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Brad Wardell's Plan To Save PC Gaming
A few weeks ago, we discussed Stardock CEO Brad Wardell's "Gamer's Bill of Rights," a proposal for removing some of the PC gaming industry's more obnoxious characteristics, such as annoying DRM and no-return policies. Shacknews sat down with Wardell for a lengthy interview in which he discussed his reasons for starting the project, how it's being received by game companies, and how he wants the gaming community to help. Quoting:
"I've already gotten calls from Microsoft, from Take 2, and other publishers who are interested in moving forward on this. Obviously the first step is we have to really define these items. And I've had other developers and publishers who have come back and said, 'No, because it's not flexible enough.' For example, what happens if someone wants to do a policy where there's CD copy protection, but after the first month [consumers] can download a patch that gets rid of it. So obviously that's a perfectly good solution too, but our thing eliminates the ability to do that."
I wasn't aware that PC gaming needed saving.
At least, not any more than console gaming needed saving...
That CD copy protection doesn't even work. The game gets pirated before it's released!
These companies are just fucking stupid. SOMEONE IN YOUR SUPPLY CHAIN IS STEALING FROM YOU! Why punish us?
Where do games go after they get mastered? Keep a closer eye on that.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Ideally? Get rid of DRM. It NEVER benefits the consumer, and the pirate copies have it removed anyway.
If you HAVE to use DRM because the old farts who run these companies insist on it, have the game hosted on something like Steam or GameTap.
If you do decide to go the Steam route, don't incorporate further DRM on top of the Steam version of the game (I'm looking at you, BioShock).
Get the annoying f@cktards we call 'publishers' out of the way
Read radical news here
Develop
A) Cross-platform games
B) Get rid of the insane DRM, if you want a CD serial key thats fine as they are easily cracked later in its lifetime, but don't activate it online (with the exception of say, a MMORPG)
C) Develop for a generation before, don't develop a game for quad-core CPUs and dual video cards, develop for a generation before the current generation. Optimize for multiple CPUs and video cards all you want, but I won't upgrade my graphics card/RAM just to play a game.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
It's about time business's (and customers) re-established good will over mindless abuse of one another.
I think that policy is a fine policy, assuming that the copy protection was at least risk-free -- that is, assuming that if you bought the game legitimately, if it didn't work, you could just upgrade with a patch in a month, and the protection is gone.
Well, it's not risk-free.
Some of these CD schemes, in particular, have actually installed drivers which screw up things like DVD burning. Some have installed rootkits. There's really no way for a gamer to know that it's completely gone -- and if there was a bug in it, there's no way to know that we could completely remove it.
Parent has a point, though:
The reason you should remove CD copy protection from your game is that it doesn't work -- at all, ever, the game's cracked before release, and people can make perfect copies.
The second reason is that CD copy protection can be so intrusive as to drive legitimate customers to piracy -- which means that it has to have a significant benefit to justify that risk. It doesn't.
So, if CD copy protection is such a clear net loss, what's the point? Why would you want to only shoot yourself in the foot for a month, instead of, say, not shooting yourself in the fucking foot?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
While I applaud every item on the list, I don't really think those things will "save" PC gaming simply because they're not the reason PC gaming was weakened so much.
The problem with PC gaming is that a lot of the smaller companies were driven out of business, while the bigger companies obsessively followed each other. How many WW2 FPSes have we had to endure over the past decade? How many futuristic and ancient world RTSes? At first that works. If someone loved starcraft, then there's a good chance they'll buy the next two clones, but after a while it just gets tedious.
I mean, look at CRPGs; the neverending AD&D gold box RPGs killed the CRPG market until Baldur's Gate. Doom was a great game, but we had to spend the next several years getting forcefed Doom clones (half of them produced by Id themselves). Starcraft cloned countless futuristic FPSes, and Starcraft itself originally copied off of Dune (via Warcraft maybe). I lost track of all the Age of Empire (itself not an especially original game) clones.
The Steam Terms of Service say no such thing. You buy a one off payment subscription to games on Steam, you don't own them. I'd link but I'm late for work so just google for the Steam ToS.
If Valve went into receivership them I doubt the bankruptcy courts would look favourably on their directors nuking their most important asset!
Nick
I know an fair few PC gamers - a dozen or so. All but 1 wouldn't even know what DRM is. They don't hang out on slashdot, gamer sites etc or get involved in the Internet Zeitgeist of people wrining their hands about how terrible the DRM in game x is. They but their PC 'What PC Game' magazine, go to their fav. bricks and morter shops and buy the game - sometimes they'll use Amazon.
Maybe I know a very skewed demographic but I'd suggest that the % of gamers who care about such things as DRM is actually quite small.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Well said. The biggest issue really is the self-fulfilling prophecy of low PC game sales. A bunch of us waited anxiously for the next UT version from Epic. When it came out, it was riddled with bugs which had been well reported in the beta, the menus were still coded for console use only, and the it lacked a non-windows port, even though leading up to it there had been good talk about both a Mac port and a Linux port. And there was no Linux server port, meaning almost no good servers for the first few months.
Now Epic is talking about potentially getting out of the PC market due to the low sales. I'd be angry, but as a collective we've decided that the UT franchise which we've always loved for the modding is dead to us.
So yes, the PC market is dying. Because the publishers kicked it into a dark hole to wither and die.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
What "DRM" in games means is what we used to call "copy protection". And players do care about it, when they get a scratched CD, or steam screws up, or anything else that results from them not being able to make a backup of their games whacks them upside the head.
They're just used to it. It's "that sucks, but what can you do about it".
And for game companies, the attitude is generally "it sucks, but what can you do about it" too.
I've been whacked upside the head by copy protection from both sides. As a player, the first pirated game I ever got was a cracked copy of Wizardry that I had the local pirate write over the original Wizardry gold-foil-labelled CD because their copy protection was so broken the game became unplayable (except on one particular computer) after a couple of months. And as an author, the copy protection (required by the publisher) we put on Tracers led to us missing the Christmas release because the first run of disks had to be recalled because the publisher had screwed up the production.