Raving Rant: Cutting the Cord - Editorials

Axel explores (or more accurately, explodes) DRM and piracy, and manages to avoid condoning either one.

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Raving Rant: Cutting the Cord

It would seem that the suits at Ubisoft didn't read that little article I wrote a few months back about how to save the game industry. Particularly that little bit towards the end about DRM being a bad thing on so many “bad thing” levels. The word has come out that Ubisoft plans to punish PC gamers for buying the PC version of Assassin's Creed II by making a constant online connection mandatory for the game to run. The mention of using Ubisoft's new service is a fig leaf of shockingly small size and laughable transparency. Any interruption of the signal kills the game. Doesn't matter if it's an issue on your end, your ISP's end, or

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Ubisoft's end. Doesn't matter if there's a loose cable, a lightning strike, a blown fuse, or you just don't feel like going online. No Internet connection, no joy.

The burning question that comes to mind is this: are you guys high? Seriously, whatever drugs are being smoked, snorted, shot up, or swallowed need to be put away and never touched again. They're clearly screwing up your perception of reality.

Before the word got out

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about this impending atrocity, I would have had a difficult time believing there was a way for a game company to come up with a more draconian, more obnoxious, and more personally invasive DRM scheme. I would have had an equally difficult time believing that a company could have actually committed a sufficient amount of resources and given a sufficient degree of consideration on the matter and still could have reached the conclusion that this even remotely resembles a good idea. It absolutely defies anything resembling common sense, good sense, and basic logic. Oh, I don't doubt there is a strand of logic buried somewhere in the PR crap and the prevarications that will undoubtedly go into Ubisoft's quarterly report, but somehow I think any effort to explain it might raise the ghost of Aristotle and send it on a bloody vengeful rampage.

Looking through an excerpt of Ubisoft's press release on the issue, posted on Tom's Hardware, Ubisoft immediately owns up to the fact that their decision is controversial, right before jumping into the pious platitude of “we're trying to reduce piracy.” The overall tone is disdainful and contemptuous. This is our game, you'll play it how we tell you to play it, and you'll like it! What's worse is that Ubisoft tries to make it sound like they're trying to do gamers a favor by allowing this abortion to happen. They blither on about cloud computing and portability of save game files. You want cloud computing? Make an MMO. You want portable save game files? Give me a single file in a single easily accessible location on my hard drive. This idiocy does neither. Just an informal poll of gamers I know have resoundingly said that they see absolutely no value in these proposed “features.”

Whatever cretins in Ubisoft thought this idea was earth-shatteringly brilliant clearly haven't been paying attention to the industry that they've ostensibly working in for however long they're claiming. For them, I offer a brief refresher course. Let's start with Spore. You remember that one, right? The game that was kind of a big deal for EA? The one that EA loaded up with DRM and proudly swore it would never be cracked. The one that not only got cracked in less than a week but went on to be the most pirated game in video game history. And why would this be the most pirated game ever? Because EA swore the DRM would stop the piracy. They sounded so terribly proud of it. Which guaranteed that anybody with a modicum of hacking talent, a BitTorrent client, and a functional brain would not only pick up the gauntlet, but would then proceed to slap EA stupid with it. The debacle with Spore was precisely the sort of “protest vote” that got everybody's attention, even EA's. When Mass Effect 2 was released, EA did not go with the DRM found in Spore, nor did it bring back the original game's DRM, but instead settled for a simple disc check. What can we learn from EA and Spore? First, the more offensive the DRM, the more likely it will be cracked, stripped out, and otherwise neutralized. Second, the game will be more likely to be pirated than it will be sold, because under most accounting schemes, unsold games are not considered losses, while a pirated game would be. EA's size made it such that the only way anybody could get their attention would be generate a sufficient amount of losses. Simply organizing a boycott would not have been effective given the amount of titles EA has out at any one time. While EA claims that Spore is one of their best selling titles, it will never escape the distinction of also being the most pirated. Though, if I were to take a guess, I suspect Assassin's Creed II might very well supplant Spore for that highly dubious honor.

