Battlefield fans: Your phony marriage with Electronic Arts is getting more interesting every day.  Two weeks after the release of Battlefield: Bad Company 2, the company severed SecuROM from any purchase made through Steam.

STEAM
Change: The STEAM version of Battlefield Bad Company 2 will no longer have SecuROM on the exe file. Instead it will use [sic] Valves own DRM instead.

Naturally, the makers of Spore are getting praise for a change of heart.  You know, proof Battlefield totally owns Call of Duty, a series that was lax on digital rights managament.

Noticing a trend?  Crippling DRM is announced for an upcoming game.  An outcry ensues.  The company charges headlong anyway.  Weeks after the game’s release, “Please Submit a Blood Sample to Continue Playing” is removed.  And people cheer a “victory”.

I hope you don’t believe this isn’t deliberate.

Digital distribution is granting computer games a longer sales life.  In the world of boxed retail, even the great ones eventually cede shelf room to Nancy Drew’s Pro Teen Detective 2010.  And despite the shift in consumer purchasing habits, it remains that your game development overlords are paranoid.

In a cubicle at Ubisoft or Electronic Arts or Activision, somebody hired for their Master’s in Business Administration degree (as opposed to their brain) has discovered the financial success of an upcoming game may determine whether they have a job in six months.  By fiddling through colorful graphs, this person has determined software piracy during the fourteen-day post-release period is the most monstrous and insidious communist plot we have ever had to face.  And because of this, both the company and various employees are prepared to risk their morality to stymie teh piratez…until that fourteen days is up.

Nobody wants to be the guy that makes the next Psychonauts.  And piracy is too easy to blame for that.  Nobody wants to be the guy that let years of hard work ‘fall victim to new-age tape trading’.  So even if a game like Assassin’s Creed 2 can have its “stay connected or we kill you” approach cracked on the first day, Ubisoft reps can play with each other’s cocks and say “Well, we tried our best and failed miserably.”

Know how the employees of Infinity Ward will instantly regain their babyface status when they deatch themselves from Activision?  Right now, removing DRM isn’t seen as a company calling off the dogs.  It’s seen as a company “coming to its senses”.  So there’s an incredible backlash against DRM.  There just isn’t any backlash to the play right after.

Enjoy your patch.  Developers and publishers really do care about you.  Honest.

Yup.  IWNet, that direct port of X-Box Live to the PC, sure stopped software piracy.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 broke records this year as the biggest ever entertainment launch in history. With 4.7 million units sold in the US and UK during the first 24 hours, it pulled in revenues totaling $310 million.

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With 4.1 million unauthorized downloads of the PC version alone, the game more than doubles the achievement of last year’s ‘winner‘ Spore. Modern Warfare 2 leads both the PC and Xbox 360 lists, by a landslide.

IGN’s response to the news?

Provided these numbers are indeed accurate, Activision has potentially lost more than $245 million in sales on the PC version alone.

We all know this is a line of bullshit.  “Every download is a lost sale, costing the industry 874 kajillion dollars”, blah blah.  Game publishers would love for societies to agree with this logic.  So I have a question I’d like to put forward.  Let’s tout some erroneous methodology and treat every download as though it was a lost sale.

On November 11th, VGChartz dropped jaws by estimating seven million copies of Modern Warfare 2 were sold in the twenty-four hours after its release.  The site also estimated twelve percent of these sales were on the personal computer.  (Despite the NPD’s recent tally, 840,000 units on day one sounds plausible.  “[N]early 170,000 units at retail for Windows PC [in the United States for November]” is consistent with both the popularity of digital distribution and regional sales breakdowns.

So let’s look at the six-week sales total:  To date, the Playstation 3 and X-Box 360 versions of Modern Warfare 2 have combined for 13.11 million units sold.  If PC sales still represent twelve percent of the total, then Modern Warfare 2 has sold 1.79 million units on the personal computer.

Now, assume TorrentFreak’s piracy numbers are accurate.  The Playstation 3 lived another year without a marriage to illicit downloads.  Meanwhile, Modern Warfare 2 was downloaded 4.1 million times for the PC and 910,000 times for the X-Box 360 version.  So I dare ask: Treating these downloads as “people who would have bought the game if it wasn’t for those meddling pirate Swedes”, how does the size of our user bases pan out?

