The "Gamer's Bill of Rights" and the Future of DRM
I wrote this in August of last year:I should receive notification when a copy protection program installs itself. I should be told its name. I should also receive notification every time it connects to the Internet, and if it sends data, I should be told what it's sending. If I uninstall the game, and I have no other game using this method of copy protection, then the copy protection program should be fully and completely removed from my system. Completely.
...The biggest problem, of course, is that we have no rights as consumers. Nothing's spelled out on the box in regards to this kind of bullshit, and we can't return the game.
Last Thursday, Brad Wardell of Stardock released this:
We the Gamers of the world, in order to ensure a more enjoyable experience, establish equality between players and publishers, and promote the general welfare of our industry hereby call for the following:
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 adequately play 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 express 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.
Is this self-serving and a thinly-diguised marketing effort to promote Stardock? Yes. Is it also dead-on in almost every case? Yes. In other words, it's both self-serving and correct.
What I think is most interesting about this is that someone from inside the gaming industry who's published this list. Yes, you can say that Stardock is on the periphery of the gaming industry, but they're making award-winning, complex games for the PC, and those games are selling very well.
Because of that, this is awkward for the gaming industry. It's not some food-encrusted blogger with no life ranting about the gaming industry (hey, I resent my own characterization of myself)-- it's someone inside saying what everyone outside has been saying for years.
Really, the only thing the gaming industry can do is ignore this, because trying to argue that any of this is unreasonable is almost impossible. Well, except the point about meaningful updates, because I don't expect any meaningful updates for a game that's been released in a finished state.
In a marketing sense, this is a brilliant move. It's the "little man" developer standing up to the "big man." It crystallizes the "we're on your side" position that Stardock has been promoting to the consumer for years.
I'm very curious to see if anyone in the gaming industry responds in any substantive way. I doubt it very much, but if they do, it should be very interesting.
That's the short view.
The long view, though, is potentially much more interesting. I read an article yesterday titled The On-line Music Ripoff (thanks for the link, Sirius), and in the article DRM was described as a "disaster." I think that's fair, but what's particularly important to note is that it's been a disaster for both consumers and the music industry. Would anyone have predicted three years ago that Amazon would be offering DRM-free music on their website? I doubt it, because the music industry slogan seemed to be "to the death with DRM."
It's a funny thing about death, though--the closer it gets, the better compromise looks, and the music industry found itself faced with a strange paradox: while DRM undoubtedly reduced the number of people who stole music, it also reduced the number of people who bought music. Industry growth was anemic, and the only real driver remaining was digital music.
Here's the takeaway: crisis drives change.
In the gaming industry, PC gaming DRM is in much the same cluster-*uck situation that the music industry's been in for years. There are so many different standards for copy protection that it's impossible to even catalogue them all, seemingly. DRM on the consoles works because its turnkey to the consumer, but on the PC, it's anything but that. We never know what the hell is getting installed on our systems or what it's doing, and that pisses most of us off.
It's so bad, in fact, that what we desperately need as consumers is a game database that lists the form of copy protection used for every existing and upcoming release. It would spell out exactly what gets installed by each copy protection scheme, and it would tell us under what situations a program gets activated or tries to pass information back to the publisher.
It's very difficult, on the surface, to believe that PC game publishers would ever abandon the present system. And for now, that's true, because the gaming industry is still growing every year. When the lean times come, though, and they will, the gaming industry will go through the same kind of painful self-examination that the music industry's gone through.
Look, the goal of gaming publishers is to make money. It's business. No matter what they say about philosophies and fairness, none of that matters a bit. What matters is the long green. Gaming publishers actually have more possibilities for post-purchase revenue, by far, than music companies, and at some point, I think they're going to start focusing on the size of the pie instead of protecting individual slices.
If somehow DRM does survive for the next five years, I think it survives because a universal standard is adopted by the industry. In other words, one application that gets installed on the PC, not half a dozen from different companies. Anything else, in the long run, is going to fail.
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