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.

Ironically, a role-playing game inspired me to write this entry.  I won’t tackle it until Dragon Age is an afterthought, but the reviews suggest the soon-to-be-legendary Mass Effect 2 is akin to “Borderlands, this is how you do a role-playing shooter.”  However, I had an allergic reaction to one review snippet:

Gears of War fans should feel right at home with the cover mechanics and controls. Thankfully, there is still a huge emphasis on tactics and RPG stats – Modern Warfare 3 this is most definitely not.

Four years since Gears of War popularized cover mechanics, and as good as Uncharted 2 worked the flavor, I’m already sick of hiding behind walls.

It’s been a decade since Unreal Tournament and Quake III Arena were the creative heights of twitch shooting.  Since then, developers have gone out of their way to prevent pinball wizards from permeating the new pay-to-play shooter culture of X-Box Live and beyond.

I’ve come to tolerate it.  Twitch shooters didn’t die because they were an inferior format; the business of gaming changed.  My problem?  We’re still hailing and deriding “Doom clones” that embodied nothing Doom and its successors were about.

(more…)

Continuing my quest to never get laid, I spent a Saturday cross-checking GameRankings review scores against VGChartz sales numbers.  As of January 15th, 213 games have sold one-million copies on the three seventh-generation consoles, reception ranging from dreadful to legendary.  Armed with this data, I ask: What can we learn about the seventh generation of video games with this data?

Bad games can be purchased for any console.  Many sell.  But never have so many sold irrespectively of “quality”.  And the majority of this business is taking place on the Nintendo Wii.

Yeah, reviewers have biases.  They enjoy Microsoft’s wallet.  They would have married Grand Theft Auto IV if they were allowed to.  But on a “compiling thousands of reviews for hundreds of games” basis, I’m willing to hear the opinion of those who enjoy the medium for a living.

(more…)

Hooray, more useless data!

A thesis will be on the way.  Data mining is serious business.

Update: The Gears of War category is not “PS3 and PC”.  Fixed to reflect that.

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.

…

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.

I blew a gasket during E3 because Microsoft tried to convince me the X-Box was a revolution in graphics and online play that hadn’t already occurred.  I lamented that the era of PC gaming that built the modern video game industry was in the process of being forgotten.

If you’re looking inward at the PC gaming community, you’d have the perception that I’m a crazy internet nergin who can’t stop living in 1997.  You know, when PC gaming meant something.  This is why I act that way.

The following is our list of the top 10 innovations in console video games that [emphasis mine] revolutionized the industry within the past 10 years.

And the author lists away: Storage capacity that computer game makers have exploited since the advent of the hard drive.  Physics that pushed the limits of the first video cards.  Downloadable content conveniently monopolized by console game developers.  And most importantly: Online, head-to-head competitive play over the internet.

Thank our gaming overlords.  Without the video game console, we may be doing things the personal computer pioneered in the decade before this one.

Know when you were a kid and your cat died?  And mom explained it went to kitty heaven, where the biggest, most awesomest scratching post awaits?  That’s the game industry.  In a world where The Dark Knight wins fans with anti-heroes and morality redefined, Starcraft II won’t have LAN functionality because Battle.net is so amazing, you wouldn’t want to play the game offline!!1

In a world where the average gamer is 29, your overlords treat you like children.  That’s why I waited to judge the Modern Warfare 2 clusterfuck.  Now I can judge.

On November 3rd, Best Buy hosted a question-and-answer developer chat.  It only took a few thousand keystrokes for Infinity Ward to bury a platform and the consumers that made Call of Duty the biggest gaming event of the year.

Modern Warfare 2 would be capped to nine-versus-nine matches, a pleasant surprise for 100-plus-player clans that rely on sixty-four-player dedicated servers.  The InfinityWard.net matchmaking model uses player hosting, presumably granting hosts a significant latency advantage.  The game will not feature a console (programming prompt) because the company “would like you to play the game the way [they] designed and balanced it.”  The ability to lean, once a critical gameplay tactic, won’t be included because “the game is not balanced for lean.”  There will be no ability to record replays, likely cut in favor of the console development cycle.

And that 196,000-signature petition?  According to an Infinity Ward rep, Robert Bowling (the company’s community manager) signed it four times, so who gives a shit what you think?

The people who work for Infinity Ward (or those who tell them what to say) bought their own Kool-Aid.  Modern Warfare was the epic, fuckstaining, Halo-killing, babypunching opus for video game gun fetishists.  They thought PC gamers would throw up their arms and play it anyway.  No lean?  You’ll get used to it.  No server model?  Look at the pretty matchmaking system!  No console?  It’ll be fine.

