Raving Rant: How to Save the Games Industry - Editorials

It's a lofty statement to be sure. "How to Save the Games Industry." It's bold, but Axel also makes sense when he talks about lowering the price of creation tools, DRM and canning EULAs (among other things). Read on!

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Raving Rant: How to Save the Games Industry

By the latest reports, there's good news and there's bad news on the economic front. The good news is that the games industry seems to be weathering the current recession better than a lot of industries. The bad news is that the current recession may last for another year or more before things really start trending towards a genuine recovery. And in that time, there's no guarantee of how long the games industry can maintain its seeming indestructibility. If it is true that we're in for a long climb of a recovery period, then now would be the time to implement needed changes. Some will doubtlessly argue that the games industry doesn't need to make any changes. They will point to the indicators and say “if it's not broken, don't fix it.” I submit to you that the games industry isn't thriving because it's doing anything inherently right, but is instead having the illusion of prosperity, that it is essentially stagnating and getting away with it because everybody else is going down the toilet faster than they are. I have no doubt that a few years from now we'll have industry execs crying in their beer about how the market has turned against them. Below are my suggestions for steps the industry can take to help it thrive when the economy returns to something normal. I have no doubt some of these ideas will be radical, maybe even heretical, but now is probably the best time to implement them without completely murdering the industry.

End EULAs

These vile chunks of legalistic boilerplate have been polluting the industry for too long. They're a callous effort to pull an end-run around the “first sale principle” that books and magazines are governed under. Companies may bleat on about how they need to protect their intellectual property and the right to control their works, but it basically comes down to money. Lots of money. Money that they wouldn't get on the secondary market. And let's be fair, they aren't getting that

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money. However, I don't seem to recall any law on the books guaranteeing companies the right to constantly make money or constantly reap profits. Profits are nice, but they're not guaranteed, and EULAs are not the magic wand to make those profits suddenly appear.

When I advocate getting rid of EULAs, I'm not talking just in games, but across the board. EULAs in office applications. EULAs in

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audio tools. EULAs in 3D rendering tools. Get rid of the goddamn things. All of them. From the simplest solitaire game to the most powerful suite of game development tools out there, future generations should not have to ever see that acronym and a lump of text that nobody reads. In the same vein, site licenses and seat licenses similarly need to vanish. You can blither on about “asset control,” “recurring revenue streams,” and all of the thousand other pedantic reasons used to justify what is basically a stupid idea. It comes down to greed. If we've learned anything about the current morass, it's that greed is not good. EULAs do nothing to protect intellectual property. Seat and site licenses do not lower the costs involved in setting up, utilizing, or maintaining production pipelines. You're contributing to the bloating of budgets which make our games more expensive without necessarily adding more value to them.

Lower Prices on Tools

Let's get this out on the table right now: fifteen grand for Maya is not paying for “professional quality tools,” it's highway robbery. Yes, Maya can do some truly impressive stuff, but when you get right down to it, the fact that there are other 3D rendering suites out there does not make it particularly distinctive. 3D Studio Max and Softimage, by the same token, are equally lacking in the sort of distinctiveness even if they're not quite as expensive. But I've gotta tell you, while EA might not sweat the difference between three grand and fifteen grand per seat, the garage dev team already on a shoestring budget is sweating great big bullets.

What further irritates the piss out of me is the half-assed way the tool developers think they're trying to do the amateur development community a mitzvah by tossing out gimped versions of their products. Show of hands, who's actually used gMax? Not just installed it and played around with it, but taken an entire project from start to finish using the thing? I thought as much. And the freebie versions of Maya and Softimage which ostensibly let mod makers create new character models? How many of those models are running around mods or amateur projects? I'd sooner expect models out of MilkShape than Maya these days.

For less than a tenth of the cost of a copy of 3DS Max, I could go down to the local hardware store and pick up a sufficient amount of tools to put myself into business as a general contractor. Many argue that the analogy doesn't hold water, that the fundamental differences between building a house and building a game are so radically disparate that it's a meaningless comparison. I strongly disagree. Both are used to create something, tangible or intangible, which other individuals find sufficiently valuable as to pay for them. If Sears decided to put a rider on its Craftsman series of tools that you couldn't use them for any professional purposes, they'd probably be laughed out of business. Those who would deny the analogy between physical and software tools would point out that there's a different set of skills involved swinging a hammer than rendering a 3D model. True, but the fact that different skill sets are involved does not invalidate the fact both skill sets lead to a manufactured product.

Instead of trying to sell giant packages of tools strictly for the professional development houses, a more profitable model would be to sell smaller packages to the larger public without the dichotomy of professional or amateur, removing the restrictions on what one can and can't produce with the tools. By making the prices of smaller packages closer to what the majority of people can afford, you open up the opportunities to make money.

Cut The Price

Many have argued that Nintendo has pandered to the lowest common denominator with the Wii. That when it's all said and done, it is nothing but a gimmick, not a proper next generation console. While it's true from a graphic standpoint when stacked up against the Xbox 360 and the PS3, the Wii has arguably managed to stay ahead of the curve in the current economic climate. For a third of the money needed for a PS3, people are picking up a console that is almost intuitively easy to operate. It's getting people more active than most any other single platform you can mention, without any specialized peripheral devices. I'm well aware that Microsoft and Sony lose money on every console they sell. I will argue, rather strenuously, that they're losing more money on the consoles that they aren't selling. Microsoft has certainly figured this out, though they're still pushing out consoles of less-than-reputable stability, which in turn does not help their bottom line any when you crank in the costs of repair and replacement. Sony needs a massive cut stay within shouting distance of Microsoft, to say nothing of Nintendo. And despite Kaz Hirai's delusional ramblings to the contrary, there are not two completely separate markets for gamers, one which Nintendo exclusively farms and the other which Sony exclusively farms. There is only one vast pie. Trying to arbitrarily declaim casual gamers and hardcore gamers as two separate and disparate markets is going to do nothing but clean Sony's clock.

