jalf_123

Join Date 01/2008

Revising the Bill of Rights?

While I very much like the idea of a "Gamers bill of rights", there are a few problems with the one proposed by Stardock. I couldn't find an existing discussion of this, so I started this thread.

I noticed this because of a thread on the EA forums where a Red Alert 3 developer was claiming that they "respect" the Gamers Bill of Rights"... Except that the entire thread was dedicated to explaining their draconian DRM (5 install limit, online activation). Am I the only one seeing a mismatch here?

If you look over the list, you do see some very obvious loopholes. Some points are so general they mean nothing, and any existing DRM scheme can be justified. Others are so specific that they can't very well apply to non-Stardock games in the first place.

So first, here are the issues that are too general:

6. Gamers shall have the right to expect that games won’t install hidden drivers or other potentially harmful software without their consent. So it's ok that the game *requires* hidden drivers such as Starforce, as long as the user is presented with an "ok" button first, so they can consent? It doesn't say that the game should work if the user declines. It also doesn't say that the user should be notified of this requirement before buying the product. How exactly is this an improvement?

7. Gamers shall have the right to re-download the latest versions of the games they own at any time. - but it doesn't say they should have the right to re-install the games they own at any time. Isn't that the main thing? I personally don't care too much about how often I can download a game. I can take backups, burn to a DVD or whatever. The big issue is whether I'll be able to *install* the game from those backups. Being able to download the game again just a bonus, but it's missing the main point.

8. Gamers shall have the right to not be treated as potential criminals by developers or publishers. - Nice colorful language, but it's a bit too easy for EA to argue that "We're not treating anyone as criminals, we're just providing friendly callcenter dudes in India to help users reactivate their game". How about just something like "Gamers shall have the right to play the games they buy, if, when and where they want, without requiring permission from the publisher of the game". Or if you want something a bit more to the point, "Gamers shall be treated no worse than those who pirate the game.

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. But LAN games are allowed to require internet connection? They're not singleplayer, after all

Then there are the ones that are too Stardock-specific to be of much use:

2. Gamers shall have the right to demand that games be released in a finished state. How does this apply to something like a MMO? When is World of Warcraft in "a finished state"?
3. Gamers shall have the right to expect meaningful updates after a game’s release. Doesn't this contradict #2? If the game is in a finished state, what can a meaningful update possibly contain? If it is supposed to add *new* content, that may prove quite a burden for some developers, who are then not *able* to live up to these rights.
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. How does this apply to Impulse? Or Steam? Is it really such a universally bad thing that a game autoupdates before you run it? And again, how do you propose that MMO's should live up to this requirement?

Well, I'm curious to hear what you all think of this. Is there anything I've missed? Or reasons why the original version is better?

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I've been lurking this debate across the web... and Stardock's and EA's moves in this game have really stoked the fires...

Anyways, I'm in general agreement on principle of your first 4 points, but as for issues on #s 2, 3, and 4, here is my response:

#2 - Obviously in this case the phrase 'finished state' needs to be defined. Finished state should include fully playable with all features necessary to gameplay enabled (not necessarily eye-candy), a fulfilled plotline (beginning, middle and end), and generally not broken for the vast majority of systems (95%+). I believe in this case that most MMO's achieve a 'finished state'

#3 - Again another definition issue: Meaningful updates should include consolidated bug fixes, Meaningful performance updates (pushing the minimum specs lower or noticeably better performance to minimum spec machines), optionally new content (as you say, not all small game designers can support this), and (one I've seen suggested elsewhere) once profit-grooming sales have fallen off, full and complete removal of DRM system should be effected through an update. I think all would agree these are all 'meaningful upgrades'

#4 - I don't really have an opinion here except this - if a game is going to auto-update without asking, it needs to keep it under 30s - 1:30.

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It's certainly ironic that you raise this point after a bit of conversation on the EA forums. As I came here just to see if I could see any complaints or bits about the Bill of Rights.

