The Dark Side of Digital Distribution

An anonymous reader writes "Game journalist Stuart Campbell has written an incisive piece on how the digital distribution model users have grown to know and love over the past several years still has some major problems that go beyond even the DRM dilemma. He provides an example of an app developer using very shady update techniques to screw over people who have legitimately purchased their app. Touch Racing Nitro, a retro racing game, launched to moderate success. After tinkering with price points to get the game to show up on the top download charts, the developers finally made it free for a period of four months. 'Then the sting came along. About a week ago (at time of writing), the game received an "update," which came with just four words of description – "Now Touch Racing Free!" As the game was already free, users could have been forgiven for thinking this wasn't much of a change. But in fact, the app thousands of them had paid up to £5 for had effectively just been stolen. Two of the game's three racing modes were now locked away behind IAP paywalls, and the entire game was disfigured with ruinous in-game advertising, which required yet another payment to remove.'"

Comments

Beyond the DRM dilemma

[Anonymous Coward]

So what s the DRM dilemma? Whether to just not buy DRM products or whether to burn down the houses of those who make them?

Re:Beyond the DRM dilemma

[causality]

which the best possible means of making displeasure known is the age-old Voting With Your Feet (or dollars) by walking away from anyone practicing such things. I'm a slow adopter on quite a few things, largely because of my elevating level of disappointment with the way people are deciding is appropriate for doing business - by wrecking something you have already paid for and are using.

You're right about "age-old". In fact I'm wondering what the news is here. That digital distribution is not abuse-proof or fraud-proof just like brick-and-mortar sales? That there are dishonest people with exploitative business practices? This has been going on in one form or another ever since the origin of barter and the later invention of currency.

How is this not another "... with a computer!" story?

The solution to this is to make such people notorious, so that potential customers think twice before doing business with them, same as any business that causes legitimate grievances and dissatisfied customers. Make them more famous for their terrible business practices than for any software they have created. Let them be the ones who fail while honest people with good business practices thrive. That's how you create an environment hostile to this sort of thing and select against it. It's just an iteration of that old saying, "fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me."

Re:Beyond the DRM dilemma

[petermgreen]

In the old days if an upgrade removed functionality it was annoying but you could always reinstall from your original media and not install the updates (or install an older update since in the old days most devs made standalone update installers available) but with online activation and/or digital distribution systems that may no longer be an option.

Re:Beyond the DRM dilemma

[Maxo-Texas]

Here is how it is different.

I sell you a book, car, TV, shirt, power drill. You pay a fair price for it.

Then with an update, I remove your book from your reader, limit your car to driving 30mph, your TV to only working with bluray content so you can't use your DVD's any more, remove the pocket from your shirt, and limit your power drill to using phillips head bits so you have to buy a nother drill for star, hex, and flat head bits.

You can't do those things. But with digitial updates, not only can you do it, it is happening already.

Re:Beyond the DRM dilemma

[Anonymous Coward]

Aaaannnnd welcome to the licensing model, which allows for legal theft.

Everything you mentioned above is an actual product, not a license to use the product....which nobody in their right mind would buy if they had a real alternative.

The problem is all of our new devices are being treated as if they are still ideas that need licensing, as if they never made it though a production line(ereaders, cell phones, etc), and somehow are different from any other tool you can buy. I realize they are more complicated tools, but tools nonetheless.

This isn't a problem with digital distribution, this is a problem with a lack of integrity, and a willingness to force others to suffer your bad ideas for your own profit. In any REAL free market, this shit would never fly. But we live in America, where an actual free market is as elusive as the Dodo.

It's a sad day for justice and equality when a guy who steals a small ticket item will see jail time, meanwhile these asshats who steal en masse will go without so much as a visit to the local police station.

Re:Beyond the DRM dilemma

[TheCRAIGGERS]

The solution to this is to make such people notorious, so that potential customers think twice before doing business with them, same as any business that causes legitimate grievances and dissatisfied customers.

In the non-digital world, this is a feasible approach. Opening a store and stocking merchandise are both expensive acts- a shopkeeper can't keep reopening his or her store repeatedly. Changing your name or moving doesn't help with this.