So by the definition and economic ramifications of piracy as propagated by anti-piracy groups, please explain to me how the personal computer is a niche genre with a small userbase.

Happy New Year.

You know what happened.

Modern Warfare 2 PC now has dedicated servers.

Wait, PC gamers! Before you send Bobby Kotick a thank you letter, know that it wasn’t they who did it, but rather the gamers who took Infinity Ward and Activition’s attempts to lock down the game as a challenge. And bring it those gamers did, managing to hack in the developer console and enable the ability to set up dedicated servers. Keep in mind, the game hasn’t even been out a week.

Remember the Hot Coffee fiasco?  How Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas drew national attention because of a minigame detailing the most boring sex since you and your mom last night? That wasn’t intended for consumer eyes.  In computer programming, bringing the guillotine to a large swath of code is more trouble than it’s worth.  It’s simply easier to disable the code, making it impossible to access it through in-game means.  Access to Hot Coffee was carved through the power of modmaking.  Millions of dollars in lawsuits later, Take Two should have learned from Electronic Arts’ old motto: If it’s in the game, it’s in the game.

As I understand it, Modern Warfare 2 uses a modified version of the Call of duty 4 engine, which was built on the Call of Duty 2 engine.  While the former was in development, an Activision higher-up decided that dedicated servers are the gateway drug to software piracy.  The problem?  The elimination of dedicated server code would delay the biggest entertainment launch of all time!!1

I thought IWNet was a replacement for dedicated servers and not a band-aid.  I made this assumption by following the Starcraft II development cycle.  When that game becomes property of ThePirateBay, it will be “difficult to pirate” because its multiplayer components will require Battle.net verification.  Instead, Infinity Ward and Activision commandeered the U.S.S. Half-Assed.  Their first voyage?  Disable the dedicated server code and sue anybody who touches it.  They struck an iceberg and were never heard from again.

Edit: Thanks to Kirym and Grmnasasin for the heads up on the age of the Call of Duty engine.

The PC iteration of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 will not feature support for dedicated servers.

In a webcast [Saturday], Robert Bowling revealed the existence of IWNet, a matchmaking service Infinity Ward will operate beginning with Modern Warfare 2. But it ends dedicated servers, and fundamentally changes the culture of the game’s PC community.

Bowling, the Infinity Ward community manager, said IWNet makes multiplayer more accessible to the PC community on Modern Warfare 2, replacing the need for dedicated servers that are hosted and managed by players. But the hardcore PC crowd to whom he was talking, on BASHandSlash.com’s webcast, did not take the news in a completely positive light.

…

Here’s the score: by building up its own matchmaking service riding shotgun with Steam, “you can get in and play with players your same rank,” Bowling said. However, “You’re completely reliant on IWNet and there is no dedicated server or server list. You rely on IW Net for matchmaking and your games, but you still have your private matches.”

I dismissed Starcraft II’s lack of a true LAN component.  Long ago, CD-Keys established a doctrine of “one copy per computer” (hence why I’m opposed to the decision of “one username per account”).  I scoffed at the Left 4 Dead 2 Boycott, a community rejecting the sequel to a game they thoroughly enjoyed.  This is not one of those situations.

Game developers want to kill retailers.  They want a society that accepts digital distribution as the standard.  Following this, they will attempt to kill the video game console.  OnLive represents the endgame for this industry.  They do not want video games to be a manufactured good.  They want them to be a service.

Beyond the latency issues that plague first-person shooter matchmaking, beyond the fatal blow to the competitive gaming community, beyond the restrictions on modmaking that creates an artificial market for “premium content” and its developer-held monopoly, the elimination of dedicated servers is a step towards “service”.

Similar situations have proven roadblocks, torn asunder by protest piracy.  The reality is that Infinity Ward is backed by Activision.  They undoubtedly had a say in this decision.  That is, a company powerful enough, headed by a big enough asshole, to risk setting precedent that would create their vision for video gaming.

