - altho it's a bit of a Massively Multi-Instance Multi-Player Online-Library Game.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Pretty much all online play and MMORPGs are piracy proof if they take the current model of CD key needed to access online servers, this is just as true for FPS and RTS as it is for MMORPG.
Quake3/4, battlefield, CS (steam), C&C Generals, Warcraft, etc.. all need valid CD keys to play online... the only way to pirate these games are their single player counter points.
The biggest problem I see that develops from an online model is the one of cheating.. where there ISN'T a definitive way to stop people from cheating. Compared to cheating stopping piracy (in online play) is simple.
I used to be a huge critic of Steam and its related services, but I've warmed up to the idea over time.
As a softdev (and a small-time indie game dev) I have a hard time justifying piracy, and since I've made the moral choice to buy the software I use, it's hit my pocketbooks pretty hard, but it's a decision I am glad to live with. Most of my colleagues are not so conscious, I'm afraid, and most would buy a PC game if it's CD-key locked and the game was all about multiplayer (CS, BF2, etc), but almost none would ever buy a singleplayer game.
In other words, the concept that developers should just intrinsically *trust* the gamer to be moral and buy the game is hogwash. There may be a number of gamers like myself who strive to pirate as little as possible (if at all), but the majority of the world isn't so dev-friendly. I welcome (legal and reasonable) ways to protect developer content.
Additionally, I'm also a huge singleplayer gamer. I loved games like Deus Ex, Half-Life, and the new C&C3, which I bought mostly for the campaign mode (and it is excellent, btw). Many developers are eschewing singleplayer games in favour of multiplayer-only games, due to the fact that the multiplayer-ness easily lends itself to better piracy protection. This leaves gamers like me out in the cold. It is also why I believe, despite the evils of the technology, we must live with it if we are to see more singleplayer content being developed in this world.
Just my 2c.
I'm reminded of one of the Unreal games for PC that required you to submit your CD-key to a central server to be checked. Of course the scene groups decided to block access from the users computer to the Unreal server, and redirect it to the loopback address where the CD-key would be falsely verified. Like a few of the above posters mentioned, piracy evolves as the anti-piracy evolves.
will be a real bad thing
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/22/ 1645252
Real humans replacing the AI. Perhaps it's not the end of 'singe player' games as even those will actually be mulitplayer under the hood?
thank god! those guys are such a bunch of fags.
One thing they didn't mention and i think is going to be important is more malleable environments.
I think this trend was mostly started by HL2's Gravgun, and we're going to see some significant advances in physics and materials in the next few years.
The two best examples i can think of right now are the upcoming Crysis and Star Wars: Force Unleashed.
Sure, attempts like Red Faction didn't do very well, but i think it's time.
To quote the fortune teller from the Orson Wells film noir, "Touch of Evil":
"You have no future; you're future is all used up."
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
Not only bad, it may not be smart. Counterstrike was a fan-created mod which revolutionized the industry. Neverwinter Nights was great because so many people made modules for it. I think we'll see developers looking for ways to leverage user-created content. YouTube wouldn't be worth billions if no one uploaded anything to it.
Did they really say that DRM will save gaming on the PC? Are they insane?
Let's be honest, here. Steam is simply DRM with some sugar stuffed around it to make people like it. And it's even broken, already. I've seen quite a few steam-rips out there.
How in the world will an already-failed DRM save PC Gaming?
No, instead, good GAMES are needed to save PC Gaming. Assuming it needs saving at all. Maybe the reason that gaming has been steadily moving back to consoles is because it works better there. The controls and basic interface are familiar, there's no worries about your particular brand of hardware working with the game, the DRM doesn't often bite you, etc. With the exception of a few games that really do play better with mouse and keyboard, consoles have PCs beat. And they are cheaper. Even if you buy them all.
A couple years ago, I'd have laughed in your face if you said I'd prefer console gaming now. But with power of the XBox 360 (and PS3, theoretically... wish they'd go ahead and make a good game for it) and the innovative interface of the Wii, I rarely game on the PC now. Enough so that I am back using Kubuntu as my main OS because I rarely feel the need to be in Windows.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Being able to impulse-buy a game and have it playable either in a few minutes or in a day or so is a huge deal. Also isn't bad getting periodic updates (HDR for Half-Life 2 and CS:S).
As for DRM biting you... I've lost, scratched, and otherwise killed game discs, and on a console, that's it, no more game for you. On Steam, just re-download and reinstall -- or burn a backup DVD, or whatever.