In the digital world, this is far harder. You have no stock. You have no manufacturing costs. Changing your name / the location of your store is a trivial matter ranging from completely free to taking back a few loads of bottles for deposit and buying a new dev license.

Re:Beyond the DRM dilemma

[Solandri]

I just revert to the old version of the app from the backup TitaniumBackup made. Then I unlink it from the market so it's never updated again.

Remember folks, Fair Use includes being able to make backups of software you buy. Exercise that right. The only time a company should be able to pull a bait and switch like this is if they're selling you a service for an annual or monthly fee. And there you can simply stop subscribing (in the case of cell phone contracts, you can quit before your contract is up without penalty).

I also run firewalls (DroidWall or LBE Privacy Guard) which let me turn off an app's network access. If the free version of a single-player game requires network access to run, that's a big red flag that I don't want to buy the pay version.

Re:Beyond the DRM dilemma

[Surt]

Voting with your dollars doesn't communicate WHY you made the decision not to buy, just that you made the decision. Burning their houses down and explaining why you did it on the news and in court makes that clear.

that's the magic of auto updates

[alen]

come to the cloud, updates are free, automatic and easy

Well...

[MightyMartian]

I guess there might be a case for misrepresentation, though I'll wager the licensing agreement allows the company to do whatever they like.

The real solution here is, of course, not to pay these guys. Don't play their stupid game. If their stunt loses them customers, they're not likely to try it again.

Re:Well...

[PIBM]

I don't understand how they've been able to pull something like this. On a free game on iOS we added some stuff which required us to block some content of one of the levels for old ipods, as they didn't had the required power to play it. We were denied the update as apple said that nothing could be taken away from the users in an update (!), and we had to build 2 different code path & levels so that both could exists together. In a free game... I would expect them to prevent such a thing even more on a paid game!

Reminds me of an old scam

[ackthpt]

There was something on Slashdot a few years ago about people buying a service, then having to pay more to disable advertising.

I'd dump them without a second through. Cut your losses and move one.

I'd probably warn others as well as prospective future clients, by going to /. and other sites and writing about the craptivation of the game.

Re:Reminds me of an old scam

[TheRaven64]

The trick is to do it gradually. You don't make people pay to remove advertising immediately. You give them a useful product, then a bit later you introduce a small, easy to ignore, amount of advertising. Then you give them the option of paying to turn it off. It's easy to ignore, so most people won't bother. You also add some new (minor, easy-to-implement) features or, better yet, a security fix, at the same time, so people will want to get the update. Then you increase the number of ads. Now people are locked into your app or, at the very least, used to using it. Now they'll pay to remove the ads. Repeat and you've got a revenue stream.

This is a small variation of the business model of a lot of proprietary software where you pay for 'major updates' which include features like 'not crashing on launch when you run it on the new version of the OS' or 'not corrupting your documents'.

I've come across this behaviour so many times that I now have a standard reaction: find the open source program that's closest to the proprietary one and give them a donation equal to the cost of the upgrade. The problem is that other people are willing to continue to pay companies that have screwed them over in the past.

Users respond with poor ratings

[MetalliQaZ]

In response to the underhanded update, users take to the ratings system with a vengeance and downmod the developer into oblivion. Thus, the app ecosystem sees shady behavior as 'damage' and 'routes' around it.

Re:Users respond with poor ratings

[TheSpoom]

Poor ratings do not help those who have already paid for the shadily-updated app.

Re:Users respond with poor ratings

[forkfail]

And then the company rebrands, rinses and repeats with the next app.

iOS store price points were too low

[alen]

i noticed it a while ago that the price points were way to low to be sustainable. Not only were they low, but users expected unlimited updates for their $.99 game. and not just bug fixes, but new functionality. it worked for a while as the iOS installed base exploded but as growth slows down expect the return to version numbers.

it already started with "HD" versions of games and apps. separate iphone and ipad versions. sure you can run the iphone version on the ipad but it looks like crap.

next is the return to version numbers

cool racing game
next year is version 2 with new features and new IAP
and a new version every year and dropping compatibility with new iOS versions after a year or so

Re:iOS store price points were too low

[Have Blue]

That's not at all what happened. At the time the iPad was released, iPhone screens were all 480x320. The 960x640 phone came later (and, in the usual Apple fashion, not revealed to developers until that time).

