The Future Of Digital Distribution Thread (or, how are we going to get paid)

Games
1

So, I was hanging out at a party tonight. A friend of mine started talking to me about what is going to happen to copyrighted material in the future. We both agreed that making consumers pay through traditional channels is becoming more and more irrational. Piracy is a mainstream phenomenon. Three clicks of the mouse gets you 95% of the entertainment that you normally have to pay for. As hard as content distributors try to make an “uncrackable” product, it will always be compromised and available to the masses for free. Piracy, which was once a highly technical and inaccesable pursuit, has become as easy as firing up a web browser and clicking on a bookmark.

Falling back onto litigation of copyrights in this content-saturated environment is implausable.

My friend’s argument was that all forms entertainment will eventually be incredibly easy to create. He cited YouTube as an early example of how the masses will get all entertainment in the future. Every content creator will have no option but to throw their work onto the net, free for anyone to download. This will create an huge glut of possible entertainment choices… and the overwhelmed consumer will be forced to pay a filtering service to make heads or tails of what is actually worth looking at. This money paid to the filtering service would eventually make it into the hands of the top rated content providers to create further content.

There were obvious problems with his idea which I took issue with, and it lead into an hours long discussion. I’m not going to get into the gist of every point and conterpoint made… but the question still remains:

Given the fact that every form of copyright protection is dead, how will the content providers make any money?

2

Personally, I think that as broadband penetration increases, we’ll see more games with a strong server side component. Games like WoW and Guild Wars are practically pirate-proof and I think that at some point, single player games will start containing part of the game logic on the server side (as opposed to mere server-based authentication) and require a continuous internet connection. Browser-based games (with a server side component) will also be a “safe” and rather easy to produce form of income.

3

In the few hours that it took you to have that conversation and type up that post, over a half a million songs were sold on iTunes. That’s how. You just cater to the market of people who buy things instead of stealing them. Your little party conversation amounts to “How can somebody make money selling sunscreen to shut-ins?”

It’s not going to happen. There’s people who want to buy things, and people who don’t.

You don’t even have to do it all that well. iTunes DRM is a pain. And did you know that if you buy an iTunes song at work, you actually have to move the file yourself to play it at home, instead of re-downloading it?

4

Haha, I remember thinking Hollywood was in trouble when I first saw the TROOPS short. Movie profits are going to drop, but movies at least are way to ingrained into culture to totally die off.

In the few hours that it took you to have that conversation and type up that post, over a half a million songs were sold on iTunes. That’s how.

I know as part of the “IT’S STEALING” crowd you’re totally braindead about warez/piracy. However, MP3 downloads are currently kind of tricky. People generally don’t want to use Kazaa-like p2p because of lawsuits. The safest thing is bittorrent and that has trouble meeting the on-demand request of your average hipster for eclectic old shit.

Bittorrent doesn’t bode well for people who want a top charts song rather than an entire album. That’s the reason it’s happening. To point at iTunes with the state of music piracy is insane, more people would be downloading for free if there was another popular, safe, and easy app out, like Napster. The reason people are paying 10 cents a song for files (I really thought it was right to download) is because it’s the easiest and safest way. It’s sure as fuck not because they have an aneurysm at the thought of MP3 THEFT.

It’s a bit much to assume that even a smattering of the people on itunes share your high minded values of insisting to pay regardless of the shitty revenue scheme that most bands deal with or the shitty DRM forced down your maw. Most people would rather get something for free than not, and it’s not the rugged individualism of the American consumer, it’s that they don’t know any better. As piracy gets safer and easier more people are going to naturally turn to it.

I imagine you’ll probably still be espousing values that no longer apply if it does happen.

Personally, I think that as broadband penetration increases, we’ll see more games with a strong server side component. Games like WoW and Guild Wars are practically pirate-proof and I think that at some point, single player games will start containing part of the game logic on the server side (as opposed to mere server-based authentication) and require a continuous internet connection.

Uh, but there are free WoW servers. That’s effectively WoW being cracked. It’s not enough to have some code on a server, you need to have the reason people play on that server, mainly, other people.