I think you're right, that certain ones are too general, and certain ones are too specific. However, I think that while this should be brought to light for Stardock to see, I think we should leave it in their hands to revise it. Suggestions are fine, of course, but the final decision should be theirs to make.

I think, on point four, at least in regards to Impulse as I know Steam requires it to be activated to play the games, I think they avoid it by stating "to play a game." I'm not sure how this applies to Impulse, but so long as you don't have to run it to play the game, they're not being hypocritical. I'm not sure how it would work with MMOs, but I do know that Guild Wars sort of avoids it by having streaming updates in the background.

I was thinking new content or fixes to glitches or, depending on the game, balancing. That is a good point, and some companies may not be able to uphold it, but if it refers to all of the following, content, fixes, and balancing, then it's a bit easier to uphold. Even games in a finished state will have glitches needing to be fixed.

As to number 8, I like your suggestion, but I would change the wording to publisher or developer.

Number 7 is also a good point, if anything it could be easily changed to "re-download and reinstall."

Number six is certainly a wonderful point and it should be elaborated on a bit. If anything, perhaps it should be changed to..something like this:

Gamers shall have the right to expect that games that may contain hidden drivers or potentially harmful software will include a visible notification of its inclusion and that it will not install itself without their consent and that if they decline, the game will still run.

A bit longer, and if you can make it more concise, by all means, do so.

All in all, I like the points you made, and I think they shouldn't be overlooked.

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Quoting DreadWebb78,

reply 1

But what if a game doesn't have a plotline? How does MS Flight Simulator live up to these requirements?

The problem is that games are different. Some have a central plot, some don't. Some are continuously evolving and changing, others are basically done the moment they go on sale.

Are those required? Does that mean a developer would have to introduce "artificial" bugs and slowdowns in the original game, just so they can make patches that "resolve" these issues? What if the game ran well enough to begin with, and there were no significant bugs? Because if you're not careful, this one sounds like it's encouraging developers to ship incomplete games. Requiring patches is dumb. In an ideal world, there'd be no patches, because everything we'd want was included to begin with. Some kind of clause requiring patches "as needed" would be much more meaningful (but that would contradict the one about the game being sold in a "finished state").

#4 - I don't really have an opinion here except this - if a game is going to auto-update without asking, it needs to keep it under 30s - 1:30.

But again, what about MMO's, where you may have to apply a 500MB patch before you can play? Not installing the patch isn't an option, because the servers are running the latest version of the game, and if you don't have that, you can't play. Of course, in most cases, you're right, but it still makes certain genres downright impossible. You can't make a MMO that lives up to this bill of rights.

Every game has glitches. Even after all patches. Does that mean every game must have an infinite number of patches, continually fixing more and more bugs until the end of the universe?

And once again, where does the money for this come from? If the bugs are small enough that no one care about them, do they need to be fixed? All software has bugs. Requiring them all to be fixed is just plain impossible. It costs money to have developers sitting around squashing bugs. If they do it in a game you've already released, you're essentially doing this work for free. You won't suddenly sell another 200k copies just because you write another patch. Any patches you do make are just a service to existing players. And there's a limit to how long you can afford to continue doing that.
The problem for smaller companies (or less successful games) isn't that they can't be patched, but that the expense of having a team of developers sitting around bugfixing the game can't be justified.

Thanks for your comments though. Let's hope Stardock sees this thread.

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honestly, #3 is something stardock provides which makes it go above and beyond, but not something I have ever felt entitled to or hold other companies to provide (meaningful NON bugfix updates... but I do for bugfixes since they shouldn't have been there in the first place).

I would say that companies should do the bare minimum to get their games playable on future operating systems. Care enough about the product to make it playable 5 years down the road. It might even be as simple as releasing a DRM-free exe (if it is a DRM incompatibility that is the issue, as is with most games released before 64bit operating systems became prevalent). That is not a "gamer right" though, it is a measure of a company's outlook and my respect of it.