Why not?  As vocal as computer games have proven, their money is competing against the console gaming juggernaut.  And in the eyes of that console gaming community, computer gamers are the boy that cried wolf.  They cried about SecuROM.  They cried about StarForce.  They cried about Spore.  They cried about Left 4 Dead.  They cried about Starcraft II.  In the eyes of the console gaming community, we’re just a bunch of nerds and we need to stop whining.

In the meantime, make some popcorn. Three weeks until the release of Modern Warfare 2, and this is only the beginning of a battle that may prove one of the most important moments in video game history.

I couldn’t tolerate a world where digital distribution is the norm.  I made that decision when OnLive claimed I had nothing to fear.  In the battle over copyrights and software piracy, that’s my “breaking point”.

So thanks, Sony.  You just released the PSP Go.  It’s the first major gaming device built on digital distribution.  And so far, you’ve done everything to ensure it will be the biggest failure of a portable device since the Virtual Boy.

In a world where new technology tends to give you more for your money, you’ve taken a bold step backwards.  Compared to its direct predecessor, the PSP Go is more expensive, offers less functionality, is a hassle to set up, and managed to piss off the retailers who depend on software sales to bolster their bottom line.

There are internal issues at Sony we don’t know about.  In a world where the company no longer controls seventy percent of the console market, they spent 2008 hemorrhaging cash on all fronts.  To compensate, the company has become enamored with two words: Profit margin.

Yeah, many companies are obsessed with it.  But when I use my 360 to cook Jiffy-Pop, Microsoft does its damnedest to pretend the console is functioning properly.  When Sony speaks, I hear the ghosts of 2004, a company that still believes it’s the undisputed standard.

In this case, I see a 170-dollar PSP-3000 that is a better product than the 250-dollar follow-up.  I see a device built on the sole function of increasing profit margin with every PSP sold.  I see a device that increases software profit margin through digital downloads.  I see a device that requires a Sony-exclusive cable format and replaces the USB standard.  But according to Sony Director of Hardware Marketing John Keller, I’m just not educated.

We certainly view physical goods as very important and will remain so, but we’ve seen the growth for digital — particularly for a consumer who values ease of use and not having to go to retail and being able to download their content at home.

…

It’s really education, I don’t know how many times after E3 that I saw on blogs, “Well, I love the [PSP]go, it looks nice and portable, but where do I put my disc?” That just kind of rubs me up the wall [laughs], and I go, “This is an all-digital device, and it’s centered around digital.”

Haha, yeah, what a stupid question, asking how to play the games I already purchased for my device!  Good thing you have no recourse for that one!

Look, John: If people were “educated”, they would be discussing the potential pratfalls in a society where companies are building copyright law directly into software, something the PSP Go is trying to legitimize.  Not whether physical media inconveniences an on-the-go, nine-to-five, buzz-word society.

Fortunately, people are educated enough to see that Sony took a crap in the consumer market.  Just no word on whether the smell is going away.

In this decade, the figurehead for game development has become Bobby Kotick.  He is a visionary who admits his interest in video games is limited to making money off of them.  In a struggle to appease shareholders and weather a bad economy, Activision has become the standard-bearer for “nickel-and-dime” consumer exploitation.  To counter this prevailing issue, consumers are turning to software piracy as a method of protest.  Ask Electronic Arts how that worked out.  We went into Spore’s release cycle talking about the computer gaming event of 2008 and ended up with the poster child for the horrors of DRM.

However, I digress on software piracy as a protest.  If a video game company crosses the line, why do you vow to pirate the game? Why aren’t you boycotting it?

Last year, Budweiser was purchased by Belgian brewer InBev.  Amongst Americans who never had an intelligent thought in their lives, this caused an uproar.  After all, MAH BUR IS AMERICAN BRUH.  Until our boys storm Normandy and bring Budweiser back home, they’re never buying that beer again.

That’s a boycott.  A stupid one, but a boycott.  It represents that you have an ethical qualm with a good or service.  It indicates that these issues are so severe that they conflict with your ability to consume or use the product.  Until these problems are addressed, you will not use this good or service.

Software piracy is the guy who swears off Budweiser but still drinks it when his friends buy it for him.  He’s making a statement, but hey, the beer is still good!  It’s just not his money going towards that diabolical Euro-socialism brewhop!