Next on our little refresher course is Hellgate: London. This game added the term “flagshipped” to the gaming vernacular. What was supposed to be the next generation of Diablo-style gaming turned into a fiasco that ended up killing the nascent Flagship Studios and proving that gamers are not going to pay MMORPG subscriptions for what is ultimately a single player game. Tying loot and character levels in single player to subscription multiplayer was very likely the stupidest thing that any game company has done prior to the Spore DRM fiasco. While Hellgate didn't have a problem related to DRM, it did have a major problem relating to what the company claimed was valuable to the gamer and what the gamer perceived as valuable. Ramming “value” as the company describes it down the game community's throats while said community is crying foul is never a good idea. Shoving out a game that you have led gamers to believe is a single player game and then trying to half-ass an MMO out of it is guaranteed to earn you the undying enmity and relentless scorn of the very people you're trying to get to buy your product. The lesson here, children, is that treating your customers like dirt will eventually come back to bite you on the ass. It's never a sound business strategy. When you're a small company, it's invariably fatal, and usually it kills the company in short order. In a larger company, it's more akin to cancer than a bullet to the head. It might take a while to end up killing the company, but much like cancer, even when you think you've got it beat, it can always come back later to finish the job. Whatever responsibility is owed to the shareholders, there's a greater responsibility to the customers. Without them, your stock will plunge no matter how rosy you make that quarterly report.

Lest you think all I have to offer up is doom and gloom, I give you the nice folks at Stardock. Up until a few years ago, they were a small developer/publisher outfit whose greatest claim to fame was Galactic Civilizations. They have since put out runaway hits like Sins Of A Solar Empire, put out what may be the most credible challenger to Valve's Steam service in the form of Impulse, and they have done so without adding DRM to their titles. A cynic might be inclined to believe that they will eventually put DRM in their titles, or that they are at greater risk for losing money than somebody like EA or Ubisoft. So far, there has been no indication that Stardock will be putting DRM in their titles anytime in the foreseeable future. Moreover, because of the lack of DRM, it's attractiveness to pirates is arguably lower because the company does not attract their ire in the same way EA or Ubisoft would. Stardock's success lies in knowing their customer base and working to satisfy them instead of antagonizing them. They treat their customers like actual customers and not like potential criminals. It's a basic lesson in customer service and a basic lesson in Business 101.

What I find potentially horrifying about this move by Ubisoft is that this doesn't simply represent an escalation in the constant war between publishers and pirates. It's the ramifications. It's the belief that every game put out by any publisher can without warning or protest be treated like an MMO, a theoretically perpetual revenue stream that you as the consumer have absolutely no right to leave short of not playing the game. It's the belief that every moment of every game is open to data mining from the publisher for whatever purpose they feel is right and there is nothing that anybody can do to protect their information, forced to trust in the “goodwill” of the publisher who will likely claim that the save game file and all related data is their property and thus can be used at their whim. It's the continued balkanization of PC gaming, and gaming in general, as seemingly every publisher tries to cram their own version of Facebook down our throats and multiply the avenues of threat against our information just to add a few cents to their bottom line. Even more horrifying is the possibility that somebody at Ubisoft not only knows that their DRM will be circumvented but has actually cranked that possibility into their byzantine calculations and has already prepared the justification for increasingly invasive measures that will only further attempt to strengthen what the company foolishly believes will be its stranglehold on its customer base. The rights of publishers to protect their intellectual property does not give them carte blanche to act like scum noblemen and treat their customers like serfs whose only duty is to provide them with money.

I feel absolutely no pity for what happens to Ubisoft because of this. Whatever financial, material, or reputational loss they suffer because of this stupidity that they have chosen to engage in leaves me totally unmoved. I hope somebody in Ubisoft reads this and decides to get rid of the whole damn mess, even if it means delaying the release of their games by a couple months, but I'm not exactly holding my breath.

- Axel Cushing

(March 3, 2010)