I’ve had an Xbox 360 for awhile. I bought my first one about eight months after it debuted. I’m on my third console now (previous two red-ringed, and were replaced under warranty), and while I did receive an HDMI-out port on my latest incarnation, the big white box is otherwise still the same as it was the day it debuted. That isn’t a compliment. As loud as my PC with five fans going full-tilt, and far warmer to the touch, the Xbox 360 doesn’t sound or feel like a friend of the environment. The same complaints go against the PS3, which is also guilty of being a rash loud, uncivilized, and hot-headed piece of hardware. But just how bad are they?
I can’t honestly say that I ever sat down to think about that question, but the Naural Resource Defense Council has, and they’ve compiled a report on how much energy game consoles are using. Says the report:
Today, more than 40 percent of all homes in the United States contain at least one video game console. Recognizing that all that gaming could add up to serious demand for electricity, NRDC and Ecos Consulting performed the first ever comprehensive study on the energy use of video game consoles and found that they consumed an estimated 16 billion kilowatt-hours per year — roughly equal to the annual electricity use of the city of San Diego.
16 Billion Kilowatts? That sounds like quite a lot, but on the other hand, its hard to tell. It isn’t as if we’re given any source for comparison, and I’m no national power consumption guru. In search of a comparison, I ran across this Greentech Media article, which claims that national energy consumption totaled $46 billion kilowatt-hours in 2004 and may reach a maximum of $70 billion kilowatt-hours in 2009.
In other words, game consoles may be using a bit of energy, but they’re not exactly the largest piece of the pie.
My largest beef with the report - and it is a large one - is that it is based on the assumption that, across the nation, half of people with game consoles keeping them on twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. That seems a ridiculous assumption to make. Both the Xbox 360 and the PS3 a relatively hot, noisy machines, and absolutely everyone who has ears and a sense of temperature knows it. Personally, I have never kept my 360 on while I was not using it, and no one I know operates their game console twenty-four hours a day, either. This is, of course, anecdotal evidence, which isn’t the most reliable sort of data available. But it hardly matters, because the NRDC never actually backs up the scenario they pose in their article with any data. In fact, the NRDC explicitly states in their end-notes that there is no actual data on which they can base their assumption. It is simply a figure they pulled out of their hat.
This doesn’t entirely invalidate the study, however, because it still makes some valid points concerning the ways (or lack thereof) which game consoles manage power. Power-saving features such as reduced clock speeds, sleep mode, and hibernation have existed on PCs for years. Considering how closely consoles are beginning to mimic PC architecture, it is surprising that more advanced power-management features have not migrated to the console market. Such power-saving features would be a great boon to consoles, not only because of the energy saved, but also because of a reduced thermal output. My 360 gets very warm when playing a DVD or HD-DVD. Considering that the work being done could be handled easily by a single, low-end Radeon card with passive cooling, its hard to believe the 360 needs to throw all its muscle into the task.
On the whole, though, the NRDC’s article is more alarmist than it really needs to be, and its unfortunate that they had to spoil some very good, valid points about console power management by making a completely baseless case concerning the national power consumption of gaming consoles. But hey, when it comes to studies published by committee, I guess one out of two ain’t bad.
Articles about game addiction have been a bit in vogue lately. No one really knows much about it yet, which means there is still plenty for psychologists to yell at each other about. Earlier this year, one of my favorite local (Portland, Oregon) area papers, Willamette Week, published an article about what they more broadly called Internet Addiction, and they had a fair amount of research to back up the argument that there are people for whom the internet is just as damaging as crack. Here in the ‘States, some shrinks have started to pick up on this issue and specialize in it, or at least advertise that they’re willing the tackle the problem. But as anyone whose watched a Korean Starcraft tournament or been in a Japanese internet cafe knows, America’s gaming-addicted youth don’t hold a candle to the hardcore addicts that can be found on the other side of the Pacific.
