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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."
1. Gamers shall have the right to return games that don't work with their computers for a full refund.
Try taking the box store to court for not providing basic fitness. Guess what? The business is willing to "deal with you".
2. Gamers shall have the right to demand that games be released in a finished state.
Definition of finished? Perhaps they want mathematically proven code? I'd rather have a continual ladder of bugfixes and more content.
3. Gamers shall have the right to expect meaningful updates after a game's release.
Conflicts with #2.
4. Gamers shall have the right to demand that download managers and updaters not force themselves to run or be forced to load in order to play a game.
How about: Dont include updates that remove features.
5. Gamers shall have the right to expect that the minimum requirements for a game will mean that the game will adequately play on that computer.
If people had the balls to sue, they could do so under truth in advertising clauses.
6. Gamers shall have the right to expect that games won't install hidden drivers or other potentially harmful software without their express consent.
Companies that do so should be prosecuted under the fullest extent of the law.
7. Gamers shall have the right to re-download the latest versions of the games they own at any time.
8. Gamers shall have the right to not be treated as potential criminals by developers or publishers.
9. Gamers shall have the right to demand that a single-player game not force them to be connected to the Internet every time they wish to play.
10. Gamers shall have the right that games which are installed to the hard drive shall not require a CD/DVD to remain in the drive to play.
All fixed by using the ThePirateBay images backed up with the appropriate cracks and servers. The crackers crack the software so you have no hassle. Why pay fo it when you are treated ike a criminal anyway. Might as well live up to the ideal.
If anyone wander's on over to Stardock's website, you will find they have a return policy, but it's got all kinds of ugly exceptions.
I think they should really consider having the same policies as he is demanding of the gaming industry.
Pot.. Kettle.. Black..
Honestly, I really do not like to say it, but I am thinking if any anti-DRM movement sprung up effective enough to get traction, companies would likely consider console-only release, rather than face the "risk" associated with releasing for a PC-- no matter the real costs vs unreasonable fear.. Regardless of who says they are "interested" in front of the press.
The percentage of people who would buy a game, copy it, and then return it for a refund or an exchange is probably so high that they are afraid to do these things.
RTFA. Bascially: Stardock measured an increase in sales when they added refunds, and not that many people bothered to return it.
I suppose there would have to be a point at which you start dealing with abuse, but keep in mind -- most people who want to pirate the game know about BitTorrent. The people who actually bought the game are, mostly, legitimate customers.
I'm thinking a compromise would be in order...
Well, I believe it does allow for the scheme Greenhouse (Penny Arcade) uses -- interestingly, also the scheme Windows XP uses, which was so controversial at the time -- where it phones home once at install, and once on significant hardware changes.
It doesn't do anything with that, yet -- no retarded limits like 3 reinstalls -- I assume it's to serve more as a watermark. If you're sharing it with a thousand of your closest friends via BitTorrent, they'll notice.
That does still bother some people, but honestly, I'm fine with it -- I wouldn't dare reinstall anything without access to the Internet these days. Of course, I'd feel significantly better if there was a crack in escrow somewhere, so that if Greenhouse fails, I can still reinstall.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Back in the '80s when things were fresh and new, I remember the eagerness with which I went to Egghead/Babbage's to look at the computer games.
There was so much variety in the games. People were trying all sorts of different things. These games were not hundred-megabyte heavyweight games, they were much lighter--but they were more interesting.
Now everything is so similar. The gaming mags freak out over frame rate and animation quality. I could care less. I value freshness and cleverness much more.
My wife plays, and loves, the popcap kind of games on the internet. They are nothing special at all, but she likes them because they are novel and fun.
I think I had more fun playing the original ASCII empire game and CIV II than I get playing later, overwrought, Sid Meier games (and he designs among the best).
The massive multiplayer games could be tons of fun, but there's no way I'm putting down a subscription to play.
All the damn game publishers are trying to hit home runs all the time, like the movie industry. That sucks. I'd rather see a lot more variety out there, like in the '80s.
Anyway--that's my gripe.
I'm not saying DRM is a successful method of preventing piracy, but instead that it is a typical knee jerk reaction of (as you quite accurately, if cynically called them) retarded control-freak publishers who are freaking out and losing revenue through piracy.
