I know this probably sounds like paranoia, but sometimes I wonder if there’s some people predisposed to dislike the forthcoming Fallout 3. Yes, I realise what you’re thinking: But this is from Bethesda, who make those incredibly popular Elder Scrolls games, and the Fallout series is excellent and deserves a new game from a stand-out development team. But despite all this, my gut just tells me that there’s a dissenting voice, quiet as it might be, out there. While I’m here, another prediction: I think DRM will soon become a hot-button issue amongst PC gamers. Time will prove this. I laugh to think what would happen if you combined the two topics, were my instincts to prove correct.
Wait, what’s this?
Fallout 3 will have minimum DRM. Possibly just a disc-check. And no install limits. As with Oblivion, Bethesda don’t intend to impose any mad restrictions on their legitimate customers. That’s rather lovely. But they’re still concerned by the subject. Talking to Shack, Pete Hines explained,
“[It's] pretty similar to what we did for Oblivion, which was – we basically don’t do any – we do the mildest form possible… We try to be really non-invasive when it comes to that stuff. And it is a pain in the ass – it is a pain in the ass that we have to do it at all in the first place. But when you spend tens of millions of dollars, we don’t think it’s right to just put something out there and let everybody do whatever they want and pass it around.”
I like this response. It’s not, “RAH RAH IMPRISON THEM ALL!”, but more a reluctant, “Oh, I wish they wouldn’t.” He continues,
“But no, we’re pretty mild about how we do it, and we try to do it in a way that prevents folks from exploiting and distributing our games that we worked very hard on, and that we feel we have a right to try and sell and not have distributed free without our okay. It’s very important for us not to ruin the experience for the person who did buy a copy, so we try to be very careful.”
It’s then confirmed that there will be no install limit on the game either. Hurrah! It’s worth reading the whole, interesting interview. (And of course to read our own with the man). There’s more discussion of piracy, which we all love to talk about so much. And they go on to discuss the nature of developing for the PC, and all that sort of thingamy.
Related Stories:
@Maximum Fish
It is a tangible good. A game is a discrete blob of code which runs and does a particular thing. A book is a collection of specific words in a certain order, etc.. They’re not tangible in the sense that you can touch them, they’re not physical (though they are partly appreciated physically (via the senses)), but they are tangible in that we can understand them as meaningfully separate from the rest of existence. They are not pure ideas like earlier public goods such as a particular religious/cultural practise or belief, for instance.
Property rights have been about since the Sumerians, aye. But there have been huge gaps. And even if it was a continuous tradition, that only represents about 10% of our existence. And I meant specifically in relation to authorship, which you skipped over. And which is a very new idea.
“The idea that only people who can afford things should be made to pay for them, …”
I didn’t say they should be made to. I said I see them as having a moral obligation (under certain circumstances).
I didn’t suggest that any agent should go out and collate this stuff. Of course that would be impracticable.
“And besides, who has a gaming computer and cable internet but is too poor to by a $50 game?”
I didn’t say too poor, although to answer that: many children. Many families/households who have a computer+net for work/their childrens’ homework etc. but don’t have the disposable income for games. There are places where some games are just not sold.
Back to the money thing. You suggest money is just a proxy for the exchange of labour… do you really think that? What’s the relative value of the labour of a videogame programmer compared to, say, a baker? Once enough games have been paid for to cover the coder’s labour should subsequent copies be given away for free? Or should a cabinet maker be compensated for the fact that the fruits of her labour are not infinitely replicable for very little cost?
The point running through all this is that we’ve never had goods that can be considered tangible/discrete, with authorship and ownership assertions attached to them and which can be replicated and disseminated (electronically) potentially infinitely for no cost.
When we last had such cultural units, authorship was not asserted or even really thought of much if at all.
I think we’re coming at this with opposing values and we’ll have to agree to disagree on some of these details. But it’s nice that we agree to an extent and share certain hopes/views.
Regarding Games for Windows Live, the criticisms about it in earlier games are well deserved. But Microsoft has scaled back their ambitions for GFWL; it shouldn’t be above the level of ‘fancy matchmaker’ for the newer games with it like FO3 and DOW2.
