HomeAnother relatively quiet week. Which is why the release of the NPD January US video games sales figures was timely, since it allows me to pad this WNR with a few more words than otherwise about the analysis. With stats now available spanning a two year period, it was interesting to compared January of 2008 with that of 2010, and to find that the PS3 only managed a 3% sale increase in that time. The reason Sony are still happy is because 2009 was best forgotten in terms of PS3 sales, and so 2010 seems like the best year ever, and it is, but only by 3%. The economy might have something to do with the small size of the increase, but consider the fact that the Xbox 360 managed a 45% increase with the same comparison, suggesting there’s still some time to go before Sony should start the celebrations, especially with the alarming decline of both the PS2 and the PSP. But with a good lineup of PS3 exclusives, Sony might not have to wait too long to declare themselves the winners (which is different to “being declared the winners”). The Wii continues its steady decline, having received a (what seems temporary) reprieve in December. Anyway, on to the news.
In copyright news, The Pirate Bay may still be open, despite lawsuits, seizures and various other tactics, but it’s not stopping anti-piracy agencies from still going after its members. This time, it was the Danish Antipiratgruppen that went after a Danish TPB user, who had done the terrible thing of uploading 4 movie torrents.
The user’s home was searched, equipment seized, and the Antipiratgruppen declared the operation as stopping a “big fish” from committing “massive piracy”. Antipiratgruppen apparently found more material than they had expected, so it seems their fishing expedition had paid off with a catch, although just exactly what they found nobody knows at the moment. Is it beyond agencies like Antipiratgruppen to talk up their seizures when in reality they’ve found very little? No it isn’t. On a similar theme, Nintendo recently went after a man in Australia for leaking the game New Super Mario Bros. Wii a week earlier than the official release date. The man pleaded guilty and was fined $USD 1.3m. The only thing uploaded was a copy of the game DVD, which was still uncracked and so was not usable, but that was enough.
Moving on to the war against ISPs (new strategy in content owners fight again online piracy), NBC Universal Vice President Richard Cotton says that ISPs should filter out illegally uploaded copyrighted content just like how they filter out viruses. The thing is, I’m not even aware that ISPs filter out viruses, or at least not successfully, since many people, if not most, still get sent them via emails or get infected through web pages. Sure, they block attacks and probes, but these are attacks aimed at their own networks – home users still have to install firewalls to protect their own networks, for example. And when email filtering is activated, there is almost always a way to deactivate it or still allow “suspected” emails to go through with a tag added for easier identification, because false positives are still quite common and nobody wants real emails to get blocked. Just like nobody wants real, legal content to get blocked, which is a distinct possibility if ISP level filtering were introduced. The content owners seem to want everyone else to take responsibility for online piracy except themselves, even though they may be the ones most responsible for the increase in popularity of online piracy, thanks to outdated pricing models, lack of online services and excessive DRM.
Ubisoft's new DRM, which comes with Assassin's Creed II on the PC, may drive gamers to piracy
Speaking of excessive DRM, Ubisoft’s new approach to DRM, which was mentioned here a few weeks ago, is even worse than first thought. Some reviewers that managed to review Assassin’s Creed II on the PC, one of the first games to feature the new DRM along with Silent Hunter 5 and Settlers VII, were shocked to discover that not only is online authentication required, it is required for virtually every second of gameplay. In other words, it’s not just the type of online authentication you find at Steam where you need to do it whenever you start the game, this new DRM requires that you connect to the Ubisoft servers every single second the game is running (and there’s no offline mode either, so no Internet = no game). And if for one second, you connection to the Ubisoft server dies (or if the Ubisoft server dies), then you are kicked back to the main menu and you lose all unsaved progress, at least for Assassin’s Creed II. Upon hearing the news, I thought that this may be just a temporary issue, one that Ubisoft would address. Address they did, by saying that this is all intentional and if you don’t like it, blame the pirates. Blame them, or join them? Now, I would never advocate pirating a game, because a lot of people have put a lot of work into it and they expect to be paid just like you would, but it seems that the only way to get any sort of decent experience out of these games is to go with the pirated version. Ubisoft has turned a moral and legal decision into one of necessity. Having had a look at Ubisoft’s incredibly long FAQ page about this DRM platform, all the usual questions are covered such as what happens if Ubisoft’s authentication servers are down. The answer they give is that, well, it won’t go down because they’ve got people monitoring it and stuff. Big websites like Google and Microsoft can go down and do go down, so do we really expect Ubisoft, a company that has had a dubious record when it comes to hosting gaming servers, to not fail? And fail they have, judging by the backlash they’ve received, and the series of funny YouTube videos mocking their new DRM system (see Das DRM Part 1, 2 and 3, as well as the obligatory Downfall Hitler parody). And on the question of why there isn’t an offline mode, the answer is simply that if they did, then the constant authentication system wouldn’t work anymore.