Four months ago, I wrote an article stating my concern that companies would use global piracy rates to reflect on Western piracy.  Same deal applies to using software piracy as a protest.  When you pirate a game because a company is removing a feature once considered essential, or adding a function that hinders your enjoyment of the product, your voice is being lumped in with every other person who pirates a video game.  That is, a group of people whose reasons for piracy vary wildly from your own. If you were that concerned with making a statement, you would make every conceivable effort to ensure your message is not associated with a general culture of piracy, and the first step in doing that would be to not pirate the game.

The death of Nintendo’s market share during the 90s owes credit to the cartridge format. Despite a massive advantage in storage capacity, Playstation and Saturn loading times proved awful enough to be a substantial negative for CD-based consoles.  Nintendo was happy to point this out, as cited in a November ‘95 edition of European Stars and Stripes:

Unlike other recent game machines, Nintendo’s new model will use plug-in type game cassettes rather than CD-ROMs.  Nintendo said it decided against CD-ROMs, despite their higher storage capacity, because of the longer time it takes them to access data.

Oh, it’s true.  The short loading times were a huge sell.  But now, we know Nintendo stuck with cartridges in order to stymie piracy.  They were terrified of it.  It’s not difficult to understand why.  PC software developers were screaming bloody murder since there was a market for home software.

But primarily, this was an anti-piracy tactic to fight “emerging markets”.  American tweens growing up on the Super Nintendo were oblivious to the concept of piracy.  When I installed PC games on my friend’s computer, I didn’t think of it as piracy.  For all I was concerned, I was letting him borrow the game.

So in 1998, the advantages of the cartridge would be lauded by Nintendo fanboys, a trump card in blasting those “dumb enough” to own a Playstation.  Raise your hand if you think 2009’s hardcore gamer would buy Nintendo’s line of bullshit.

Know what we’d say?  “My games are going to be tagged with the cost of manufacturing cartridges because you’re worried about piracy?  I already pay fifty-to-sixty dollars a game.  Because you want to protect your profits, you’re going to kick me in the balls?  Fuck you, Nintendo.”  Give or take a couple of swears, that would be the story.

I wanted to bring this up on Monday, but I couldn’t find room for it.

Every month since April of ‘72, the Battle.net forums are struck by a variation of this complaint:

Dear Blizzard,

I recently learned that you are planning to [bullshit nitpick].  In your early days, you made awesome games.  When I was nine years old, I played [favorite Blizzard title] with all my friends.  Unfortunately, your company sucks now.  You sold out after making [favorite Blizzard title].  [Latest Blizzard title] was the worst game you’ve ever released.  As a result, I will only buy [number from one to ten] copies of [upcoming Blizzard game] to prove I do not care about your products anymore.

Sincerely,

[Shitty name lifted from popular Japanese cartoon]

Let’s go ahead.  Let’s assume Blizzard Entertainment built their empire on “service and a smile”.  Let’s assume their customer support has evaporated since 1998.  (While we do this, disregard the dozens of Warcraft III patches the company had no obligation to release.)  Want to know why Blizzard gave you “service and a smile”?  Because it made a lot of money!

Warcraft II and Starcraft allowed players to “spawn” copies of the game.  With one copy of Starcraft, a player could spearhead four-man multiplayer.  Why would Blizzard do this?  In order to play on Battle.net, those kids would need to buy the full version.  Blizzard wasn’t shooting goodwill flowers out of their ass, they didn’t think it made the game any more fun, they were doing it because it was a good financial decision.  The company hadn’t lit the world on fire yet.  Therefore, a spawn mode was free advertising for these games.

With help from their last six products (Warcraft II, Diablo, Starcraft, Diablo II, Warcraft III, World of Warcraft), Blizzard Entertainment is now a publicly-traded company that employs 2,700 workers.  And you’re surprised they no longer have the demeanor of a mom-and-pop programming mill?

Blizzard now relies solely on the Pixar effect, a.k.a. the expectation of quality.  The company’s higher-ups have made the assumption that if one cannot obtain the game through illegal means, they will buy it.  As a result, they are designing a system intended to funnel all multiplayer through Battle.net.  In the gaming economy of 2009, this is a good financial decision for Blizzard Entertainment.