And then you look at X-Fire’s daily stats, where 2005’s Call of Duty 2 fights it out with 2007’s Modern Warfare while 2008’s World at War barely registers.  (Yes, I am aware Treyarch developed World at War.)  But I guess if Infinity Ward is to abandon the platform that made them famous, we can at least thank you for the previous installments.  Your once-benevolent fan base will play those instead.

Note: Edited for general flow.  Thanks, Littlesaltz.

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.

Subtract some name-dropping (Zork, King’s Quest, Ultima, Time Zone) and I can’t tell you much about computer gaming in the 1980’s.  I’m just sure nothing has changed: A world enamored with Nintendo’s “casual games”, a world that has no respect for those geeks glued to their computer monitor.

Today, that era is an afterthought, a decade of dungeon-crawlers and text-based adventure games supplanted by VGA graphics and the mouse.  Instead, we’ve granted legendary status to the Nintendo Entertainment System.  Gamers did it for a reason: We took the pick-up-and-play, single-player side-scroller and left it for dead.  That crowd has yet to find recourse.  Today’s game is competitive multiplayer, user-created content, and fancy graphics.

That is, what PC games pioneered in the 1990’s. That’s why I’m concerned the era responsible for modern gaming is being forgotten.

Top-end graphics, content creation, online play.  Where’d console developers get that idea?

As early as the 1980’s, Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior were brewed by Japanese developers’ experience with Western computer role-playing games.  During the mid-1990’s, Donkey Kong Country killed the Atari Jaguar by showing how a sixteen-bit console was capable of “computer graphics”.  Soon followed four-player deathmatch that turned Goldeneye into the Nintendo 64’s killer app…and Sony countered with Final Fantasy VII, whose pre-rendered environments and full-motion video were all compiled for use on a compact disc.

From 1992 to 2000, the personal computer witnessed the releases of Command and Conquer, Ultima VII, Star Control II, Myst, Doom, Sim City 2000, X-Com: UFO Defense, Star Wars TIE Fighter, Warcraft II,  Civilization II, Quake, Diablo, Total Annihilation, Fallout, Half-Life, Starcraft, System Shock 2, Counter-Strike, Everquest, Unreal Tournament, Quake III Arena, Baldur’s Gate II, and Deus Ex. I know I’m forgetting a number of games.  Each of those products is the cream of their genre or revolutionized it.  They are responsible for a planet where World of Warcraft, Halo, and Call of Duty appeal to tens of millions of fans.  They are directly responsible for a console war built on the compulsive urge to build the ultimate gaming rig.

And today?  Keyboards are for losers…until you need sixty dollars to buy a keyboard for the Call of Duty RTS.  Microsoft would like to thank the forces in the computer industry that made such a potential scam possible.

I thought this would be obvious to anyone with a brain, but humanity’s ironically orchestrating an information explosion while the species gets dumber.

NOT PURDY ENUFF!!!

The Starcraft community originally criticized the sequel because it lacked “dark and gritty”.  Now that it’s the Secretariat of dead horses, they’ve changed their outlook: The graphics look awesome for a game from 1997.

Why would a company with infinite resources create a game with “dated” graphics?  Because they’re smarter than you.

What’s PC gaming’s major setback?  Getting a game to function on thousands of computer configurations.  Keeping the graphics light makes this much easier.

The United States government is the only entity on the planet without Starcraft-capable computers.  That’s what happens when you use a 2-D engine in 1998, and a decade later, people are buying video cards that can cook dinner.  If your computer gets hiccups while playing Starcraft, it is an incredible achievement that you could load this web site.

That’s a precedent that the sequel needs to affirm.  In the course of Starcraft II’s development history, players have whined about multiple building selection, a deviation from “dark and gritty”, and currently evaluate any Starcraft II gameplay mechanic by comparing it to a unit in the original game. Do you think Blizzard wants to saddle “my machine can’t run it” on a community that hasn’t heard such a thing in years?  Blizzard wants to make Starcraft II the e-sport of the Western World, and they don’t want hardware issues getting in the way of that.

Not to mention the millions of World of Warcraft players that will make this the second computer game they have ever bought.  Blizzard doesn’t need thousands of morons invading their help line asking why their integrated graphics can’t handle the game.  Not everybody is savvy enough to build the nuclear-powered machine required for Crysis.  When Blizzard unleashes Starcraft II on a gamer base that can barely craft a readable MySpace, you’ll understand.