What Ubisoft is advocating is the end of PC game ownership. Instead of buying a game and playing it the way you want to, you are now only leasing it from Ubisoft and they tell you when and when you can play the game. Once Ubisoft finds 24/7 monitoring of their servers too expensive, especially for older games, they can simply remove support for such games and you’re left with a useless box of junk. On their FAQ, Ubisoft promises to release a patch to solve this problem if they ever remove support for the game, but all that tells us is that they do in fact plan to stop supporting games in the future, and that gamers will have to be relying on a company to release a patch for an old game in order to keep on playing it. Anyone who has failed at finding a patch of a five year old game that no longer works in Windows 7, and with no response from the publishers other than “sorry, the game’s too old to be supported”, will know what’s in store for potential Ubisoft customers. I’m hoping Ubisoft’s extreme actions will prompt a extreme response from consumers, and hopefully lead to the eventual downfall of PC DRM, much like how EA’s Spore has made EA a bit more friendlier in terms of DRM. In the end, all this does is to punish those that actually purchased the game. The people who pirate may get a version that doesn’t do this at all, and will play happily never worrying about their Net connection dying in between saves. The situation is very similar the one with those un-skippable trailer on DVDs and Blu-ray’s (see this illustration that has been circulating around the net about piracy versus pay), which you had to admit is a lot less annoying that this Ubisoft thing. There was a story last week about whether game publishers are encouraging piracy, and I said I wasn’t sure about that, but in this case, then you have to say that Ubisoft is encouraging piracy like no other company has done before, by making the pirated version the most user friendly and enjoyable version available.
By comparison, console games have a lot less DRM, although their hardware makes it harder to play downloaded games. But that may be about to change, as Sony are testing their own DRM system which will require a complicated system of vouchers and registration. Basically, the game comes with a voucher that needs to be redeemed online if you want to play online. If you purchased a second hand copy of the game, then you’ll have to buy a new voucher for $20. Just like the Ubisoft DRM, this plan seems to have unintended or intended consequence of killing off the second hand games market (Ubisoft’s new DRM games can’t be re-sold).
Moving onto HD, Blu-ray has been slow in terms of PC and Laptop adoption, but that may soon change with MSI pricing a Blu-ray, Intel Core i3 laptop for less than $700.
Sony's OLED TV: Thin, beautiful, but really really (really) expensive
Now, that may still seem expensive compared to a Blu-ray player, but you do get a laptop too, even if the screen is not 1080p (but it does have an HDMI output, to connect to your HDTV). I’ve seen recently some super expensive gaming laptops that still come with DVD drives, and so perhaps this marks the start of a new trend, because there’s no reason why all PCs and laptop aren’t coming with Blu-ray drives (the cost has come down, Blu-ray movies are widely available, and pretty much all modern PC hardware can play Blu-ray movies without breaking a sweat).
Sony has cancelled it’s OLED screen for sale in Japan. I guess the relatively poor Japanese economy meant that hardly anyone was willing to pay $227 per inch of screen, and what would one do with a netbook like screen size anyway. Of course, Sony’s OLED TV is more of a technology test than an actual product, and I expect bigger and cheaper screens to come eventually, as I see OLED as the successor to LCD and Plasma screens.
As for gaming news, there wasn’t much, but I’ve already covered the NPD and Ubisoft DRM thing so I’ll skip this section for this WNR.
See you next week.