The result? A rehab center for gamers. When I ran across the article, It was the first I had ever heard of such a place - but according to the article, these centers are popular in gamer nations like South Korea, Japan, and China. I can’t say I’m surprised, but it leads me to wonder when, or if, we’ll see such centers in the USA. I’ve yet to hear of any, and I can’t seem to find any centers for gaming addiction on Google. But I think the topic is a fascinating one, so if anyone has heard of such places in the USA, let me know. And I swear, I’m not just asking so I can have myself committed.
If you’ve been on a college campus and tried to do anything bandwidth-intensive on the college network, than you’ve probably thought about throwing your laptop through a window, or maybe at the dean. Though normally thought of as places where freedom, tolerance, and ideas flow freely, most colleges have approached the internet with all the openess of Nazi Germany. And now students in Tennessee get to look forward to things being a little worse, thanks to the RIAA. Says the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
Last week, the RIAA celebrated the signing of a ridiculous new law in Tennessee that says:
Each public and private institution of higher education in the state that has student residential computer networks shall:[...][R]easonably attempt to prevent the infringement of copyrighted works over the institution’s computer and network resources, if such institution receives fifty (50) or more legally valid notices of infringement as prescribed by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 within the preceding year.
Vague doesn’t even begin to cover it. It’d be nice to think that this means colleges could put up a basic firewall and forget about it - that is reasonable, right? - but things will not, of course, be so simple. Or cheap. According to the EFF, this new bill will cost the state of Tennessee at least $9.5 million to intially impliment, and 1.5 millon annually. And it appears that cost is only for publically run institutions; private colleges will also be on the hook. Because tutition isn’t high enough.
All that money will be used to buy more staff, computers, and software, all of which will be focused on scanning traffic and keeping out anything that looks like it could be illegal. Inevitibly, this will result in even more restrictions on what kind of software will work across college networks - including games. I had a hard enough time running World of Warcraft or Xbox Live in my dorm room two years ago. Unfortuantly, it looks like things are only going to get worse.
Casual game developer 2d Boy recently reported that the piracy rate on their popular new game World of Goo is approximately 90%.
I’ll allow you to pick up your jaws, because if you’re anything like me, you found that rate fairly stunning. That sort of piracy rate is hard to ignore, and seems to draw credit to industry complaints that piracy is absolutely slaughtering profits. But wait. Even with that sort of piracy rate, there is evidence that casual games, such as World of Goo, do no better when protected by DRM.
2D Boy cities an in-depth Gamasutra article about casual games and piracy. The article is written by an employee of Reflexive, another casual game label. One of Reflexive’s games, called Ricochet Infinity, recently experienced a piracy rate of about 92%. It was protected by DRM. And more interestingly, fixing the loop-holes which allowed cracks to break through the DRM did not reliably increase the amount of sales, but it did reliably decrease (or keep flat) the number of downloads. In conclusion, the Reflexive employee states:
As we believe that we are decreasing the number of pirates downloading the game with our DRM fixes, combining the increased sales number together with the decreased downloads, we find 1 additional sale for every 1,000 less pirated downloads. Put another way, for every 1,000 pirated copies we eliminated, we created 1 additional sale.
I’ve been saying that every game illegally downloaded does not equal a lost sale. But Christ. I figured maybe every one in eight was a lost sale. Every one in 1,000? If that is the case, why bother with DRM at all?
It must be noted, however, that none of this is conclusive. It is extremely interesting, because what we’re seeing here are numbers being thrown around concerning the amount of sales lost to piracy, and those numbers are backed with research. But these are casual games, with smaller audiences, and both 2d Boy and Reflexive admit that they are no statisticians. So consider this a glimpse of the truth: it is likely the case that every illegally downloaded game is not a lost sale, and it is likely that the vast majority of downloads do not represent potential customers, but the details of the effect illegal downloads have on sales overall is still, unfortunately, a complete mystery.