5

I know, but I included that in the “practically pirate-proof” statement. As far as I know, the quality of those servers is rather low compared to the real thing and the percentage of folks playing the game for free is insignificant.

6

Server side game code. I’ve been tempted to implement and patent this system so I can be a bajillionaire, but I care too much about the industry to do that.

Games continue to ship in whatever form necessary; cd, dvd, digital distribution, whatever. But core parts of the game’s logic are stored on a centralized server, and are accessed only by an account specific encryption key. Games require a net connection to play (which is trivial nowadays), and are unplayable without a connection to the central server.

By buying the game and creating an account via registered key, you can play. Without doing so, the game is unplayable, as it would be missing key logic by default.

Theoretically to crack it, you’d need to make a server emulator and populate it with the acquired scripts from a complete playthrough. If the logic can have multiple outcomes based on multiple inputs, it would be extremely difficult and error prone to crack it. I’m sure it would happen, but quality would be questionable at best.

7

This is another way the digital distribution should win: the ability to get absolutely anything at any time. Content. The public space has a short memory, if you don’t get pirated goods shortly after release eventually they won’t be available. Movie, tv, music, and game studios can fight this by making sure their products are available forever.

8

Can be reverse-engineered. It’s not uncrackable. Also, it can only really apply to MMO’s, unless you want to prevent people that own games like Quake and UT from starting their own servers.

9

But “reverse-engineering” in this case means rewriting the whole (or part of) the actual game logic and content. Take, for example a single player adventure game, where all dialog trees and object interactions are on the server-side. It isn’t a matter of just reverse-engineering some protocol or cracking some encryption. You would have to meticulously record and duplicate every single request/response possibility from the “blackbox”-type server.

10

I guess there’s a fine line between braindead and PhD when it comes to warez these days. I mean, you don’t even have to know that it’s thepiratebay.org, piratebay.org will get you there.

Most people? Everyone would. However, most people realize that things aren’t free.

Just because you’ve come to terms with being a dick doesn’t mean that everyone will given half a chance. Piracy is never going to get any easier or safer than it is right now, and everything’s fine.

11

Sorry, I didn’t specify that my idea was only for the single player portion of a game. Also, it’s not exactly playing on a hosted server… 95% of the game would be running locally on your box, so there’d be no issue with ping/lag.

Yes, that’s exactly it. It would require a large amount of both time and work, and there have been studies that have shown that all you need to do is keep a game off the warez channels for a month and you’ll increase your sales by a large margin.

On top of that, my system would allow for a future ‘unlocking’, so once sales die down the devs can flip a switch, all the logic would be given to the client, and then they wouldn’t need the server anymore. To prevent dead game syndrome.

12

Look. People don’t get bittorrent the way they got Napster or Kazaa. This is horrible, I don’t believe I’m explaining why you need to explain bittorrent to someone here. It’s safer, better, and more confusing.

People currently aren’t using anything like Napster (bearshare or whatever) because they don’t think it’s safe. So they’re using the least cost alternative, it’s not that they are ideologically bound to purchase music.

Most people? Everyone would. However, most people realize that things aren’t free.

Look, it’s like apples and computer files here. Totally different things.

Just because you’ve come to terms with being a dick doesn’t mean that everyone will given half a chance.

Haha, I’m hurting people. I’m hurting the ARTISTS! I download and the artists say “YEE-OUCH, cut it out, that smarts”.

Piracy is never going to get any easier or safer than it is right now, and everything’s fine.

Sure!

and, uh, in response to laughing342.gif, bittorrent is fuck all difficult for MP3s. The best trackers(oink) are incredible amounts of time invested. General trackers really don’t provide any regular amount of music. Bearshare is easy sure, however, everyone is scared shitless. I don’t know how secure bearshare is, so it may be an entirely hysterical response.

It’s still painfully disingenuous point to itunes being patronized by people who are afraid to freely download industry music and insist it’s proof of a majority support in yesterday’s values.