Copyright is a legal monopoly (albeit a very narrowly tailored one), not a property right. The primary justification, aside from rent-seeking by interested parties, is that it allows people to profit from creative works who might otherwise be unable to do so, which increases the number of creative works available, which benefits society. However, since society doesn’t really benefit if the monopoly power prices the works out of reach of many of society’s members, the monopoly privilege eventually expires (unlike an actual property right).
Not only is copyright not a basic right, left unchecked it is a threat to more politically critical rights. Copyright fundamentally functions by imposing a restriction on the right to free expression/freedom of the press (and any other mass media). Many “fair use” exclusions to copyright are intended to mitigate this aspect and limit copyright to its function as an economic incentive — by preventing copyright holders from abusing this privilege to quash political discussion of a work or unfavorable reviews of a book, for example. More to the point, if copyright is pushed to its logical extremes (say, charging people statutory infringement penalties for singing along with the radio or littering their internet posts with pop culture quotes), it becomes ludicrous, and the vast majority of people would be better off with no copyright and fewer works that were at least accessible.
Some degree of copyright law is a positive-sum market intervention; anything beyond that purpose (say, retroactive copyright extensions) is just welfare, except that most of the benefit accrues not to starving artists, but to wealthy content industry executives and investors.
This may be way off topic by now, but this is a pretty awesome discussion, so…
You have more than a ‘moral obligation’ to pay for something, regardless of whether or not you are able. You have a legal obligation too, whether you believe this is justified or not.
And besides, morality is just glorified social conditioning anyways, just another tool used to get people doing what you (or society rather) need them to be doing. Just like law. The only difference in fact is one acts on the instinct for self preservation, the other on a classically-conditioned guilt response. Either obligation serve the same end.
There is a reason that both of these prohibit theft, or use of a public good without paying, and it isn’t ‘old-fashioned’ notions of justice or fairness, that’s putting the chicken before the egg (i think i used that right?), these are just rationalizations for what is a functional system. For the system to work, people need to pay for things, to exchange rather than to take, regardless of what the can do.
And yes, i do believe that money is simply a proxy for labor. I think just about every economic thinker, across the spectrum- from Marx to Friedman, would -and has- agreed. Think of it this way (I’ll try to keep this from balooning too bad…): In the most basic anarchistic state, a human being having the desire to survive has a few basic needs. He/she needs food, water, shelter, etc.. Shelter must be built -labor, food must either be hunted or foraged -labor. Once procured these things have value to this person, and that value can be seen as roughly equivalent to the effort required to produce them, no more and no less (if they were less valuable, they wouldn’t have done it).
To take this (back) into the piracy argument, think of the vegetarian alternative: so rather than hunting, you’re eating a bunch of fruit and vegetables and shit. But you don’t know what out there will sustain you and what will kill you, or at least make you sick. This knowledge then has value as well.
And the person down the way who knows this, only does because he’s eaten the good and the bad, gotten shit-sick before and probably almost died. This information then also takes the value of the labor that produced it (modified by the risks), and yet standard price theory would call it valueless, as it has -once procured- an infinite supply.
But why go to this effort, why risk you life for something that has no value? Especially when you can simply wait for someone else to do it, and “buy” it from them for nothing. This is called “social loafing” (among other things), and is the same thing that explains why people can be murdered in public without anyone intervening. The end result is that nobody does anything.
You won’t produce something via effort when it can be (conceivably) attained without effort, even if it would be worthwhile for you to do it alone. It’s basic game theory, every other player is in the same situation as you, and everyone knows this, and so the game gridlocks.
But this is obviously not the case, as this information does have value to someone. Every form of monetizing (what i do for a living actually…), be it tort litigation or economic modeling, operates on the theory that an object, service or piece of information assumes whatever value people would be willing to pay for it.
If it has value to someone, it has value. The point is that just because you can take something without paying and not exclude anyone else for that something, does not invalidate the need for payments to begin with. And it doesn’t work as half-in/half-out thing. It all comes down to the idea of the “tragedy of the commons”, that when the benefits for an action go solely to the person taking the action, and the negative consequences are shared among all participants, the system is not stable.