If you’ve ever worked a job where you created original content or ideas for a company, than you probably are familar with idea that the company owns whatever you create for them. This is a relatively basic principle. Afterall, the company is paying you for your original ideas - if you could simply leave and sell them somewhere else, they wouldn’t do your former employer much good. Sure, the idea of giving ownership of your brainpower to another person or organization sounds a little werid, but there is one simple reason why it is okay. You get paid.
Students, of course, don’t get paid for going to school and completing assignments. The best students may be able to earn themselves a free ride, but even those situations the school typically is “paid”, with the scholarship funds coming from various outside donations and sponserships. Its hard to believe, therefor, that a school would try to put a claim on what their students create during their time there. But that is exactly what DigiPen is doing.
According to Claude Comair, President of DigiPen:
“Our policy, which has been our policy since day one and which is laid out in our student agreement, is very clear — everything that is done within the school and presented as homework or as a product to be judged by a teacher ends up being the property of the school. IP, code, artwork, everything,” says Comair.
Well, Claude, you’re wrong. Also, you’re a very bad human being. This sort of policy is something that very clearly seperates DigiPen from a “real” university. A real univeristy would never dream of telling an art student that a project once turned in for homework could not later be adapted and sold at an art gallery. They don’t do that because they realize the student, not the school, is the person responsible for the creation of the work, and that any assistance provided by the school was paid for, thereby giving the school compensation for any contribution they made towards the creation of the finished work. In this sense, the school is actually acting as a sort of employee to the student: just as an employee relinquishes rights to ideas created for an organization because the employee is paid for their input, the school should relinquish its rights to ideas created by a student because the school is paid for its input.
To be fair, it isn’t as if DigiPen is trying to sell these works for their own profit. Which is a wise decision, as doing so would be the same as handing a blank check to the person who created the IP; such an action would result in a lawsuit DigiPen would certainly lose. Even so, DigiPen needs to realize that schools are placing of learning and creation, and that stifling the ability of students to use what they create at the school in later projects will ineviability demoralize pupils.
If you’d like more information about this, check out the Gamasutra article, which is where I originally heard of this news.
Did you know that a month ago, everyone’s favorite Bush signed into law a bill - the PRO IP Act (or Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act of 2008, or the The Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act of 2008)?
No, neither did I. But like you, I wasn’t very surprised to find out about it.
So what, exactly, is the PRO IP act? Well, one of the things it does is slam offenders with even heftier fines than the already absurdly large sums charged to offenders. It does this by amending the Trademark Act, doubling fines. If you thought that the fines weren’t absurd before, then you ain’t see nothing yet.
More important, however, is the bill’s creation of a so-called “Copyright Czar” - a suit responsible for overseeing the battle against piracy. To be fair, this does not sound like a horrible idea. Piracy itself is not a good thing, and it would only make sense for the country to put someone in charge of the nation’s overall efforts to combat piracy.
The problem which arises is that the bill also grants law enforcement agents the ability to seize any property suspected of being connected to copyright infringement. I say “suspected” because that is, after all, how the system works; if you become a suspect, the government is going to seize your property in order to conduct their investigation. Considering that the materials being seized may, in the case of major tech geeks, be worth tens of thousands of dollars, this provision is nothing to laugh at. And hell, who would want to lose their laptop because the feds though you were downloading Spore, even if it was only a $500 dollar Dell? For many people, a computer is a central part of life, full of everything from resumes to family photos to porn.
Of course, being granted power doesn’t mean it has to be abused. But it is worth noting that these powers are similar to what were granted to law enforcement during the War On Drugs.
Luckily, there is some good news. One important provision that didn’t make it into the PRO-IP Act would have allowed a copyright holder to collect damages for each instance of copyright infringement within a larger work. In other words, rather than being sued for copying a CD, you would be sued for each song that was copied from the CD, dramatically increasing the damages. And it applied to other forms of media as well; if you were caught bootlegging a collection of short stories, you might be charge for each individual story contained. Its hard to imagine how this would apply to games, which consists of thousands of files - if each file was considered one instance of infringement, a person could theoretically be hit with thousands of charges of infringement, simply for copying a single piece of software.