If you want to contest whether a lack of true LAN is better for the product, whatever. I’m just tired of people pretending that if 1998 Blizzard had 2009’s Blizzard’s resources, they would have released Starcraft for free.  “Good public relations” was not the offspring of a small development company that was compiling code for the love of the game.  They were (and still are) trying to make money.

That rumbling noise you heard this morning?  That was Blizzard.  They broke the internet.

Rob Pardo, senior VP of game design at Blizzard Entertainment confirmed in an interview with IncGamers that the StarCraft II development team “don’t have any plans to support LAN,” and clarified saying “we will not support it.” The only multiplayer available will be on Battle.net.

Has this company ever heard of “damage control”?  The majority of human beings are fucking idiots.  Not surprisingly, a heavy portion of gamers are fucking idiots.  Right now, they’re flipping cars and breaking glass on the mean streets of the internet.  Where I say “Slow down, we don’t have all the information”, others go into rage mode.  Read the fine print, people:

IncGamers also got a clarification from Blizzard, shortly after the interview, saying the choice of excluding a LAN feature “is because of the planned technology to be incorporated into Battle.net,” a topic they will reveal more about at a later date.

Eliminating the ability to play Starcraft II through a Local Area Network does not mean you won’t be able to play the game through an equivalent.  You can’t cut through a Battle Report or Q&A Batch or Dustin’s Terrible Terrible Blogspot without having it drenched in e-sport.  Blizzard didn’t build the game for competition, for television, simply to decide we can’t fight it out latency free.  This is the sequel to gaming’s biggest spectator sport.

What we can say is that you will have to hook into the internet to play the game.  This is a piracy thing, and the Steam approach appears to be the compromise being offered by developers.  Ten years ago, a CD-Key was good enough.  Today, Blizzard does not want to get snakebit by another case of Garena, where hundreds of thousands play Defense of the Ancients with illegal copies of Warcraft III.  My guess is that Battle.net 2.0 will emulate Steam’s product.  Players looking to LAN will log into Battle.net to verify the game’s legitimacy, and then proceed to play on an emulated equivalent.

Yes, people will pirate it.  But the Steam approach doesn’t lie in flawless security; it’s designed to make piracy a bitch.  Steam works on three fronts: Cracking the game, cracking Steam, and actually finding other illegitimate users to play against.  It’s simply more trouble than it’s worth.  So while Hacker Ron may get the game working, 14-year-old Johnny will give up and beg his mom to buy it.  If it stops casual consumers from pirating the product, then Steam and Battle.net 2.0 are doing their job.

Until we find out what the “planned technology” actually is, there’s no point in speculating any further.

Before I begin this tale of illegal software, this is my stance on piracy: I would be a hypocrite to say piracy is wrong and that it should never be done under any circumstances.  My point of contention is the Don Quioxtes who view The Pirate Bay as a noble endeavor.  If the tone was “I won’t pay for the game because I’m a jackass”, or “I can’t afford it”, whatever.  Instead, it’s “Starcraft II may not be playable on LAN?  That’s the final straw.  Fuck the greedy corporations.  They won’t get my sale.”  If Blizzard didn’t run the best gaming service on the planet, and you didn’t have to leave your e-friends behind, you wouldn’t pay for the game, anyway.

Credit to Kotaku for a good article.  Gaming’s transition to Hollywood budgets haven’t stopped indie developers from trying, but piracy has proven a threat to their ambitions.

Nearly 24 hours after it went out in mid-April, John Warner checked on the numbers for Raycatcher – a game he and a partner designed and distributed over Steam. The first day, it sold 1,000 copies for $5. But pirates had also made 35,000 copies for free.

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“I think people are voting – they’re just not interested in paying for games any more,” Warner said. “The DRM is getting cumbersome, and everyone hates it. I think we’re at a point where indies have to consider a new revenue model. Because it takes a long time to make a game.”

Put 35-to-1 in perspective with Cevat Yerli, who was laughed at for suggesting Crysis was pirated 20-to-1.  Remember when Stardock CEO Brad Wardell publicized his commitment to DRM-free games?  When Demigod was released last month, critics slammed its online issues.  Wardell (pictured top-right, attempting to crush piracy) explained the problem was 102,000 assholes thick:

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