Yeah. There are not many players, therefore less people play those servers. The point of WoW is other people (ideally), therefore the most people can be found on the pay server. A piece of code and “the game itself” being on a server are two very different things.

If you release a game that needs to get certain code off a server you’ll have public outrage, cracks to emulate that server on a PC, and if you can’t there will be pirate servers for people to connect to.

13

It’s more than that. AFAIK the quests, mob placement, items etc. in WoW are all server based. The WoW warez-servers are essentially a different game.

14

You sir, are out of touch. Download uTorrent, click on a link from a popular torrent site, and you are done. Wait for it to finish. You don’t have to explain how it works or why it works. It just works. It hasn’t been complicated for years now.

and, uh, in response to laughing342.gif, bittorrent is fuck all difficult for MP3s. The best trackers(oink) are incredible amounts of time invested. General trackers really don’t provide any regular amount of music.

I don’t know what internet you are using, but on my internet, music is piss easy to find, as long as you are looking for full albums and not single songs.

If you release a game that needs to get certain code off a server you’ll have public outrage, cracks to emulate that server on a PC, and if you can’t there will be pirate servers for people to connect to.

“Outrage” is one of those relative things. A vocal minority will crap their pants, but for most players it would be completely transparent and they’d never know. And as has been address above, a crack would be long in coming and prone to errors and quality problems.

15

Yeah, that’s an important feature, one that I fear will be a very rare thing. I’ve been thinking that my hypothetical software could unlock itself by just installing the server executable on the client (via a patch) and transparently launching a local server when the game client is run. This would require minimal effort (practically none) on the client code.

16

Well, I’ve only got experience from UO servers which were pretty well emulated. I really don’t know if what you’re proposing would be rock solid or not. I just assumed that the data could be intercepted some how.

17

In addition to what Charles just wrote, I don’t think the “safety” part has any merit either. Every client participating in a torrent is plainly visible to any other node in the swarm, unless you use something like TOR (I don’t know how good the support in BT clients/trackers is for TOR nowadays or how widely it’s used).

Anecdotally, I used to do network administration for a university student network, and we got a lot of copyright threat letters from the content industry attack dogs that targeted BitTorrent users.

18

You might want to acknowledge that it was seven or eight years before there were playable private shards, and that all the game rules had to be re-implemented server side, so they were radically different games from the UO you paid to play.

There was no intercepting of data. The people who wrote the servers recreated everything from scratch. If you don’t believe me, you can go check out the RunUO project, which is one of the largest and most popular player shard codebases.

19

Yeah, unless there are no seeds, or a slow seed, or the site monitors ratio. It doesn’t allow the kind of penetration into this that Napster allowed. It may seem simple to open a port or ask for the guy who upped that torrent to seed for someone who has been doing this a long time. Though it’s not the kind of simplicity that lends itself to lots of people doing it.

I don’t know what internet you are using, but on my internet, music is piss easy to find, as long as you are looking for full albums and not single songs.

Uh, PM me these great non-registration music trackers why don’t you?

“Outrage” is one of those relative things. A vocal minority will crap their pants, but for most players it would be completely transparent

Yeah, unless it’s completely fucked up.

whoops. I just started them up at some point. Didn’t realize the amount of work dumped into it. As for a video game, it’d be secure, and absolutely ensure no more old games when the companies go down. I just think it’s an awful fucking idea with way too much overhead to attract customers as gallant pointed out, don’t buy things anyway.

20

Opening ports is a thing of the past with UPNP. Seeds are only an issue if you are looking for something old, but how is that any different from looking for something rare that only one or two people have? Hint: It’s not. As for ratio, I’m a leeching motherfucker, and I have yet to run in to any problems with ratios on torrents.

Uh, PM me these great non-registration music trackers why don’t you?

I guess maybe you haven’t heard of the popular torrent sites which are just an aggragate of all the trackers out there? Almost all of it is public. It’s rare to hit a registration only tracker.

Yeah, unless it’s completely fucked up.

Sure. But that’s true of absolutely everything you could possibly name. Nice catch-all argument though!