I don't like the DRM either, and I won't make excuses for that -- technologically, it sucks, too, as does anything that requires IE to play a game. But it is actually a good idea, and it works very well.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Piracy, right... more like too many games, and too many mediocre games at that. The truth is there is simply way too many games for the market to support @ 50+ dollars a pop, then add in MMO's with their subscriptions and everything else and you have perfect storm. Next many games offer nothing new, why should gamers buy games that are simply upgraded rehashes? Game developers only have themselves to blame in their quest of chasing their expensive technolust tastes. The truth is the game industry is the cause of their lack of profit... let's see where the game industry went wrong...
1) While the game market has expanded, it hasn't expanded to keep up with development costs of high fidelity graphics that the industry is chasing.
2) Game industry did itself in, gamers do not control where money is invested, nor what it produces, gamers do not control any of the financial aspects of where money is spent in development (graphics vs. gameplay).
3) Capitalism and designing a good game do not always mix well, with it rubs up against the economic model of society. The more time you spend working on a game 99% of the time the better it will be, if you're independently wealthy or have connections like certain figures in the game industry you can take your sweet time. But the drive for short-term profit over long-term gains has been an emerging problem in the game industry since the PS2, Xbox and Gamecube.
The whole industry right now is suffering since gameplay is getting stale and more games sell based on graphics then gameplay. I was never sure that the game industries model was very stable in many respects. It's built on the whims of a customer base which is not only difficult to understand but is just too diverse to pigeonhole with terms like "hardcore gamer" vs "casual gamer", next add in the mad rush for profits and you get a glut of mediocre games. I wouldn't be surprised of gaming slows down (Tanks) for a bit in the future but as long as their are fresh bodies without gaming experience (new kids being born) they may just be able to keep getting away with rehash city.
There is a fundamental difference between games and music: I can play an mp3 on absolutely any device that decides to support it, on any software I feel like writing for it. There is no technological reason for me not to -- ultimately, music and video is just data, so there is no reasonable reason it shouldn't work anywhere. Same with text, for that matter -- no website should be Flash, because every website should work on any browser, and there's rarely a technical reason for them not to.
Games have yet to standardize on anything, even the few standards -- how many games use Direct3D instead of OpenGL? We're certainly a long way from having a standard engine, and most people I talk to think it's ludicrously impossible for such a thing to exist and cover all the possibilities. So, it's already an expected part of a game that you have to install custom software to run the game.
Installing software is annoying. It means I need a supported platform -- probably Windows. It means I have to patch it, and it could have bugs, or be incompatible... It means all the hassle that usually comes with installing software, especially proprietary software (read: not in package management). But no one ever considers another possibility for games.
Once that software's on your machine, the main inconvenience -- for me, anyway -- is gone. My computer's online all the time anyway, and I pay for most of my games. There might be problems with the game, but there might be bugs in any game anyway. 99% of my complaints about DRM already apply to most games, DRM'd or not. And I'd MUCH rather have a call-home feature, because that's less likely to fuck up my whole system than a check-the-CD feature.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
yeah i'm sure rockstar will have wide open arms to mods in gta4
that mod just unlocked some thing that was left in the game next time they will likely remove all unused things in the game. Making anything like it 100% fan made.
1) This is almost inevitable as you can no longer have one guy his garage make a blockbuster game. Do you know how much the operating cost a video game studio is? Do you think they use pentium 3 800 mhz machines to build their models? Or that their artists work for free?
2) Actually games DO control what games are made. If people weren't buying Madden 2001 2002 2003 2004 etc. by the truck load every year, EA wouldn't be making them. If people were willing to buy single player adventure games, those companies wouldn't be dying left and right. In the end, we're in a capitalist society and demand is what drive the supply.
3) True. However we're seeing more and more support for the next generation of independent game makers, such as Fl0w, Portal, and that thing that Xbox Live was doing where people can make and upload their own game for others to play. Obviously you will not see the next Unreal Tournament made by 3 guys from their college dorm.
The Source engine is DirectX only. Steam uses Internet Explorer -- I believe for large chunks of the interface, and also for the MOTD on CS:Source servers.
There are titles on there that do have native Linux binaries -- Darwinia, for instance, has a Steam release, but you can also buy it from their website, which gives you 3 downloads each, completely un-DRM'd, of the Windows and Linux versions (Mac version is published by a third-party shop that did the port).
Personally, I'd like to re-implement Steam, but the way I want to do it is complete overkill, and not going to happen soon.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I buy a title or two every month but have no desire at all to play online, in fact my main gaming rig isnt usually connected to my network. I have tried Ultima Online, Battlefield, Star Wars galaxies, FF online and some really stupid car racing game that was completly online. In the end all of them fell short. I think the big thing im most opposed to is paying $50 for the media to install a game but then having to pay $10-$20 a month to actually play it. I tend to play a game for a few days, go to something else then come back to the other again a few weeks later. Im still playing Oblivion for instance, and I purchased it a year ago. The monthly fee just isnt condusive to my playing habits. So where does that leave me? Im sure there are others that feel the same way. So I guess the real question is do the saved sales from the clutches of piracy outnumber the lost sales from those with no desire to go online with their gaming? Oh well, at least the theoretical question of whether pirates would buy the games if they couldnt be pirated would finally be answered. My predition: A year or so after the shift to online, the new buzz phrases will be DRM free gaming and single player experiences.