Luckily, widespread criticism knocked that idea out of the bill, proving that the titans of the entertainment industry do, in fact, have a limit to their power.
Still, consumers will have to keep a close eye on how the power given in this bill is used. Although these laws are meant to keep pirates from hosing the profits of copyright holders- a perfectly fine and valid purpose - many businesses are constantly trying to create tighters and tighter restrictions on how a copyrighted product can be used. Under curtain law, sharing music with a friend could be considered a crime (depending on how you shared), and could certainly result in the siezure of a person’s computer and other expensive electronics. The more successful businesses are in labeling various actions as copyright infringement, the more potentially dangerous this bill becomes.
Hey, we have to put our games somewhere, right? And if you’re a hardcore lover of hardware, you might have picked up (along with your Core i7 and three hundred dollars of DDR3 RAM) a brand-spanking new 1.5TB Barracuda Hard Disk.
Except there would be a problem with that. As it turns out, a number of these new mega-drives are causing computers to randomly freeze. But for The Honest Game, the fact of the hardware fault isn’t the real news - what is important and the manufacturer’s response.
Which has been…schizophrenic. Apparently uncertain if they should break down and admit their short-comings or keep the fortress buttoned up tight, they sent some very vague info to The Tech Report. For the TL;DR crowd, it says that while there might be something wrong somewhere, no one wants to say exactly what it is or how far-reaching the problem might be.
The fact that the company is actually communicating is a sign of good faith, but Seagate’s responses to customers who’ve called them about the problem are neutering any good-will they might generate by admitting there is a wee bit of a problem. Again, for the TL;DR crowd - Seagate’s customer service reps are pointing the finger at everything but their company, including a comical nod towards RAID set-ups as the source of woe. Comical, because Seagate’s own website says that their 1.5TB drive is perfect for RAID.
Ah, well. Companies are like 5-year-olds; they never want to take the blame, even they’ve go their hand stuck in the cookie jar. Its worth noting that Seagate’s response to The Tech Report was a direct response from Seagate to that website. Perhaps they’ll cook up some better PR, and a better solution, if we give them a week to think about it.
One of the most tragic and most hilarious fallacies put forward by the games industry is that any sale which is not made at full retail price is, effectively, an injustice to the publisher and the developer. The latest crusader for this cause turns out to be Michael Capps, President of Epic Games. You’d think that someone with such a title might know a thing or two about basic business sense, but you’d be wrong, as Michael demonstrated in an interview with gameindustry.biz. When asked if second-hand games or pirated content are his enemy, he had this to say:
I’d hate to say my players are my enemies - that doesn’t make any sense! But we certainly have a rule at Epic that we don’t buy any used games - sure as hell you’re not going to be recognised as an Epic artist going in and buying used videogames - because this is how we make our money and how all our friends in the industry make money.
I think a little bit of it is education so people realise that the reason there’s no PC market right now is piracy. I mean, Crytek just put out some numbers saying the ratio was 20:1 on Crysis, for pirated to non-pirated use. So guess what? That’s why there’s no Gears of War 2 on PC, because there’s no market, because copying killed it - and that’s gruesome to a company like ours that’s been in the PC market for so long.
We’re trying to fix it, there’s a new alliance of companies trying to make PC gaming work again. But if people are playing games without buying them, then the games aren’t going to keep coming.