On the other hand, how do you go about convincing dumbass board members and investors (who often only care about the bottom line) that you're not going to do anything about piracy, and that it won't hurt the bottom line to do so?
I can understand how piracy helps companies like microsoft, as all you're doing by pirating windows is increasing their market penetration, but how about small/medium sized developers who don't have the market power of say EA? How do they remain competitive if their already meagre sales (Troika or Majesco anyone?) are hammered by piracy?
I'm not saying the situation is awesome, but neither am I agreeing that this is something that we're not responsible for (as gamers who pirated).
http://www.zombieapocalypse.tv/
It was worse than that. Halo was originally going to be a Mac game with the Windows version coming out the same day. Bungie made their rep as game developers for the Mac, most notably the Marathon franchise.
Halo got revealed at Macworld in 1999 I believe. Then MS bought Bungie and then there was no Mac version at all. It got immortalized in a PA strip.
The GP has a point, but games is about the only thing I use Windows for these days. Without 'em, I have even fewer reasons to hop on the Windows upgrade mill.
May I direct your attention to Tribes? Tribes 1 was created by Dynamix (now known as Sierra) a medium/small development house which found themselves in exactly the situation you describe. Tribes 1 was pirated left and right and the end result was that a relatively unknown game eventually had a very large dynamic, thriving community of players and player-created content. So, what did they do? They followed Tribes 1 up with with a Triple-A title, Tribes 2 and made a chunk of change.
-Grym
I cite it as a counterexample, because you know what? No game can look worse now than when it started.
Not true, actually. See Final Fantasy VIII PC port on Nvidia GPUs. Apparently at released, it used an "undocumented feature" of the GPUs which was fixed in later versions of the drivers, including the current set for current cards (that the old drivers do not support and cannot be used for).
Completely unplayable now. :(
Two things:
1. Consoles have always been highly developed for compared to PCs. It's just a little different now because consoles have more or less caught up in power -- keep in mind they have to produce 3D for a much smaller screen resolution (what is the worst case, 1080p? Bah. That's so 1997) so they'll always have higher quality in some aspects (smooth motion, mirroring, etc.) while PC games are always trying to jam that into a much higher resolution, which they can't without having 1 fps. Thus the PC lags in the latest and greatest visual tricks beyond pure resolution.
Quite frankly, you need something on the order of 60-70 fps to truly get a "looking through a window" feel due to smoothness of motion. Worse, many PC games have loading glitches where the picture freezes for half a second when you start to move or turn fast, which also costs in immersion.
In any case, there've been tons of games only on consoles, it's just that you expect to see them on the PC now because of the roughly comparable quality of the visuals and depths of the game.
2. "Gaming is dead" - Or maybe it's just in a draught. In music, we can go for months, if not years, between huge hits with a catchy tune, with the #1's being some mildly catchy thing that wouldn't even make it into the Beatles' top 50 hits.
Halo, World of Warcraft, sorry, I know they're huge, but I've been playing video games since the mid '70's. I've seen 'em come, and I've seen 'em go. These are just the latest that managed to suck in a new generation of players.
Something else will come along and dwarf them in turn. Then you can join me in waxing nostalgic about the good old days.
By the way, Microsoft is sticking in the console market until the bitter end because they see that, eventually, TV, PC, TiVo, console game, web surfing, and so on are all gonna merge eventually as the whole family sits there in front of a giant screen divided up into 9 pictures ALA Back to the Future.
Oh, by the way. Monkey wrenches are always on the way. Supposedly NVidia is going to introduce 3D goggles that, combined with their 3D cards pumping out 120fps, will give you 3D, assuming you have a monitor that can handle 120fps as it swaps the left and right views back and forth. Maybe true 3D gaming will finally stick this time.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
First off - playing with a gamepad can be a lot easier and more relaxing than playing with mouse / keyboard combo. For C&C3, you should be using mouse / keyboard. For GoW, Bioshock, Assasin's Creed, you're better off with the gamepad.
AC maybe. The others, not a chance. Do we need to revisit the mouse/kb vs. gamepad precision argument again? When it comes to aiming, mouse/kb wins hands-down every time, no exceptions. So if a game requires aiming, thumb-knobbies just don't cut it. That's why they have add in all that auto-aiming crap for console shooters, as well as slowing down AI reactions and retarding their aiming abilities as well.
