Movie Industry: Loss of Control Worse Than Piracy

tlhIngan writes "Miramax CEO Mike Lang has admitted to what we all suspected. The biggest worry is a distribution monopoly, not piracy. They saw what happened to the music industry with iTunes, and vowed to not lose control and be at the mercy of Apple or whoever becomes the dominant distributor. From the article: 'Lang, whose company today debuts the Blu-Ray version of the cult classic Pulp Fiction, emphasized that people don’t necessarily want to pirate, as long as they get what they want. “Innovate or die,” should be the motive of entertainment industry companies, where it’s key to listen to customers.'"

Comments

Too little too late

[cboslin]

Does anyone even care what the DRM loving Media moguls think anymore? Hardly. Son, that horse has done left the barn....you all blew it big time!

Re:Step 1, no DRM

[AwesomeMcgee]

Thankyou. Free is easier and that's the simple truth right now. I really wish there was a legal way to get any movie in 15 minutes. I'll pay, really. If netflix streamed what they have on mail request i'd stop torrenting altogether.

Adverts and lack of control (by the user)

[Anonymous Coward]

I hire/buy a DVD and place it in the disc drive, press play and try to go to the movie.

But no, some prick has decided that I WILL watch the advert for organisations that I have come to hate (movie companies, distribution companies, etc). Every time I see tht adverts I am reminded that they have an excessive level of control and I seek a means to take some control back myself. As I am forced to watch the adverts I think about the region codes on the DVD. And so the brand value of the advertisers goes even further down

I don't pirate to save money, I pirate so that I can choose what to watch. And I choose to watch the movie not that self serving adverts that make my blood boil.

Pirates do not sell me pirated movies; movie distributors sell me on pirated movies.

Re:Adverts and lack of control (by the user)

[xenobyte]

I keep thinking about this graphic: http://xandermol.com/blog/media/1/20100724-GxzeV.jpg

I explains EXACTLY why some people actually prefer pirated versions. And while it is possible to skip most of the junk on DVDs, Blu-rays is significantly more locked in. I've seen blu-rays where you can't do anything at all when playback starts - you can't skip previews, you can't fast-forward, jump to the menu or anything. You just have to sit and watch 11 mins of previews, warnings and so on. I returned that blu-ray. Another release of the same title from another country in the same region had different extras so I checked that out. It had two previews, both were skippable and you could jump directly to the menu (to start watching the movie) anywhere. Much better.

But the core is value for money. Sure previews are nice, but a year later they're obsolete and a pain to watch. So simply do this: When the disc loads, go directly to the menu. Make the first choice to watch the movie with previews, the next to watch it directly, then setup, then extras. That way people that want a cinema-like experience they can have that, and people that just want to watch the movie can do that.

Re:Nice quote...

[Trogre]

Unfortunately in many cases the only way to even get the content one wants is by piracy.

Consider the original Star Wars trilogy. The only way to see the theatrical versions in HD (or even anything more than LaserDisc quality) is to download or otherwise obtain fan-edited versions, which have been meticulously reconstructed from several different sources. Official versions just don't exist, except deep in Lucasfilm vaults and probably won't see the light of day again until they have degraded beyond a usable condition.

All those "make sure you're getting the genuine product" ads can bite me.

Re:Step 1, no DRM

[kangsterizer]

I'd pay $100 for 720p or above access to all movies, all shows, anytime i want, even the stuff that was on tv the same day, or a couple of days earlier, and movies as soon as they hit DVD/Bluray (ideally, just after cinema in fact). Heck, that'd be well worth it. I might even go higher.

I'd also pay $50 for dvd or above access to relatively recent movies and shows.

But i'm never going to pay $30 for old movies, old shows, various qualities, various availability, that's stupid. And it's hard to get better, specially when your country doesn't have netflix.

In fact, most of the tv shows can only be acquired if you pirate them. And for movies, you gotta wait almost a year to be able to buy them bluray (2 years for stream); who are they kidding?

Re:Customers don't know what they want.

[CharlyFoxtrot]

iTunes didn't bust up their distribution model the internet did, Apple was just there to seize on the disruption and capitalize on it with iTunes. The movie companies have already lost control of distribution, their movies are out there for download before they're even officially released. That genie isn't going back into its bottle. Of course they could keep reaching for that holy grail and drag their whole industry down the ravine by doing so.

Re:Customers don't know what they want.

[Anonymous Coward]

As much as I hate the freemium MMO model, it's the right model because otherwise the games would be overrun with cheats and bots, making the games unplayable.

As it is, many of these games (especially Japanese(FFXIV,Lucent Heart) Korean(Mabinogi,Vindictus,Aionm) and Chinese(Perfect World)) tend to be on the edge of unplayability due to the overrun of RMT chinese gold farming bots. Where as subscription models (WoW) have the very same problem, but solve it on the financial end.

Let's say for example, that MMO's were completely free to play. The company would need to make up money somehow, so they could probably sell advertising (making the game a rather terrible experience) or write things into the game (KR/JP games tend to make some loose ties to tv shows and anime) that are optional. This only works as long as there is a market for it.

Now if a game operates on the Feemium model (where you pay for optional parts of the game, or to make the game easier), only 1-5% of the players will participate in this scheme, and then only if it's priced right. This is a good way to extort money out of players in exchange for not having to waste time doing something time-consuming-for-no-reason in the game, but ultimately it's ruined by instancing, since you can just retry the instance. So games have durability and other issues that make consuming time detrimental to the game play. See where I'm going at? If a game operates on the Feemium model, that means the game is no god damn fun to play and is just a fancy barbie-doll IRC chat if you don't play the actual instancing. Save yourself the money and just don't play. Meanwhile the RMT bots have full run of the game and will fish anything you want out of the instances so you don't have to play either. Hell every time I play one of these friggin games, even the players have their own "mule" accounts that they use as extra storage so they don't have to pay for the extra storage bolt-on.

On the other side of the coin we have the "subscriber" model where everything in the game has to be earned (in theory anyway,) So RMT becomes an expensive option, but because players want to make the most use of their subscription cost, they will bot the gameplay in any manner possible. This is generally done by the same means it's done in the Feemium model... create additional accounts and just use them as banks and/or party-filler. Of course there are things like "bind-on-equip" that makes doing this rather silly and expensive, but the games are more fun when you don't have to keep paying for do-overs.

My beef of course with either model is that the trade-offs are often very one-sided, and the DRM & DLC is a necessary evil to prevent the games from being hacked or all becoming console/ipad-only to avoid the swiss-cheese security model of the desktop computer.

So, the reason we are seeing a decline in the amount of single player games, all moving to feemium-MMO style games with DRM and DLC is because this is the only way to make money on a game in a land of piracy and cheating. It's more cost effective than simply charging 80$ for the game, when you can get potentially 1000$ out of a player in a 1 year time period by charging them 25 cents every hour to re-do missions that have been purposely setup to fail.

And that's why I quit playing. After a while you see that the games are not really fun and just frustrating. When you see cow-clicking games people play on facebook and they spend the same kind of money ... for wasting their own time.

It puzzles me how the feemium model has also become the norm for the social gaming model. Everyone wants a bigger e-penis and are willing to spend real money on it.