The Evolution of Multiplayer Games and Online Play

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?"

Comments

When was the last LAN party you went to?

[Opportunist]

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.

Re:When was the last LAN party you went to?

[tepples]

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?

Re:When was the last LAN party you went to?

[mlts]

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.

Re:When was the last LAN party you went to?

[Malevolyn]

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.

Re:When was the last LAN party you went to?

[!coward]

I only own one of the two, and it isn't the 360. However, from my limited experience with the system, it would seem you're wrong about piracy on the 360. There are quite a few chips for it, but for the most part, and this is mostly where my "experience" with the system comes from, it's mostly a firmware hack.

A mate of mine makes a nice profit off of buying new 360's, using some well-documented hole (like the Zelda hack for the Wii) loading some special firmware onto it then selling it at a higher price with the knowledge that the end costumer will be able to play, errr, backups .. *cough* *cough* Yeah, let's go with "backups".

He doesn't do any actual development, got all the training he needed from material on the web and trying it out on some 360s (which he later sold at a profit, so no loss whatsoever), and the special code is obtained on the web, if you know where to look. He doesn't actually mod anything physical, the warranty is left intact (though he does need to open the system for it to work -- but as long as the seal isn't broken, subsequent inspections wouldn't find anything) and he is yet to have people complaining about it.

Seriously, from what I understood, it's so easy anyone could do it. Microsoft tend to put a wrinkle on things whenever they release a new mandatory firmware update (which is few and far between) or when the newer models get upgraded parts (the disc drive is the crucial component here), but that only lasts a few days, couple of weeks at the most, then it's back to business as usual.

Oh, and there's no problem with XBL too, since there are no actual physical changes, and whatever "magic" is worked on the firmware serves only to allow non-original disks to play. Yeah, that thing with the hard drive is still locked, as far as I know, but pretty much the only thing that you can't do with this method is download a yet-to-be-released title and then try to go online with it. You _can_ play it before release date (he bragged about finishing a couple of major titles before they were even officially released -- Halo 3 comes to mind), but you must be careful to stay offline the whole time, else the XBL system will "see" what you're doing and you risk a ban.

As a PS3 owner, it _is_ a bit irritating that the competition is open to such exploitation -- you get to shell out your hard-earned cash for every single title worth its salt while your mate gets to play any title he likes for free.. But that usually means he's got so much (crap?) to choose from, he can't stick with any title long enough to finish them (bar a few notable exceptions).

So they're not actually charging for the game?

[argent]

If you can't play the game except through their online service, I assume they're not actually charging you for the game software itself?

No, of course not. They'd never double-charge people for a game, would they?

It won't fail, though

[Tridus]

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.

Re:Not sure why it will fail.

[Rogerborg]

this measure will probably reduce piracy

Super. Now, will it increase sales?