However, if Sony won't cut their console prices at all, and Microsoft won't cut their prices any further, then the only other logical place to cut them is the price of games. While the gaming industry might be very resilient as a whole to the downturn, I'm curious to see what the breakdown of the purchases look like. My suspicion is that folks are snapping up more lower cost games in larger numbers, either new but heavily discounted because they've been out a while or used. That being said, Sony's probably the more egregious offender when it comes to keeping game title prices at “new game” levels. While I can understand that Heavenly Sword was a flagship title for the PS3 launch a couple of years back, there simply is no justifiable reason to still sell the damn thing at $60 a pop. Your console launched. There's other games out there that look just as pretty and probably play better in the bargain. Find all those older titles that retail for the cost of a new game and slash the prices. I'd be willing to bet you'd see a marked uptick in sales of those titles because the price is now more attractive. Otherwise, you're losing money to GameStop who'll sell those titles for half or less. It should be clear within a month of a title's release if it's doing well enough to justify keeping the price at its maximum level or if a price cut is necessary to stimulate interest. This is basic economic theory, guys, and when the world's economy is as thrashed as it is right now, getting back to the basics is the smartest move you can make.

Unlock Your Games

By now, we've all heard the story: Spore holds the dubious honor of being the most pirated game in history, despite what can only be described as an onerous and detrimental DRM scheme being in place to supposedly stop precisely that sort of scenario. Not only was the DRM cracked in record time, it seems to have actually spurred on the piracy, its presence and its purported puissance making every illegal download of the game an act of giving EA the finger. Supposedly, EA will be getting rid of the DRM software in future releases in favor of just keeping the disc in the drive. I'll believe it when I see it. Even then, I probably wouldn't be convinced that things would stay that way for long.

DRM has always been a brute force solution to a relatively minor problem. Noted sci-fi author Eric Flint put it best when he wrote, “Online piracy — while it is definitely illegal and immoral — is, as a practical problem, nothing more than (at most) a nuisance. We're talking brats stealing chewing gum, here, not the Barbary Pirates.” And if this is true for the printed word, it is no less true for other forms of mass media. Yet most software publishers haven't seemed to pick up on this fact. They just keep piling it higher and deeper and they still get showed up, the investment in time and manpower and money shot to hell at the speed of light. Nothing can ever be one hundred percent secure, not even the most sophisticated DRM, and because nothing can ever be one hundred percent secure, no matter what new wrinkle they put in, somebody will figure out a way to get around it.

The case of Spore, however, is probably a very special instance. In order to properly appreciate the breadth of the instance, you have to look at a few important points. First, EA is big. Stupidly big. Big enough that it is a practical impossibility short of nuclear war or an asteroid smacking into the Earth for EA not to make money. There are so many different lines and so many different developers and so many different development deals they have in place that they will always have money flowing in from one channel or another. They may not make as much money as they would like, or even as much as their shareholders would like, but they're not going to be calling up the White House asking for bailout money. This leads me to my second point. Because EA is such a megalithic company when compared to most of its other competitors, the usual paradigm of “vote with your dollars” actually does more harm to the gaming community than to EA. By the twisted logic of their marketing wonks, upper middle management, and other assorted corporate denizens, when people don't buy a game, they assume that it wasn't a good game. Even if it's a darling of the critics, all they see is people not buying their game. They'll blame the advertising climate. They'll blame the economy. They'll blame communism, capitalism, existentialism, and antidisestablishmentarianism. What they won't do is take a good hard look at their own missteps. Nobody above the rank of programmer in EA will ever put it together that people aren't buying the game because of the DRM. They will assume it was a bad game, and thus, they'll stop making games like that in favor of something more “commercial.” Third, the DRM in Spore was particularly obnoxious even for EA. Whatever they might have gained, for a few fleeting moments, in terms of security pales into meaninglessness when stacked against the ill will and discontent generated when it was shoved unceremoniously onto the hard drives of thousands of customers, usually with unhappy results. But it was EA's attitude just before the launch of the game that probably doomed them. Word got out that there was going to be DRM, strong and nasty stuff, and EA seemed perversely proud that they had attached such a monstrosity to what was supposed to be their biggest hit of the spring. What self-respecting hacker could walk away from that sort of challenge? Apparently, not very many could, and the DRM was sliced open like a tuna in record time. Given all of those conditions, what else could have been done to get EA's attention regarding the customer's reaction to the presence of DRM? A letter writing campaign? Send EA execs cans of creamed mushroom soup? The effectiveness of such a campaign is dubious. If fans of the TV series Jericho only got a short season after sending in all those nuts to CBS, then it's highly unlikely a mail-in campaign to lose the DRM in Spore would have accomplished anything. To get EA's attention focused on the problem, something drastic would be required, a massive slap in the face that couldn't be written off as poor market conditions or a bad game idea. I'd say that it worked. I'm also terribly disappointed that it took an event of that magnitude to get EA to wake up.

The moral of the story: DRM is a white elephant. It was yesterday, it will be tomorrow. Publishers could probably save themselves countless millions by not putting DRM onto their discs. The tighter they squeeze, the more control they lose. We'll see if EA really has learned its lesson, and we'll see if anybody else learned it as well.

Guy Fawkes is credited as having said, “A desperate disease requires a dangerous remedy.” The remedies suggested above may sound dangerous to those intent on preserving the status quo. But I firmly believe that they are necessary for the continued health and future growth of the industry. Otherwise, there will be a lot of very surprised people out there in the industry wondering when exactly their market share and their profit margins got amputated so abruptly.

(July 10, 2009)