Also, the store supports and encourages "universal" apps- a single purchase/single binary that works natively on both devices, and has done so since the iPad launched.

Similar things have happened before...

[Cinder6]

A couple years back (or maybe just a year), an "update" came out for WipEout HD on the PS3. The game cost $15 to buy, but the update added video advertisements to the loading screens of each race. Aside from being annoying, they drastically increased load times in order to force you to actually watch the ad. While not as bad as actually crippling the game as in this case, that event really soured me to the concept of digital distribution.

Really, the only company I trust with digital distribution these days is GOG, who don't use DRM in any of their games. Yeah, they pulled that weird "shutdown" stunt a while back, but to my mind it only proved their value--nobody was unable to play their games during the outage (except for those few people who hadn't gotten around to downloading them yet).

Re:Similar things have happened before...

[amoeba1911]

Sharing without the copyright holder's consent has existed and will exist regardless of DRM. Humans are social creatures, we like to share stuff. We've had 100 thousand years of sharing knowledge through spoken language and thousands of years of sharing knowledge through written language. Our impressive ability to share is what differentiates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. Sharing of knowledge and ideas is an indispensable component of the human success story. The whole idea of "must not share" goes against the very foundation of human nature and is an insult to the roots of our civilization.

Re:Similar things have happened before...

[Shagg]

Piracy is the reason DRM exists.

You'd have to be pretty foolish to actually believe that. Piracy is the red herring that provides the excuse for them to force DRM on legitimate consumers, but preventing piracy is not what DRM exists for. It's not even very useful for preventing it.

Re:sony all over again..

[poena.dare]

On December 8, 2011, U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg dismissed the last remaining count of the class action lawsuit, stating: "As a legal matter, [..] plaintiffs have failed to allege facts or articulate a theory on which Sony may be held liable." He then removed massive amounts of wax from his ears after the trial.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OtherOS

Once again, I am in the wrong damn business.

Re:Or how about Android Marketplace?

[Kenja]

Explain how you not agreeing to the terms of use for a service disables said service is evil. If you dont plan on using the features of the marketplace, why do you care if its disabled? What exactly is it stopping you from doing? Your phones OS updates dont come from there, only apps and add updates. And since its Android, you can just install apps from the APK files and totally ignore the app store.

So how is it that your "paid-for phone is now becoming less and less useful"?

No Refund Terms of Sale

[dietdew7]

It's in the terms of sale from the article that Itunes has a no refund policy. It's also true for Barnes and Noble. I've been reluctant to purchase any apps and now that seems wise whereas before I was just being cheap.

Why update?

[jimmyswimmy]

This is one reason why I rarely update anything on my Android tablet. I have a number of kids' games on there which never had many privileges when I installed them, so there's little security worry (plus it's only connected to my WLAN). What could "Draw by Numbers" possibly need to update to work better? The only "upgrade" I expect is them to remove pictures. My 3 year old is thrilled with the 10 or 20 different things she can draw on there, and that probably is limiting sales.

I only upgrade OS items now and disable the automatic upgrade checking for everything else. I'm sure I'll hear about why that's bad here. I think years of free and truly beneficial MS updates have confused a lot of us into thinking that an upgrade actually means what the word is defined to mean. Much like "gender" replaced "sex" I think the true meaning of the word "upgrade" is being replaced by something. Something not good.

Where's the Update : Never setting?

[RealGene]

From the latest version of PocketCloud Remote Free (RDP/VNC client for iPxxx):

What's New in Version 2.2.134

We noticed we had mistakenly enabled multiple computer support on a previous release.
This free version of PocketCloud has always been limited to 1 computer as documented on the app description.
We apologize for the inconvenience and ask for your understanding.
We are discounting PocketCloud Pro 40% to ease the migration for our power users who need to access multiple computers.

This isn't a technical issue

[davidwr]

This is not a technical issue. This is an issue of unfair trade practices.

Re:Or how about Android Marketplace?

[St.Creed]

Open Source my ass.

You sure about that? :)