In the example, both farmers let more and more of their cows graze on shared land until it is overgrazed and useless to both. The game theory optimal strategy for both sides becomes the untenable and self-destructive one. Anyways, I apologize for meandering like this…
@perilisk
It’s not just creative works in a arts/culture sense though, it’s industry innovation, etc., the same principle behind drug patents and sole sourcing contracts (like for ISPs). In a competitive world marketplace, the value of this becomes greater. I guess that’s probably what you meant anyways though…
But yeah, copyrights should only be necessary long enough to allow companies a window to recoupe investment plus a return in excess of opportunity costs. But people can never be expected to do something from which the stand nothing to gain (again in excess of opportunity costs), which is why legitimized piracy would stop the creation of games entirely (the big ones at least).
I find it hilarious how any mention of the F game is the the equivalent of kicking an anthill.
I don’t think that any first person shooter has been equally controversial.
Loved Fallout 1 & 2… and Morrowind. So much so that I upgraded my pc and got Oblivion as soon as it came out, much to my gf’s dismay at the time.
It’s still sitting on my bookshelf, cd/dvd and all. I couldn’t quite finish the game half way.
So…as far as marketing is concerned, Bethesda got my money from Oblivion.
Did I get my money’s worth? I don’t think so.
Will I purchase another game from Bethesda? Not likely.
Then comes Fallout 3. It’s tricky, because I loved Fallout 1 and 2…but it’s from a company that lost my respect. And it’s advertising that Fallout 3 is much more of the same as Oblivion. Big ouch for me.
I think I will wait and check out the review before shelling out my money. May be a month or so, to give enough time for all parties.
If review isn’t stellar, I think I will spend that money on DeathSpank instead. Probably cheaper too.
Bethsoft : Human after all
Not interesting or particularly pertinent but I reinstalled Oblivion lately after an enormous HD crash and sagely decided to use the no-CD patch after install to avoid ramjet noises from my CD drive.
Then I realised I had to install my DLC bits and pieces. But I was not allowed, because of my no-CD :(
I don’t know what this all means, but deep down I am at peace.
I’ll be waiting for reviews/general feedback before buying this, mainly to find out if Bethesda bothered hiring proper writers this time round.
@Vault 88
I’d be really interested in finding out what proportion of torrentors (torrenters?) fall into the “would have purchased if they couldn’t pirate” camp. I suspect the numbers might be lower than expected. I’ve known lots of people that torrent games and don’t even bother to install them. I think torrent downloads are much, much higher than real market demand (meaning desire to buy and ability to purchase ofc) for PC games – but this is just based on my personal experience with pirates.
As for the “could pirate, but just plain don’t” camp, I don’t think this is a very large group. Maybe if you expand it to “could pirate, but don’t always” you’d take in a bigger proportion of the PC gaming crowd, but imho claims about total piracy abstention are fairly rare (except among commentators in piracy comments threads of course!).
“And yes, i do believe that money is simply a proxy for labor. I think just about every economic thinker, across the spectrum- from Marx to Friedman, would -and has- agreed.”
Marx, maybe. Free market types aren’t about the labor theory of value, and think money is a proxy for utility (which, being dependent on individual circumstance and taste, is highly variable for certain types of goods). Ideally, we would perform labor that is valuable, but people aren’t omniscient. Once our way of life is based around self-organizing networks of reciprocity (i.e. trade), we have to guess at what other people will find valuable, and nowhere is this less certain than with creative works. You can expend just as much effort making a shitty game as making a great one.
“As for the “could pirate, but just plain don’t” camp, I don’t think this is a very large group.”
Count me in it. When I was a kid, my parents hated gaming as a hobby, and thus I was limited to whatever I could borrow from friends and sneak onto the family PC (consoles were mostly out of the question). I definitely know how to pirate, and I’ve occasionally grabbed abandonware since, if that even counts.
However, since becoming an adult and getting a job, my situation flipped from “lots of time for games, no financial resources to acquire them legally” to “limited time for games, sufficient resources to purchase enough games to expend that time enjoyably”. Any game that isn’t worth paying for surely isn’t worth spending my time on.
