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."

Comments

Great idea, and all..

[PC and Sony Fanboy]

I wasn't aware that PC gaming needed saving.

At least, not any more than console gaming needed saving...

Re:Great idea, and all..

[DragonTHC]

I think you're a bit confused.

PC gaming is very much alive. Casual gamers number in the tens of millions for PC. Ever play a flash game on the web?

Even the hardcore gamer who upgrades his rig once a year or more is still very much alive. Hardware manufacturers wouldn't exist if we weren't buying their stuff.

That being said, I think large publishers like EA and Ubisoft are trying to kill PC gaming. It's not really as big a revenue stream for them as console games.

It is, however, the place for innovation. Ubisoft wouldn't exist if not for Cliff Blezinski and Tim Sweeney. And, Epic is continuing to innovate, though not as much as some other developers. Their revenue stream has shifted to something way more sustainable, engine licensing.

You still have plenty of developers continuing to innovate. Steam, ID, Crytek to name a few.

Though I agree with a few others here, that the large publishers are bad for the vitality of the gaming industry on a whole, it stands to reason that just as shit floats to the top, the industry will continue to consolitdate as long as their is money to be made. And, as long as there is money to be made, publishers will try and take as much of the pot as they can through consolidation and other anti-competitive practices.

Re:Great idea, and all..

[Ostracus]

"Don't forget about Microsoft! Games for Windows is a cruel joke. It seems to be primarily about them padding profits by giving the PC sloppy seconds on games that get shoveled out for the 360."

*Looks at the Sins of Solar Empire box he just purchased*

Wow! Danse's right. Just look at the sloppy seconds, games for Windows tagged box I just got. Whatever will I do?

When will they learn?

[DragonTHC]

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."

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.

My suggestion

[FoolsGold]

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).

Re:My suggestion

[Anonymous Coward]

What happens when Steam or GameTap go out of business?

Re:My suggestion

[Jafafa Hots]

Well, Valve has already announced their contingency plan: if they're on the way out, they'll release a final patch to steam that disables the phoning home.

Yeah, and companies that are going out of business are always able to see it ahead of time, wrap things up neatly and wind the business down gracefully. They're always able to implement their "going out of business scenario."

It never happens that things just spiral out of control and one day they find that their creditors have locked the doors.

Re:My suggestion

[SanityInAnarchy]

I'd feel a lot better if that patch existed, somewhere in escrow, in case that happened.

But honestly, it's a compromise I can live with. Steam doesn't force me to keep track of a CD, doesn't fuck up my computer, and does let me re-download the game as often as I like, on as many computers as I like.

Re:My suggestion

[0123456]

"Lets face it, the reason the companies are employing DRM is because (most, not all) gamers fucked them over and forced their hand by just greedily pirating everything we could get out hands on."

When I was a kid in the 80s, pretty much everyone in my school who owned a computer pirated games, and all the fancy DRM scams they used were broken by ten-year-olds in their bedrooms; after trying more and more intrusive DRM scams, eventually the distributors gave up because it simply did not work, and games were released for years with no DRM at all.

DRM is 'sowed' by retarded control-freak publishers who have no clue about technology and don't care how much they screw their customers; piracy has little to do with it. Which is fortunate, because the ten-year-olds are still cracking DRM scams almost as soon as they're released.

Lets see...

[Darkness404]

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.

Re:Lets see...

[SanityInAnarchy]

Saying Starcraft is a counter example is silly. People *still* play it in droves,

Yes. People also play Doom, Pong, and Solitaire, in droves. What's your point?

and it still looks good.

Respectfully, no it doesn't. It looks no better than it did at the time.

the game may not get better looking with newer hardware, but if it looks good to start with, who cares?

Well, you're right -- it looks exactly as good as it did to start with.

I cite it as a counterexample, because you know what? No game can look worse now than when it started. But because Starcraft looks exactly the same, it also means that other games look better.

As for cross platform, Linux is still going to be last on the list for reasonable reasons.

Fair enough -- yet for most games which would bother to make a Mac port, I don't see Linux as a major hurdle. They already had to make it OpenGL to make it play well on the Mac -- that's most of the work right there. Unless they somehow made it stupidly dependent on Cocoa, Linux would barely be a recompile from that.

DirectX stomps OpenGL in current day form, and that buys you 90% of the cross-platform that is PC and XBox

It doesn't buy you the 360, not entirely. If it does, I count the PS3 and the Wii for OpenGL.

And you're not comparing apples to apples. I don't think Direct3D is any better than OpenGL. DirectX is better, because it does more than just graphics -- so the fair comparison would be DirectX vs SDL.

And given how well UT2004 does, I think a good game engine should be able to switch between the two, without too much trouble.

Visual Studio and DirectX arn't quite the utter pieces of shit that the OS is,

True enough. But having used both Visual Studio and Eclipse, I'm not sure I would want Visual Studio back.

I don't see Windows being threatened anytime soon in the gaming market.

True. But it doesn't make a Linux/BSD port any less cool. (That's most of the reason I impulse-bought the Penny Arcade game.)

And remember Doom 3? Pushed GL ahead by at least a year from where it was, I imagine. Most developers insist on DirectX, true, but it only takes one big game to make the manufacturers start to get their shit together.

Lastly:

if you wanna program a generation into the future, OpenGL is trailing developer expectations while MS has been much more consistent with regards to their announcements of whats coming up.

If you wanna program a generation into the future, it doesn't matter -- you need both, and more. You need your engine to be so rock solid and agile that if Intel suddenly makes a cheap 500-core card that speaks x86, you'll be able to render on it before GL or DirectX.

Granted, that's a bit aggressive, but I know how poorly game engines have done, traditionally -- game development in particular tends to lag years behind the rest of the world, mostly because of performance hacks to squeeze out another couple frames per second.

I'm not entirely sure if the modern GL ports of Doom even use less CPU than the purely-software renderer Doom came with. But that kind of shows the endgame of an overly-optimized engine -- how many modern features could we actually add to the original Doom? Ramps, even? We have enough CPU now to run probably hundreds of instances of Doom on a single machine, so the optimizations no longer matter, but the lack of features and portability does -- I imagine much of the "porting" is taking old assembly routines and rewriting them in C.

Blech. I'm rambling, and it's 4 AM. Sorry to be so abrupt... Let me know what you think.

Dangerous.

[SanityInAnarchy]

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?