It is hard to know where to start with this little dandy, because there is oh-so-much for me to chew on. But lets keep it simple, and start at the top, when Michael declares that “sure as hell you’re not going to be recognised as an Epic artist going in and buying used videogame.” Artist, hmmm? Well, let me tell you, I’m a champion of the games as art. I think they’re an exciting new artistic field that will come into its own within the next few decades, giving us some staggeringly original and unique works. But tell me, Michael - what artists do you know that don’t promote the buying of secondhand works? Have you ever heard of libaries, the big huge rent-a-book centers which no literary genius would ever be dumb to denounce as a drain on his income? Have you seen any painters complaining that instead of charging for each copy of their work, they should be given a fee every time a person looks on it? No? Well, that is because they are artists - and their primary concern is advancement of the art, not their pocketbooks.
But even if you ignore the “artist” part of the equation, Micheal comment still makes little sense, although I’m sure that GM and other failing auto makers might be interested in hearing it. They need some way to convince the government to give the a bailout; maybe complaining about the injustice being done to them by all those people buying used cars is just what they need.
Secondly, Michael needs to learn about economics. It is fairly basic principle of economics that if the price for any elastic product goes down - and games are unquestionably an product with elastic demand - the number of people who will buy that product will increase. The reason that people are buying games second handed, or downloaded them, is partially because they don’t feel the product is worth the full, new retail price. Sure, you’re always going to have people who steal it. But its a mistake that to equate a pirated copy with a sale lost. Many of those people downloaded it because, well, you don’t need to be very interested in a product if you’re getting it for free. If you happened to offer the game for free in stores, I’d bet they’d be rocketing off the shelves. Anyone who’d gone through basic economics would know this. And honestly, Michael, I’m not suggesting you’re an idiot. I’m suggesting you’re letting the pursuit of all-mighty profit lead you into an unprofitable situation. The most powerful people on Wall Street just went down that very path; no reason to believe yourself immune.
As for the fix, well, I’m sure it will involve more restrict DRM which pisses off consumers, more ten-hour titles, more DLC scams, and a general move towards less giving the consumer less control over how they use their product. Their product. The one they paid you for - but may not pay for in the future, because they’re tired of getting treated like thieves and idiots.
After the nice, healthy rant I posted yesterday, I was willing to give EA a breather - after all, I could always rag on Ubisoft’s desperate attempt to emulate EA in every negative trait possible - but alas, it was not to be. Already faced with one class-action lawsuit over DRM in Spore, EA has now been treated to not one, but two more bits of legal love; the first is over The Sims 2: Bon Voyage and the second concerns Spore Creature Creator. Both of them (like the one over Spore) complain about SecuROM, the DRM software that is installed by virtually any EA game you can pick up today (and quite a few by other companies).
SecuROM is no Starforce, but it has had its detractors, mainly because it insists on keeping itself installed even after the game it is supposed to protect is gone. The case concering The Sims 2: Bon Voyage doesn’t seem particulary interesting, as it is a product which consumers pay for, and it is obvious that EA will argue the software is needed to protect the intellectual rights. In a court fight between a The People and Big Business, Big Business typically wins.
The Spore Creature Creator case, on the other hand, is intriguing. Since it is free software, EA is going to have to stretch to argue the software was needed to protect their intellectual rights. Worse, the EULA for the Creature Creator makes no mention of SecuROM or its potential dangers.
I doubt these will result in any major ramifications for EA, but if even one of the cases turns out well, we’ll have made a step forward. Cross your fingers, folks.
Crysis Warhead is a gorgeous game. It is a hell of a lot of fun, and at times can rival the intensity to be found in games like Half-Life 2. The multi-player offers little new, but it is solid fun, with open-ended levels and lots of vehicular mayhem. Critics everywhere praised the game as one of the better shooters to come out this year, particularly considering that the game only costs thirty dollars or less (about equal to the cost of a hit movie on Blu-Ray). My review of the game, which gave it a 7/10 - in other words, an above average score - was certainly one of the most negative reviews the game received anywhere. In fact, no matter how hard you search Metacritic or Google, you’ll be hard pressed to find anyone who considers the game to be terrible.
Unless you visit Amazon.com.