There are people are strongly dedicated to piracy, there are people that are resolutely resistant to its siren call (or that don’t know how to pirate), but I think for a lot of people the formula works like this: there is a certain amount of money they will spend on games, based on their overall income. There are certain number of games they will play, based on their free time. If the number of games they will play substantially exceeds the amount their income will buy, they are likely to become pirates. Of course, if this theory was true, then you could correlate increases in piracy to decreases in the length of games. Interesting avenue of research, for people who give a crap.
will buy. will crack. no prob.
i do this for all my games. all because of one time long ago when i lost my halflife key and they would not let me get a new one. there i learned how to get keygens, play on cracked servers, etc etc.
benefits are no cd scratches, no keys to find, and no clutter around my desktop.
@perilisk
I think your formula is probably right! The interesting thing is that if you assume that people have already spent all their disposable income, and are unlikely to get second jobs so they can earn more (thereby decreasing time available for playing games, and consequently decreasing demand), its hard to argue that this piracy kind of piracy does the market any real harm.
If people have already spent some money on the games they wanted the most, and don’t have any left, and can’t or won’t earn more, and *then* pirate some games on top of that – well you can argue that they are playing stuff they aren’t entitled too, or that the market is distorted because if they really wanted to play more games they should have spent less money on food or sold some of their belongs, or something like that but from the individuals point of view all these things are very abstract, and piracy comes very close to being a victimless crime.
@Above, where I say “its hard to argue that this piracy kind of piracy does the market any real harm”, I probably mean harder, rather than hard.
@perilisk
Yeah, good point. I probably should have said “a proxy for labor, among other things”, rather than “simply a proxy for labor”, which isn’t true. Utility sets the value of something (labor, ownership, whatever) and money is only indirectly a proxy for them, subject to the market’s demand for them.
My point was just that if you expect the value of your labor to be $0 (or even less than the value of an alternative use for you labor and resources), you won’t do it. Thus people need to pay for games for their to be games to pay for.
Just wondering, will there be a demo I can download and play?
@Jin
I hope so, but i don’t think Oblivion had one (?) so i’m not counting on it.
@Maximum Fish
Yeah, I am hoping I can get the feel of the game before I plunge my hard earned time/money…it’s getting more difficult to convince my wife $60 is a ‘norm’ for these kinda games…
To all the folks getting precious about Bethesda making a sequel to the BI Fallout games: when I was in my teens, I really loved a game called Star Control 2. Then Accolade published Star Control 3.
So seriously, STFU about Fallout 3 already.
@ShaunCG: So.. did Accolade mess up SC3 or…? I don’t get your point.
@rest: Sorry for feeding the troll. Anyway…anyone know where I can get wasteland?
Bethesda LIED. securerom is installed as part of this game.
to be honest in a way I think piracy helps produce better games. allot of people I see on torrent sites buy the game if it is any good. I myself will try a game out through a torrent such as fallout 3 and if I like it will go purchase it. (loved it and bought 2 copies to one for pc one for xbox360). but too many games now are sub par at best you go out and spend 70$ on a game and a day latter you feel like you wasted your money. drm is completely worthless pirates will figure out how to crack it in no time even steam games are cracked now and mmo’s are also cracked. so why frustrate the people paying for the game and why spend the money its a futile effort just make a danm good game and people will buy it
Want to go to wow gold guide
Want to go to [url= http://www.enwowgold.com wow gold guide [/url]?
Want to go to tibet tour? You can rely on us! We are expert in Tibet Tours. based in Tibet 15 years experience, 600 private groups operated! So join us for your wondrous tibet travel! Are you interested in mysterious Lhasa travel to tibet? Why not take our Lhasa tibet trekking? You can appreciate the holiness of Lhasa tibet tour guide with our well-connected itinerary and leave a memorable recollection over life. These are China Lhasa packages with personal local and private vehicle with driver + hotels + entrance fees and meals as listed for your party based on minimum 2 travelers. Sects and Characteristics, For single person, please email us for new quotations. For any questions, please feel free to contact our customer team with our prompt and personalized travel services.
九寨沟旅游，这里是最及时的旅游信息网站，四川九寨沟旅游将是你一身最值得纪念的旅途之一。当然还有三亚旅游
good web game in is on the 2366.com