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The Evolution of Multiplayer Games and Online Play

Posted by Soulskill on from the lan-of-the-lost dept.

Ranga14 writes "The recently announced Command & Conquer 4 seems to be following the same path of Blizzard's Starcraft 2 in having no LAN/offline multiplayer. They will require users to be logged in at all times to even be able to play any facet of the game. What will this mean for LAN parties, gaming events and those who don't play online? Is this a sound business decision, or do EA & Blizzard not get that this method of attempting to thwart piracy will fail like others have?"

8 of 244 comments (clear)

  1. When was the last LAN party you went to? by Opportunist · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think it's a wrong move, but not because of LAN parties. LAN parties used to be a thing when internet was scarce, connections were slow and often you also had metered lines that only let you transfer so much traffic per month. Today, with bandwitdths that break the mbit borders easily and often hover about 10mbit, carrying your computer somewhere is, at best, something you'd do for special occasions. Events, maybe sponsored, where you may even win a prize for being good. Not just "getting together to play".

    My argument against those mandatory online services is simple: What if the company ceases to exist or ceases to support the product? Good bye multiplayer (or even singleplayer)? Today I could still fire up a game of Starcraft, locally or through the internet, I needn't connect with BattleNet (let's assume it ever went away), I could play SC for as long as there is TCP/IP v4 around. Dunno if it works with v6, someone would have to try.

    Tying a game to its maker essentially results in a better rental version. And I refuse to pay premium for renting a game.

    --
    We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
    1. Re:When was the last LAN party you went to? by tepples · · Score: 4, Insightful

      LAN parties used to be a thing when internet was scarce, connections were slow and often you also had metered lines that only let you transfer so much traffic per month.

      This is still the case for satellite and mobile broadband in the United States.

      I refuse to pay premium for renting a game.

      Are you willing to give up video gaming altogether once all the major publishers of PC games have switched to this business model?

    2. Re:When was the last LAN party you went to? by prefect42 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      There's also a trend of all assets being bought by another company, who then overvalues each individual asset such that this sort of venture can't happen.

      --

      jh

    3. Re:When was the last LAN party you went to? by mlts · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The question is more of how much can the PC gaming community can take. First, it was more intrusive DRM, then activation, now its having to be online just to play a single player campaign.

      I'm seeing an attitude in the game industry that is an off-putter. Yes, the economy in most of the world stinks, but instead of trying to jumpstart sales by putting out some innovative IP, I see the grip tightening over what stuff comes out. This creates a feedback loop because gamers either will just crack whatever protection something had (patch out DRM, make a server emulator), pirate the game, or just give the game company the finger and go back to playing WoW and not bother buying any works that are less functional than the previous versions.

      What this does is create an opportunity for a small game company to take the market by storm by making a quality game that ends up widespread and played everywhere. This is how ID Software (and its predecessor, Apogee) got started. Yes, a lot of copies will be pirated, but a lot of times, pirated copies lead to bought copies. Right now, this market is ignored because of the white-hot iPhone app market, but once that hits saturation (could be six months to a year), people will want to have fun PC games again, and an indie software house could do well in all likelihood.

      For new games, the barrier to entry is low, and it is high. It is low because almost anyone can write code, get an Authenticode signing key from MS, get an account with RegNow to handle registrations, then use Tucows or download.com as the main place where customers can download the executable. The barrier to entry is high because users are expecting 3D, theater quality graphics and sound at every turn. The days of writing a generic top-down RPG along the lines of Final Fantasy Legends are long over, unless one is writing an iPhone app. So, an indie publisher will have to deal with that by having gameplay so good it overshadows dated graphics.

    4. Re:When was the last LAN party you went to? by Attila+Dimedici · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Tying a game to its maker essentially results in a better rental version. And I refuse to pay premium for renting a game.

      And that is what this is really about. Content Producers (music, movie, and software publishers) don't want to sell you content any longer, they want to rent it to you. The problem with selling content is that you have to keep coming up with new content in order to ensure a revenue stream. If I can get you to pay me a rental fee (that's not what they call it), I can generate an ongoing revenue stream off of one killer product.

      --
      The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
    5. Re:When was the last LAN party you went to? by Malevolyn · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Are you willing to give up video gaming altogether once all the major publishers of PC games have switched to this business model?

      I'd be much more willing to get into reverse engineering, actually.

      --
      Your ad here.
  2. It won't fail, though by Tridus · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The commentary added to the bottom of the summary is wrong. This has a good chance of success at thwarting piracy.

    The goal of anti-piracy measures is never to eliminate 100% of piracy until the end of time. That's nearly impossible, and they know it. What they really want to do is make it so that either you can't pirate it for the frst little while, or that you don't want to. Having no functional online play whatsoever in the pirated version is a pretty effective way of making the pirated version worse then the retail version. (That's the opposite strategy of stuff like SecuROM, which generally makes the retail version worse then the pirated version.)

    LAN functionality is a real problem in that department now, because it's used primarily for pirates to play on Hamachi (and the like) with each other. Remove it from the game entirely, and the pirates no longer have to simply bypass SecuROM or an offline disk check. They have to emulate Battle.net in order to get any multiplayer working.

    Will they do that eventually? Absolutely. Will they do that within the first 2 week sales rush? Highly unlikely. If it takes them a couple months before the pirated versions have online play, then by the standard of what the companies are trying to do, it's a successful anti-piracy measure.

    As usual, you crooks who rip off games because you want free stuff are just screwing it up for everybody else.

    --
    -- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
  3. Send them an email by ae1294 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I loved the original starcraft game but didn't really like playing online because of the cheating and honestly it's more fun to play in a room full of people you know. I also don't support this designed obsolescence crap. I can still load up starcraft and play it with my friends and will still be able to in 10 years regardless of what happens to blizzard.

    I just sent off an email to blizzard telling them I'm not buying their new version and I suggest you do the same. It only takes a minute and if everyone started doing something other than sitting on their asses things might change.

    http://us.blizzard.com/support/webform.xml?locale=en_US

    I see no way to email EA without having an account. Maybe someone else can find a method.