To say that Steam is the future of PC gaming is fairly true. To say that Steam directly equals DRM is not.
DRM is a means to strongly limit your right to use something you purchase, to the point of suggesting that you don't really own it.
Steam will allow you to download your content to multiple computers, and freely play your content.
Most music DRM schemes limit your ability to copy your music, or play it on whatever hardware you choose.
Steam is first and foremost a means of digital distribution to skip the distribution middle-man.
Game development costs have skyrocketed, game developers are working more hours for less money, and yet while our expectations rise, our desire to pay more for games has not risen. Something has to give, and many truly great gaming companies have gone to the wayside.
If digital distribution puts more money into the hands of the developer, keeps overall costs down, allows me to purchase a game without leaving my house, install on multiple PCs without even looking for disks, etc. etc. etc., then it is certainly more of a blessing than a curse.
I'm all for digital distribution.
Is Steam perfect? No. But it was largely the first venture in the market, and it is a step in the right direction.
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So where does that leave me? Im sure there are others that feel the same way.
Like me. Online gaming just isn't my thing, and I won't play an offline game that requires online auth to install and/or play because I've been bitten too many times by software whose publisher dropped off the face of the planet. The games I like are the ones with stories I can get attached to, and I can't do that if I know that five or ten years down the line I won't be able to play through it again. Even if it's only once - like when I replayed Wasteland at University back in 1999 or so - the ability to do so is important to me.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
In discussing various systems, I'm vaguely surprised nobody mentioned Guild Wars. While not everybody's style, GW's easy to get into and offers both a single and multiplayer experience lumped together, depending on what campaigns and how you choose to play. (Myself, I spend 95% of the time alone with NPCs or only one other person.)
But it's distinguished from a considerable portion of online RPG-style games in that it has no monthly fee. You pay the price up front (~50$ per campaign, of which there's three right now) and there's no monthly fee. A few posts complained about how monthly fees aren't good for people who hop games, or might spend a few months doing other stuff and this neatly sidesteps the issue.
that thing that Xbox Live was doing where people can make and upload their own game for others to play
XNA is what you're thinking of. Good idea--except games made with XNA must be released freely, with source, because you can't distribute them. Players of the indie games have to fork over a monthly fee to boot. The only people making money are Microsoft--fl0w on the PS3 at least pays the developers, too.
XNA is not a good system, even though the technical aspects of programming with it are amazing.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Mods remaining free is crucial. Screw Microsoft and their business sense. Mods are about the only factor that keeps many old games alive to this day. When I beat a console game, I pretty much throw it away and forget about it. When I beat a PC game, I can always look forward to replaying it in a couple of years with all the mods installed, which grants me a completely new gameplay experience. If the mod tools really do go away, I will be very, very sorely disappointed.
MMORPG's don't have a zero percent piracy rate. You can download the game off the internet and then use a private server. I know because I have done it. That makes what they said inaccurate.
Perhaps if games were not so expensive, we wouldn't get in trouble to find, download and install pirated games.
Having to pay 60 euros for Half Life 2, for example, is unacceptable, in my opinion. If it was 20 euros, I wouldn't even consider the pirated version.
If you think that the price of 20 euros is illogical, then you should consider that Valve spent 6 years rebuilding the game twice. Why should I have to pay for Valve's engineers having fun and not doing their jobs? Half Life 1 had more content and more substance, and it was delivered in far less time. The price of 60 euros for HL2 does not reflect its real price, also considering that the gameplay is maximum 30 hours (which means that the average gamer can beat the game in a few days).
And since you are indie developer, here are some news for you: games with equal or less gameplay than Space Invaders do not worth more than 1 euro. There are 100s of indie shops out there, all producing games with gameplay seen before a 100 million times, only with a little bit more flashier graphics that do not usually fit in with the game's context. Why should we buy them, just for playing out 10 minutes?
Perhaps a better model would be to be able to rent a game for a couple of days. Movies in DVD format cost 1 euro per day, for 120 minutes of fun. Movies can be copied/downloaded just as easily as games, yet the movie industry does not say that they are about to collapse due to piracy...and that is because they have find a better market model, one that suits people better.
I pray to God the mouse does die. If, in ten years, we are still sitting in front of a 2D monitor and using a mouse and keyboard to play our games then video games are officially dead. I doubt most people would complain if the status quo kept up for the next decade, but it is my belief that the true ideal of gaming, PC included, is the holo-deck from Star Trek. Unless we keep heading toward that ideal, games are going to stagnate and if you think you are seeing the same old thing now, in a decade you will see absolutely nothing new anymore. everything will be re-hash with better graphics.
Graphics cards are not the only things that need to change. The fundamental revolution in gaming NEEDS to happen in I/O. I think The Wii is the first iteration of this, but not necessarily the be-all end-all. I/O technology needs to take the hint from the Wii and continue to push the bounds of how we interact with the game on a fundamental level. It may sound like I am talking about VR, but the peak game experience should be much more than this. It should be as though you were stepping into a whole other real world
This is not to say that we NEED the HoloDeck in the next decade, but we need to start making progress towards this or interactive media as we know it will stagnate and die. And the masses won't know that what they once loved is dead until somebody comes along and points out how things could have been and what the original goal was.
Of course, this is all my opinion and I may just be a wacked out nut-job who loves video games too much but, mark my words, if things haven't changed within the next decade then you WILL see the death of video games, no matter what platform. Nobody's immune...
Future indie game developer of America (and possibly Canada)
what I think would be more effective than your solution is, motivate through game mechanics...
try this.. make in game rewards reactive based on ability...
in WOW, when you are a few levels above another player, defeating them is pointless, there is no gain...
now, take your headshot kills.. give them (headshot kills) their own 'level' when you can pot 99% of the players with a headshot, you 'skill level' in headshots rises to such an excessive level, that it just doesn't give you any benefit (other than a dead opposing player) unless the other char has a uber level in headshots themselves..... you have to work on another type of kill to show any 'gain'.....
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Well you did it; you made me create an account so I could post for the first time in 2 years.
Disclaimer: I'm French (Canadian) so please excuse any made-up words I might use.
I feel strongly about gaming and especially on the PC. I love the platform - it's more open, more evolutional. Multiplayer is, IMHO, better implemented (unlike Xbox Live and the like, we don't have to -pay- to play multiplayer, except for most MMOs. The thought of having to pay in order to play something like Supreme Commander in multiplayer just repulses me.)
However, I'm dismayed at the general mind set that people have regarding PC games. For most of the people I know, paying for a game is stupid. I buy a lot of games and I occasionally get the question "Why'd you buy it? I downloaded it, I could have gotten you a copy". I try to explain them the basic of economy: If a product does not make profit, they won't make more of it. If there's a game you like but you don't buy it, you're basically telling the developer/publisher "Don't make more of it, it's not good enough to spend my money on".
Before you start claiming that modern-day game sucks, that they're not worth 40, 50, 60$, just what would be worth it? If it's not worth it, don't buy it. If you want to play it then, by all means, I would think that means that you feel the game is worth playing but not worth paying for?
Don't get me wrong, if you adhere to the "I wanna try it before I play it" school then its fine. Download it, try it out, however if you do like it then please buy it.
No matter how you look at it, if you use something without paying for it, it's theft.
Steam may not be the future of gaming but with the ever-increasing internet and the tech-savvy "younguns" crowd growing up AND increasing, piracy will only increase. Developers need a way to keep PC games from being pirated, whatever it may be.
If you look at consoles, it's DRM and it works. It's proprietary, yes it's hackable and can be pirated but it's the vast minority that are willing to open up their box and slap a chip in it. Most are content at buying a few games and then selling them back at EBgames/Gamestop for a few new ones.
For PCs, what do we have? MMOs and online verification. My opinion? We need something similar to consoles but on the PC; maybe a Game-DVD reader (separate from a standard DVD-reader) or something else.
I don't like the idea either but seeing the market get choked by rampant and ever-growing piracy, I can only blame my fellow PC gamers.
Before you replay, ask yourself what's your ratio of bought-VS-pirated games. If it's lower than 1, please don't bother =/
> [MMORPGs connect to a central server] so verifying that the user's CD key is unique can be done without much fuss
They don't even bother doing that other than once to confirm that particular key hasn't been used before to create an account. After that, you can log in anywhere with just your account name.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Consoles. I came to the same conclusion a year or so ago and purchased a GameCube. It's sad, but it seems inevitable that the majority of single player games will migrate to the consoles. Since I get all of my FPS fixes with the PC, I've turned to the Cube and DS for my adventure gaming.
I would suggest that you take a look at the Wii since it can play the entire back catalog for the Cube or perhaps a PS2 if RPGs are more taste.
Piracy does exist on MMO's, you can get server's which run an emulated realm and you can use an easily downloaded client.
If your neighbours roof is flying past your window, you know it's cyclone season.