Wow, WhistleBlowerZero was actually right.

I normally like to focus my ramblings on MMOs, but every once and awhile I'll dig into an issue that I think will have a broad effect on the entire gaming market. Notice my obsessive following of the DRM debacle for Spore. Still I try to limit myself from doing these kind of posts too often and boring everyone. If you follow any of the regular gaming news sites then you probably remember the story about the disgruntled ex-GameStop employee. After getting a new job he decided to make a series of YouTube videos which highlight the way GameStop stores are run. It's a fascinating series of videos that grabs the attention in much the same way as a brutal car accident. Several practices he described were downright immoral and a couple were probably illegal in some states.

The videos are done in the same style as Zero Punctuation and used photoshop images to successfully be entertaining while highlighting questionable GameStop practices. The one that most stuck in my mind was that employees were encouraged not to ask questions when people came in with multiple sealed copies of a new game. It was obvious that they were stolen, but the store made a huge profit reselling them since the "sellers" always wanted cash. You see GameStop buys games at two different price points. You get a bad deal if you just want store credit, but you get a really horrible deal if you actually want cash. Some of the descriptions of these "sellers" from the ex-GameStop employee were quite vivid. I especially like the point where he said there was just something wrong about a crackhead selling stolen goods in a store filled with 14 year old kids.

Anyways either someone was watching those videos or the world just loves big coincidences. By way of Kotaku I came across a story about a police sting on GameStop stores in Memphis. Undercover officers had no problems selling video games to clerks even after they made it clear they were stolen. It apparently happened enough that the police arrested eight different clerks. The regional GameStop VP had to suspend the practice of buying used games in Memphis area stores and I wouldn't be surprised if there was some sort of investigation. Still if the videos of WhistleBlowerZero are to believed then dealing in stolen property is only the tip of the iceberg.

So how does this affect MMOs in any way whatsoever? Well it's a long convoluted chain of thought but the basic premise is that MMOs alone can't keep the PC market afloat. It's great news that MMOs are immune to piracy and a company will never try to slap restrictive DRM on one. However, the massive amounts of money that used game stores make are the main driving factor for invasive DRM schemes. It's not that piracy is an issue as much as sharing and trading software. Companies like EA hate the used game market in a manner very similar to how MMO publishers hate gold farmers. They both see the practice as someone making a lot of easy money off a product they developed. Stories like the one about the GameStop sting operation probably encourage tougher and more draconian types of DRM for both console and PC games.


Update: WhistleBlowerZero's account has since been suspended by YouTube and all 9 videos he made removed. Will look for another place where they are linked. Copyright is not an issue here, though a defamation lawsuit by GameStop could be.

Video Games Almost Mainstream

It's nice to see the news media not putting a negative spin on a video game story even though the two industries have long been arch enemies. Still it's pretty hard to shine a negative light on the recent study conducted by the Pew Research Center. I guess they could frighten older viewers with the study's finding that 97% of teenagers in America play video games. But quite frankly that's getting old. Most parents who aren't completely nuts know that video games don't turn children into vicious, psycho killers. Only politicians who like appealing to reliable senior citizen voters still spout out such nonsense and associate video games with things like laziness, low intelligence, and violence.

If you think I'm wrong just look at the recent primary season where several candidates tried to drum up votes by making such claims. Even the youngest guy running has gone on about how video games make today's youth lazy. It's been standard practice to do this since the game Mortal Kombat first caught the attention of politicians. Luckily, things have changed in recent years to give the video game industry a better degree of respectability. The number one factor has to be the huge amount of money game releases like Grand Theft Auto IV and Halo 3 have brought in. When you have an industry that all of a sudden makes more money then Hollywood you can't help, but realize its not the whipping boy it use to be.

That's not to say that some people don't continue to scare uneducated parents with imaginary threats to their children. Not too long ago we had the Virgina Tech shootings which drew every pop psychologist and psycho claiming that the killer had been trained on video games. Of course this proved false and in fact the killer was probably more influenced by the wide media attention such school shootings always attract. It's not just violence either the media also loves to jump on any kind of sexual reference in a video game. Even though games are often much less sexual then a PG-13 movie they often have scenes blown out of proportion.

Who can forget the Mass Effect coverage on FOX News where they didn't even try to get any of their facts straight. I particularly thought the SexBox title was hilarious, but it displayed such a staggering amount of ignorance that my head hurt. Thankfully, if there's one thing the Pew study showed is that video games are well on their way to becoming mainstream. Ten years from now it will be impossible for the same kind of story to be aired by any news outlet. Of course by then I'm sure my generation will be worrying about how dangerous virtual reality pods are to our children.

P.S. Also interesting to note is that the Pew study found that MMOs were played by around 21% of teenage gamers.

Gamer Bill of Rights

The disappointing performance of E3 this year continues to be highlighted by the success of other gaming conventions that have risen to higher prominence in recent years. PAX is perhaps one of the most well known and often has a lot of demos for upcoming games which fans are happy to eat up. Also the convention has gained a reputation as a place for smaller publishers to announce press releases to a large fan based audience. You're not going to find next year's release schedule for EA or Square-Enix being announced at PAX, but interesting information does surface. This year one story that caught my eye was that Stardock was pushing the adoption of a Gamer's Bill of Rights. With the fight between pirates and the video game industry intensifying it often seems like the average gamer is caught between a rock and a hardplace.

The amount of DRM that is acceptable to put on a game has been slowly increasing and causing headaches for customers. Also there seems to be a decrease in quality and innovation as sequels and companies that specialize in them have made a fortune in lackluster games. Huge marketing budgets for threatening and bribing review sites have become standard practice as seen with last year's gamespot scandal. Even MMO's are affected since it's become standard practice with a lot of companies to lie about what features will be in the game at release. Should Blizzard have been able to talk about the Black Temple to reviewers when it wasn't patch in until much later? Should Age of Conan been able to advertise their "PvP" mechanics even though most them still have been implemented?

The Gamer's Bill of Rights seems to address these issues and it would be nice if it was widely adopted by game publishers.

1. Gamers shall have the right to return games that don’t work with their computers for a full refund.
2. Gamers shall have the right to demand that games be released in a finished state.
3. Gamers shall have the right to expect meaningful updates after a game’s release.
4. Gamers shall have the right to demand that download managers and updaters not force themselves to run or be forced to load in order to play a game.
5. Gamers shall have the right to expect that the minimum requirements for a game will mean that the game will play adequately on that computer.
6. Gamers shall have the right to expect that games won’t install hidden drivers or other potentially harmful software without their consent.
7. Gamers shall have the right to re-download the latest versions of the games they own at any time.
8. Gamers shall have the right to not be treated as potential criminals by developers or publishers.
9. Gamers shall have the right to demand that a single-player game not force them to be connected to the Internet every time they wish to play.
10. Gamers shall have the right that games which are installed to the hard drive shall not require a CD/DVD to remain in the drive to play.

Most of these are hard to apply to the MMO industry except for the one about games not being released in a finished state. We're real familiar with that one. The problem of course is that MMOs in general seem to be horribly managed and the ones that are released in a finished state are often the most expensive to produce. In my time with the genre I think only World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings, and Guild Wars fit the definition of being finished at release. The vast majority of games in the MMO genre often release with missing or broken content in the hopes that initial box sales will fund the development hours required to patch the game. This is why I think so many MMOs are guilty of overspending on marketing and fudging on their feature list so they can produce hype.

We'll have to wait and see if this Gamer Bill of Rights gains any traction within the industry. It would be nice to see more finished products in the MMO industry and a generally lessening of DRM controls for PC games. I believe Warhammer will release very stable, but it has the large budget which makes such an accomplishment easier to pull off. I'm not so sure that smaller games like Stargate Worlds and Jumpgate Evolution could justify balancing their budget towards a period of polishing the game before release. After all, there's very little motivation to make a polished product unless gamers change their spending habits. If we keep pre-ordering unfinished games like Age of Conan or putting up with harmful DRM like SecuRom we're denying that we want any rights as game consumers.