Did Spore DRM Cost Electronic Arts $25 Million?

Staci Kramer wrote an interesting take on the fact that Spore was apparently the most heavily pirated game in history — there were an estimated 500,000 downloads of cracked versions of the game from BitTorrent sites. At $50 apiece, Kramer’s take is that Electronic Arts left $25 million on the table in its efforts to make the DRM as draconian as possible.

Normally I’d take something like Kramer’s analysis with a grain of salt. I suspect a very large percentage of folks who downloaded the game from BitTorrent would have done so regardless of the DRM scheme that EA had in place. Moreover, aren’t anti-DRM folks always making the case that illegal downloads can drive real world sales, so EA may in fact pick up customers who download the game, try it out, and decide its worth $50.

That said, it was nice to see how quickly EA backpedaled. First they caved on the ridiculous three install limit. Then they had to switch gears on their one account per registration key nonsense. If they’re smart (and this is EA we’re talking about so who knows) they’ll wait until December and announce a Christmas present patch that removes the Securom DRM which obviously caused so much trouble to all those folks who uploaded crack versions to BitTorrent.

Given the bad publicity, EA would be smart to rethink its approach to DRM in time for the Sims 3 release (currently scheduled for February 29, 2009). That and maybe get WIll Wright to actually finish Spore so its actually a playable game rather than a half-assed tech demo for an amazing set of content creation tools.

Stupid EB Games

There’s an EB Games store near where I work. I usually don’t shop there because I can’t stand the layout of this particular store. But I was in a hurry yesterday, so in between a bunch of other errands after work I stopped into pick up a copy of The Sims 2: Nightlife expansion.

I wasn’t surprised when the guy behind the counter told me that they don’t do returns on opened PC software due to piracy. It is a stupid policy, IMO, but whatever.

I became rather pissed off, however, when I realized that this applied to defective media as well. But there’s an out for those of us (like me) concerned about defective media — for an additional $3, they’ll “guarantee” the media against defects and allow such returns.

At which point a two word phrase came to mind which starts with “f” and ends with “off.”

Even Best Buy’s terms aren’t that stupid.

Sims 2

Hurried out of work yesterday and straight to the local software shop for my copy of Sims 2. The game’s been getting outstanding reviews, and it deserves every one of them. Last night I went to bed around 11 p.m., but my Lisa was up until close to 1 a.m. decorating and designing her Sims’ house. Since I’ve got the only computer in the house that has the necessary power to run the game, I can see getting kicked off my computer a lot until I break down and get her a more modern machine.

Highlights:

– You need a relatively new computer to get decent performance. I’ve got a P4 2.8 with 1.5 gbs of RAM, a 7,200 RPM HD, but only a PCI Nvidia. Still, not a bad system, but I had to crank down most of the nice effects to get decent frame rates. I’m assuming a new PCI-Express card will solve most of the slowdowns I receive, and a system like mine can be had for less than $1,000 these days, but I don’t think older systems are going to cut it.

– My number one gripe with The Sims — the way it handled add-ons and custom content — has been addressed very well with an in-game content browser and an installer package system that makes it very simple to get content downloaded off the Internet into the game.

– I was really looking forward to the option to record on-screen video, especially since I’ve had quite a bit of success using FRAPS to do this in Unreal Tournament. Using the video capture option at any decent level, however, simply destroyed system performance even if I switched to 800×600 and turned everything off. One thing I strongly disliked about The Sims 2 implementation is the game currently forces you to record video to the same drive that the game is running on as far as I can tell. Stupid. Let me write the video file to my secondary HD to reduce the primary drive’s churning.

– Graphics look great, gameplay with new system of aspirations/fears is an excellent improvement over the original game.

All around, this is a game that is going to suck away considerable hours of my life over the next couple years.

The Sims 2 Fans: We Want Our DRM

On September 17, Electronic Arts will finally release The Sims 2. I’m going to buy a new desktop later this month specifically so I can run it when it comes out (my laptop doesn’t have the requisite 3D hardware needed to run the game).

One of the things that made The Sims such a great game was all of the custom content that users made and uploaded to fan sites. Getting the custom content to work could be tricky in some cases, though, so Maxis really overhauled the in-game method for downloading and managing custom content. EA itself will host a Showcase area where users can upload and download custom content for the game. In the opinion of some custom content creators, however, Maxis and EA have gone too far and made it too easy to get content in and out of The Sims 2.

This thread at The Sims Resource is one long rant by those who want to create custom content for the game that boils down to this — Maxis didn’t build any sort of digital rights management into the game, so anybody can steal or take credit for someone else’s creation rather easily. Just as with any other moddable game out there.

The funniest examples are those who are upset at the idea that people might take credit for their rip-off of copyrighted characters. One person, for examples, offers up the horrific example of someone stealing a popular Gollum character skin and falsely taking credit for it. The poster downloads the skin and uploads it to show just how easy such “theft” is using EA’s Showcase (and no one in the thread mentions the obvious hypocrisy in that particular worry.)

Others propose the sort of bizarre DRM schemes that only the RIAA could love. So, for example, a couple of people float copyright flag suggestions where each uploaded file would have a flag that creators could set that would allow the creation to be downloaded but not uploaded again. Right, because the same folks who will have cracks for the game CD the day The Sims 2 is released will find writing utilities to reset those flags completely beyond their ability. Such a system would be hacked and cracked by the end of the first week of release.