Secondly - have you played a lot of the 360 ports? The 3 above are pretty good games.
I've played Bioshock and AC. Didn't finish either of them. They got very repetitive and boring. AC combat is the same thing over and over again, and there's little skill involved in most of the running around. You just hold down the button and the game does most everything for you. Pretty lame.
Bioshock had great visuals and a pretty good story, but there wasn't a single meaningful choice to be made in the entire game as far as I could tell. The weapons and plasmids are all basically interchangeable, and you can use any or all of them as you please, so there's no meaningful choices or real tailoring of the character. They should have stuck closer to System Shock 2 in their design.
Not only that, but many are different than the typical FPS / RTS / TBS / MMO / etc that are on PCs. They're not $3 casual games, but they're not as hardcore as typical PC titles tend to be.
PC gamers like the hardcore games. It's not that we don't like more casual games as well, it's just that with consoles there isn't really a choice. All you get is casual or hard-core-lite type games. They want to claim that they have deep gameplay and awesome graphics like PC games, but they have to deal with hardware limitations and the fact that publishers want to market every single game to everyone with a pulse. This pretty much distills them down to the lowest-common-denominator features that have to be so simple that a retarded monkey could play it to completion. Otherwise it must be too difficult and we wouldn't want to have a game out there that required any real though or effort to master, would we?
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
That CD copy protection doesn't even work. The game gets pirated before it's released!
That's exactly why stardock doesn't use this approach;)
Stardock's games don't require the CD in the drive, have a one-time serial number to enter, and, like steam, if you want to log into your account, you can download any game you've ever bought -- but unlike steam, you don't have to be online to play or even have the online component installed if you don't want. And you can just copy any CD they've ever released with the most generic CD copier. There's none of this secureROM BS where there's a bad sector on the CD.
More than any other company I can that exists, I think Brad's company embodies the ethics reforms we hear here on slashdot all the time. But unlike these arm-chair philosophers, they're out there creating multi-million dollar selling games.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
At least Games for Windows games actually *work*. Unlike, for example, Battlefield: 2142 and Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, two games I bought recently that did not, in fact, work.
First of all, if you bought Dark Messiah recently, you need serious help. The Battlefield series has always had issues, which is why I've never played it. How many console games require patches these days? Do you guess that that number is higher or lower than last year? For every example you point out of buggy PC game, I can point out one that works great, or a console game that is buggy as well.
Yes, the console games tend to get more scrutiny, but they also have the advantage of a single hardware spec to test on. Infinite hardware combination possibilities are part of the reason PC games will always require patching. It's just the way it is, and the way it will be for the foreseeable future. It's never really been a problem for me since I'm rarely one of those people waiting in line on release day for a game. I pick it up a couple weeks later after I've had time to hear about it and see if it has any major issues. It does make the recent increase in console bugginess seem a bit less acceptable though, when you think about it, especially factoring in the extra 10 bucks that most console games cost over a PC game.
Have you ever asked yourself why the PC version of Oblivion needs to suck up gigabytes of HD space when the Xbox 360 version, which is virtually identical, takes no more than needed for virtual memory?
Because it doesn't get stream-loaded from the DVD? Because I have a close to 1TB of dirt-cheap hard drive space and can't be bothered to care? Because I don't know how much space it actually takes up because I have about 100 mods loaded up as well which have turned it into a completely different and VASTLY better game experience that I'm still playing to this day even though I gave up on the original game by the time I reached level 14? *gasp* I don't know. Take your pick.
Have you ever wondered why you have to type in a 25-digit annoying product key to play Dark Messiah on PC online, when you can play Dark Messiah over Xbox Live with nothing more than the disk?
Nope. It's a crap game that I've never played, aside from the demo. The online games that I play almost all use Steam, which is no trouble at all.
I'm all for these "Gamer's Rights," and I'm all for "Games for Windows" because when you come down to it, they both have one goal: upping the quality of PC games to that of console games.
Whatever the goal may have been, the effect has been to dumb-down the games that are released on the PC.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer