Raving Rant: Call to Arms - Editorials

In what the kids might call "keeping it real", Axel uses the word "countenanced" among so many other fine words in an effort to open your eyes on what he feels is complete "bullshit" about this new aspect of the video game economy.

And watch for an upcoming Counter-Point from Aaron in the coming days.

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Raving Rant: Call to Arms

Not long ago, Electronic Arts decided that it would be a mind-blowing spectacular idea to perpetuate and expand upon the experimental notion they had first tried out with Mass Effect 2 and their “Cerberus Network” code cards, and with Dragon Age: Origins and the “Stone Prisoner” DLC they had packaged in with it. Henceforth, they declared, anybody who buys a used copy of an EA game will have to pay $10 US in order to access the multiplayer components of their games. With absolutely indecent haste, Ubisoft chimed in that they would be following suit. Shortly before its release, THQ announced they would be doing the same thing starting with UFC Undisputed 2010, though they only plan to charge $5 US.

My friends and neighbors, physical and virtual, gamers all: this cannot be tolerated. This cannot be supported. This cannot be countenanced. This is some serious bullshit and it has got to stop now before it gets out of control.

If one looks purely at the raw numbers, the dollars and cents, then the idea certainly seems like it should make money for the publishers. After all, if the same copy of the game gets bought new once, EA makes the full amount of money, just like it would on any other sale. If it gets bought three or four times used, that's $30 or $40 bucks going straight into EA's pockets. Best of all, it doesn't appear to directly compete with GameStop and other secondary market retailers because they're still getting the money for the game while the publishers are raking in their

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$10 a pop. What's the problem here? Simple. If there is any lesson to be learned from the current financial climate, it's that no situation can ever be analyzed strictly by numbers. The numbers are ultimately based upon an assumption. Assumptions are the mother of all fuckups. If you don't believe me, talk to some of the folks at Bear Stearns,

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Goldman Sachs, Countrywide, JP Morgan Chase, Merrill Lynch, and Bank of America. Of course, there are some raw numbers that publishers aren't taking into account. Consumers have to lay out the $60 for the new game, plus anywhere from $30 to $70 monthly for broadband access, plus $50 a year for Xbox Live Gold accounts, plus at least a noticeable percentage of the electricity bill every month to run the TV and console. Some will doubtlessly argue that if we're paying all that money already, $10 is chump change. I submit that whether it's chump change or not, it's the straw that broke the camel's back. It's a gratuitous insult and a graceless money grab for a product that we might not even like once we actually play it for more than a day.

The first problem I have with this little scheme is that there doesn't appear to have been any effort on the part of EA or any other publisher to look within themselves in order to reduce costs. We haven't heard any news of salary cuts, large amounts of layoffs, or any other sort of cost cutting measures. Nope, John Riccitiello decided to pillage the wallets of his customers right off the bat. Following Jack Thompson's fall from grace, I would have found it hard to believe there was a lunatic of equal or greater derangement out there in the world, but from what I've been able to determine, Riccitiello fits the bill pretty substantially. Worse, he's in charge of a publisher, which supposedly means he's on the side of gamers and gaming. The man has gone on record as stating that he wants to generate revenue in the secondary market as well as the “piracy market.” That sounds an awful lot like equating the secondary market with piracy, which is completely mindboggling in its scope of gross stupidity. The secondary market is not, nor has it ever been, a market for publishers of any form of media. By definition, the secondary market is not a place where publishers or manufacturers operate. If they did, it would be the primary market. Moreover, the ability for people to personally sell off goods in a fashion of their choice is one of the key principles of capitalism. In contrast, software publishers have been attempting to subvert or deny the secondary market for decades with their increasingly obnoxious EULAs and DRM schemes. This latest move cannot be seen as anything other than a brazen attempt to destroy the secondary market entirely. It'd be almost laughable if Riccitiello wasn't so adamant about making it happen. The idiocy of this move is that when gamers go to trade in two or three used games to help fund the purchase of a new title, they may find that they can't afford it because their trade-ins are fundamentally devalued. If they need two or three titles to get half off now, they might have to bring in six or eight titles to get a similar discount in the near future because GameStop and other secondary market retailers will have a glut of used games that they can't move because their customers are flooding them with merchandise. Even the most well-meaning retailer will eventually be forced to stop accepting trade-ins as their stock of used games reaches unmanageable levels. EA thinks they'll be helping themselves against the secondary market, but they might well be cutting their own throats in the primary market in the process.

The second problem I find with this idea is the assumption that we as gamers are somehow stealing from publishers by playing multiplayer with a used copy of a game as opposed to a new copy. Let us say for the sake of argument that an EA title comes out with an EA supported multiplayer server. Alice and Bob both buy a new copy of the game, so there are now two people using the multiplayer component of the game on EA's server. Bob doesn't like the game, so he sells his copy to GameStop. Charlie comes in and buys Bob's copy of the game. Alice and Charlie still like the game, and there are still only two people playing on EA's server. There's not any extra load being placed on the server. The only difference is that Charlie's money for the used copy of the game went to GameStop and not EA. What's particularly insulting is that EA acts like it's a crushing burden to operate the multiplayer servers when the actual construction and maintenance costs of those servers have to have been figured into their operating budgets for at least the few years that they'll be up, either in EA's overall budget or in the original production budget for the game. They complain it's too much of a cost in one breath, then extol the virtues of multiplayer with the next. It's nothing short of nickel-and-dime extortion of their customers.

Adding further insult to the matter is that there are three very simple solutions to the problem which no publisher will ever seriously consider because none of them would seem to make any money, though two of them wouldn't outright alienate their customer base either. The first and most simple solution is to stop making games with any sort of online multiplayer component. Local multiplayer, fine, but any sort of online multiplayer wouldn't be added into the game. This would make Call of Duty multiplayer matches a lot smaller, but it would also have the benefit of keeping socially graceless players quarantined off from the rest of civilized society, as well as spur a growth in super big screen TVs so everybody has plenty of space to see what's going on in their portion of the screen. Still, chances are that the bulk of the multiplayer community would howl at the suggestion that all online multiplayer be removed from all future games. The second option would be to create a peer-to-peer multiplayer setup. In this scenario, there are no servers, the players ostensibly share the load equally within the limits of their bandwidth. The obvious upside for the publishers is that they don't have to run servers on their own but they're still providing online multiplayer. Moreover, strictly from a PR standpoint, game publishers will have a demonstrable use of peer-to-peer technology that is not involved with piracy. The downside of this idea is that peer-to-peer technology for gameplay is notoriously difficult to set up, as evidenced by the problems experienced in Demigod with multiplayer. The third solution would be to put the server software, or at least a very simplified version of it, in with the game and let players become their own servers. Since there are already functions within the Xbox Live software and the PlayStation 3's basic functionality to let you know when your friends are on, it shouldn't be much of a stretch to incorporate these changes, nor should it be much of a problem for people who are hosting servers to play alongside their friends. In essence, the sort of volunteer servers that PC gamers have been using for years for their games would finally come to the consoles. This sort of setup would not only be a winner from a PR and logistical standpoint for publishers, but it would doubtlessly spur extra sales of the games, Xbox Live Gold subscriptions, bigger broadband pipes, and TVs as the hardcore element takes over and arranges a dedicated server setup with console B while they play the game on console A. The only possible downside would be the possibility, admittedly very slim, of people hacking their servers to give themselves an advantage. Regular patches could certainly ameliorate this possibility, though hacking console software is not for the faint of heart, and the vast majority of the online multiplayer console community isn't into that sort of thing in the first place.

Since the current crop of CEOs seem to be operating predominantly from the principle of “gimme!”, and thus incapable of thinking of anything that doesn't involve total market dominance at all costs, it falls to us, the gamers, the consumers, the people on the short end of the stick, to somehow force the publishers to admit reality and start treating us with a modicum of respect.

The greatest strength and the greatest vulnerability to any company, no matter how large, is its customers. Without customers, and the money that they ultimately provide, any company will start to weaken and ultimately die. Admittedly, it is very difficult to imagine EA falling into serious financial hardship or even closing up forever, but “very difficult” is nowhere close to “impossible.”

How do we make our presence, and our power, felt to the likes of John Riccitiello and others of his ilk? How do you get the giant's attention? The first option is piracy, which certainly gets attention, but is ultimately futile. Sure, the pirates get to enjoy games having hacked, cracked, and stripped out all of the crap that publishers lard up their titles with these days, but the rest of us are stuck with it.

The second option is to stop buying games altogether, which frankly doesn't have a snowball's chance in Hell of actually working. Oh sure, we could always shift our attentions to smaller indie companies and larger publishers who haven't yet adopted the thuggish extortion tactics of EA, but we'd still be buying games, and there's no guarantee that, flush with the largess of all the new customers, the smaller outfits wouldn't eventually devolve into new EA clones. The sort of general “do not buy” boycott that would be required to get EA's attention very likely wouldn't last very long. Why? Mainly because it becomes very difficult to maintain without some sort of overriding motivation. Too many gamers can't see the forest for the trees when it comes to gaming. They think that the big publishers are the only source for “real” games. Apathy and the belief that the big publishers are too big to fight can easily sap the will of even the most determined boycotter. Sooner rather than later, they'll crumble and buy the shiny new game because they can't imagine anything else, even if it ultimately shanks them. This leads us to our third option.

Instead of attempting a “do not buy” boycott, we go with a “slow roll” boycott. Instead of taking an untenable and eventually futile position of “I will never buy one of your games again,” we take the position of “I'll buy this game once you stop this $10 Online Pass bullshit.” While there might still be defections from this position, the total sales numbers over the course of a month or even a quarter would only be a fraction of the publisher's original projections. It might take a quarter, maybe even two, but even EA would have to cry “Uncle!” after six months of lower-than-average sales figures when they know full well why they're low.

The downside to this sort of “slow roll” boycott is that it would very likely hurt developer studios currently under the umbrellas of the big publishers. Smaller groups would almost certainly get shut down. Bigger studios like BioWare, Obsidian, Relic, and Gas Powered Games might very well be threatened with staff cuts, delays or cancellations of projects, or possibly even getting closed down. Must it come to this? The best and brightest caught in the crossfire between publishers and consumers, cut down over a lousy $10? As painful as it would be, we as gamers and consumers must be willing to risk those possibilities in order to effect a change in the behavior of the publishers who currently provide those developers' titles to us.

Publishers have forgotten where they stand in the relationship between markets and consumers, and they blithely believe that they can redefine that position if they not only throw enough money at it, but also plunder our pockets to help with their propaganda efforts to convince us of their “inherent” superiority. They need to remember that they are in business solely at our sufferance. We must remind them that their continued existence depends entirely upon our goodwill, and if they're going to abuse that goodwill, then we will destroy them by withholding the only expression of goodwill that matters. It will hurt. Probably a lot. But the alternative is the supine surrender of our wallets and our freedoms to a pack of mafiosi who claim they're “respectable businessmen” while they extort every last cent from us. If we don't take a stand here and now, then I shudder to think what the future of the games industry will be like. Somehow, I don't think it will be nearly as enjoyable as John Riccitiello wants us to believe.

This has to stop. If EA or any other publisher wants even $10 more from us, we have to make them earn it.

- Axel Cushing

(May 26, 2010)