There are a number of variants and alternatives to that system that all involve programs checking and storing copyright metadata, all of which would be hacked ridiculously quickly and simply interfere with legitimate uses of the program.

The change has real world financial consequences. One of the reasons that there is so much carping is that a number of fan sites planned to pay for bandwidth charges, etc., by charging visitors for access to exclusive content for The Sims 2 that could only be downloaded from that site. There are a number of excellent sites like Sim Freaks that use this model for The Sims.

But with the Showcase area and now DRM for custom content files, someone could simply download files from sites like that and instantaneously upload them to the EA Showcase area. I doubt EA is going to want to do any serious policing of the Showcase and, if it is smart, will included an EULA that basically grants the company at the least nonexclusive rights to all custom content to avoid having to worry about this.

Of course the EULA for the building tools is quite clear that they are offered for producing non-commercial mods, so these sites don’t really have much to complain about. Frankly, though, don’t think they have much to worry about. If I’m serious enough about the game to be willing to track down sites like Sim Freaks, I’m going to be willing to pay to have all of that excellent content in one place — there is, after all, a huge opportunity cost to wading through the large numbers of repetitive and uninteresting materials that will inevitably be posted by newbies and others in EA’s official Showcase area.

One thing that the thread didn’t mention but is closely related is how EA is going to react to copyright-infringing materials being posted on the Showcase. I have on my hard drive, for example, dozens of skins for The Sims that are various characters from Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. Want a Season 3 Willow and a Season 7 Anya? I’ve got ’em. Is EA going to look the other way at posting those sorts of skins and custom content (especially since some companies, especially comic book companies, have of late been cracking down on unlicensed custom content for computer games, apparently out of ridiculous fears that it dilutes the value of their licensed games). With 17,000+ Sims uploaded to the Showcase area a full two months before the game’s scheduled release, they’re going to have a nice headache on their hands with these sorts of issues.

The Mod Culture: Game Mods, Fan Fiction, and Chaucer

Slashdot.Org linked to a Popular Science story about people who mod computer games. Frankly, the article itself is rather boring if you already know about modding, but what did strike me as interesting was the questions that were left unasked and unanswered in the closing paragraph of the article,

Not all game companies are open-minded about mods. Console manufacturers like Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo, which rely on game-disc sales and fear knockoffs, have yet to create a means for gamers to get under the hood of their titles, though that doesn’t stop them from trying. Microsoft’s PC-code-based Xbox, in particular, has the hackers salivating.

In fact there are also PC computer games who actively work to prevent people from modding their software. Roller Coaster Tycoon is the best example I can think of off the top of my head, where patches to that game were intentionally designed to prevent modding. Somebody would write a nice utility or mod and a new patch would be released that would break the mod.

Modding exemplifies the ongoing and ever-intensifying clash over who will control popular culture. What (most) game companies have discovered is that people who buy computer games do not simply want to play those games, but they also want to use games as a platform for their own self-expression.

In the past, companies have used intellectual property laws to keep people from telling their own sorts of tales this way. Fox and Paramount, for example, have both been activity involved in threatening and occasionally suing people who created web sites based on intellectual property they owned such as Star Trek or The Simpsons. For awhile, TSR — the original publishers of the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game — tried actively to prevent the publication of third party material on the Internet.

From there it is just a short jump to some of the media reaction to the Internet. Surprisingly, “deep linking” (a completely redundant term) is still controversial. Organizations from National Public Radio to The Dallas Morning News and others have used both technical and legal means to try to assert control over how, when and by whom their content is viewed and/or commented on.

One of the interesting things that Popular Science misses in its almost-exclusive focus on mods for first person shooters such as Quake and Half-Life is that many people use computer mods as a sort of high-tech fan fiction.

My favorite computer game of the moment, for example, is Freedom Force — a squad-level superhero game that is highly moddable. The actual game featured a set of completely new superheroes, but user-created mods have tended to focus on well-known characters. There is, for example, an excellent 6-mission mod featuring the Fantastic Four and another featuring the Justice League of America. And, inevitably, somebody even created a Buffy mod.

The same thing goes for The Sims where not a few people used skins and other add-ons freely available on the Internet to simply use the game as a backdrop for telling stories they posted on the Internet.

The problem for companies that are in the popular culture business and want to stop this sort of thing is that it is becoming easier every day for computer users to create original content that is derivative of copyrighted material.

On the computer game mod front, for example, many companies are devoting a significant amount of the game development time to making it easy to create mods (so easy, in fact, that even I can do it). But across the board, it is becoming easier every year for someone to buy a CD or DVD or book and to use that as a starting point for new and unauthorized tales.

The response from companies, of course, is to try to slap a lid on that either legally or through technological changes to computers that would make try to make them locked boxes when it comes to copyrighted materials.

I don’t think any of that will work because I those companies underestimate just how powerful a pull this sort of thing is. I have a friend who is a very successful newspaper columnist who has a couple books under her belt a gig at a national newspaper. Several months ago she sent me a link to her new web site, and lo and behold next to links to all of her serious writings was a section devoted to story after story of Xena fan fiction.

It is just human nature to both want to listen to stories and tell, re-tell, and rewrite stories. In fact some of the greatest works of art involve such copying and adding, except if it happened today I get the feeling that Boccaccio and Petrarch would have hired lawyers to send cease and desist letters to Chaucer. Our culture would have certainly been the worse had they had to deal with the sort of rigid intellectual property laws that are now commonplace. Hopefully we will yet prevent companies from eviscerating that sort of borrowing and experimentation.