Cruise over to the online mega-retailer, and you’ll find Crysis Warhead sitting on a two-star score. In the realm of customer reviews, that is absolutely terrible. That is worse than Lego Batman. That is worse than Space Siege. Hell, its even worse than Daikatana - and no one from the Crysis Warhead development team ever threatened to make us their bitch.
Obviously, something has gone wrong. Something has caused 233 customers to, on average, score one of the best shooters of the year worse than an amusing but childish adventure, a terrible action-RPG, and a piece of software that works better as a joke than a video game. Fortunately, there isn’t much need to dig in deep and research the issue; the reviews that are posted on Amazon.com make the problem very, very clear.
According to Anthony75:
Well I would have gladly bought this game, played some of it on a friends pc and found it pretty fun and obviously beautiful looking…but now this DRM business has gotten out of control. For the first time I’m taking a serious stand against gaming companies that use these kind of measures, all my support will go to the ones that respect the customer.
Erik J. Meyer expands on the idea in his review:
I always pay for games. The only crack I ever use is a No CD crack, because I hate switching disks. I will never buy another EA game though (and I’ve spent hundreds on them over the years) unless they stop treating honest consumers like criminals. The draconian DRM they inflict upon us does NOTHING to stop actual piracy, but is an onerous burden to those who DO pay.
Yes, that’s right. If you pirate the game (which is apparently widely available on BitTorrent sites) your copy is far superior to what we honest folks actually pay for. The stolen version has no DRM. What you buy is loaded with the worst of it.
Read through the reviews, and you’ll see variations on these comments repeating for page after page. These gamers, some of whom have purchased the game, and some of whom have not, are pissed. And they want everyone to know it. Even the good reviews can’t seem to ignore the anti-DRM mob which is swarming the retailer, resulting in comments such as:
So a lot of people say don’t get this game because you can only install it 5 times… well big whoop.
Big whoop, indeed. It is impossible to say what kind of effect this sort of negative publicity is having on sales of the game, but it can’t possibly be a good one. Amazon.com is the internet’s largest retailer, a go-to spot for finding virtually any product at a decent price. At the very least, the reviews are making it clear to anyone who might buy the game that purchasing and installing Crysis Warhead might cause more of a headache than the average person wants to deal with. EA’s response to the anger has been largely to brush it off, a position that is made clear in dealing with the Spore DRM fiasco (the DRM on Spore is nearly identical to that on Crysis Warhead). This postion is somewhat understandable - afterall, with EA owning so many of today’s most popular titles, its hard to not buy their products. But on the other hand, Crysis Warhead currently ranks 22nd on Amazon.com’s list of most popular PC games - right behind Crazy Machines:The Wacky Contraptions Game - which, by the way, has received far better consumer reviews.
But wait, there’s less! Crysis Warhead is not the only title to be hit by the flurry of DRM-inspired negative reviews. In fact, the problem seems to currently be spreading across all of EA’s offerings, from Red Alert 3 to the PC version of Mass Effect. Two-star reviews currently plague these titles, as well. And EA isn’t the only company being hit: Ubisoft’s Far Cry 2, which also uses strict DRM (including activation limits), has been hurt as well.
I’d like to say that the efforts of these Amazon.com review-heads will cause game industry leaders to change their minds, but we all know that isn’t going to happen. Like the RIAA, piracy-obsessed publishers have decided on the wrong-headed view that sliding sales are the result of freeloaders, not the fact that downloading an illegal copy of a game typically results in a piece of software that is easier to install and use than what you’ll find in a retail box.
Even so, we should all praise the efforts of those consumers who are making their disappointment visible, even if the majority of such comments are repetitive and poorly written. At the end of the day, it isn’t blogs like this that will decide of gaming companies change to a more consumer-friendly business plan, but rather the voices and cash of the consumers. So go on - join in the with the other Amazon revolutionaries, and let the game industry know what you think.
The Honest Game is your source for information about digital rights management, corporate scams, and shady deals.
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