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my biggest complaint about the list is with #10:

Gamers shall have the right to sell or transfer the ownership of a physical copy of a game they own to another person.

it SHOULD read:

Gamers shall have the right to sell or transfer the ownership of a physical or digital copy of a game they own to another person.

last i checked, you (impulse/steam/d2d/etc) are asking me to BUY the game, not RENT it. if i BUY a game, whether retail or digital, i should retain all the standard consumer benefits of said purchase. one of the fundamental ones being having the right to turn around and sell it down the road if i so choose.

stop pretending you're selling me some 'service' or crap. you're selling me a copy of you digital bits. if i pay, i OWN that copy of the digital bits, and hence, i should be able to SELL those digital bits to someone else if and when i have no further use for them.

i will NEVER EVER EVER EVER EVER give one red cent to any game download provider as long as that doesn't change.

if these providers are too lazy/greedy to implement an internal system within their architecture which would, at the minimum, allow users of said architecture to resell what they have bought to other users of said architecture, then they can kiss my hiny for the rest of my life.

i think if a dev looks past their own two feet for once, on this issue, they'd see the gigantic opportunities that a system such as this could bring to their architecture and quite frankly, bottom line. i've got lots of good ideas about his mr wardell, and my fees are very reasonable hehehe.

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My problem with the list is they dont abide by their philosophy. SecuRom on a item being sold by Stardock.

https://store.stardock.com/application.aspx?id=agebooty&theme=impulse

Matters little to me that its a 3rd party product, if you believe in what you say, it should apply to everything to you sell.

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Hey guess what. Stardock warned you that Age of Booty had SecuROM included. Doesn't that make you happy? Consider that neither the Age of Booty website or Direct2Drive mention the copy protection.

What that means is that the people who run the Impulse service refuse to sell you a game that someone else made under false pretenses by lying to you about what is included in the software. Unlike everyone else.

Stardock stated that you have the right to buy games without DRM. You have that right, don't buy Age of Booty from Stardock or ANYONE ELSE if you don't like copy protection.

And stop being angry at Stardock for being honest.

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Quoting araczynski,

reply 14

my biggest complaint about the list is with #10:

Gamers shall have the right to sell or transfer the ownership of a physical copy of a game they own to another person.

You do have a right to sell your digital bits....you can take any original DVD of the game and sell it to whomever you want, and that person is able to play that game as purchased by you for as long as he wants. Your arguement is invalid based on this.

What you refer to is that with your original purchased your were granted a free online acount with the gameserver providing you with various freebies and upgrades as well as other free services. A second owner must pay for their OWN online license unless the original owner wishes to pass along the account name and password (which may contain other games he wishes to retain ownership of).

What you want is of course impossible to have and remain profitable leaving PC gaming with just one less developer, of which there are so few left. Why should any developer provide server space and usage to you AND every other person who comes across the copy you resell? You are FREE to transfer your account rights to that person, but then you should create a seperate account for each game you buy so that the account name and password can be transferred without your loss of any control over any other games you may own.

As for anyone kissing hiney... you may be kissing stardock's someday if they are the only dev left standing... that or you switch to consoles and be done with it. Go bark at Activision, see if you can get them to mimic anything close to Stardock's practices before you go barking anywhere! We've got some of the nicest devs in the biz trying to just be fair with everyone.... relax, take a chill pill and let's play a game!

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Thats the thing, they are!

The problem is that companies like EA pretend that they are selling you a physical product (the disk), and licensing you to buy the game. And then they demand that you take the costs of both and the benefits of neither, while they get the benefits of both and the costs of neither, that is bull.

Either model is FAIR, but the licensing model is the only one that makes sense because a disk in itself is valueless. And a game IS just a collection of bits which you can transfer easily anywhere.

It is perfectly within my right to resell a disk, but it is also ok to demand I have the disk to play and rebuy it if i scratch it. But its STUPID to take that model.
A smarter model is the licensing ideal. Where it is NOT ok for me to resell it, but it is my right to redownload and reinstall it however often i want, and never be required to repurchase it.

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6. Gamers shall have the right to expect that games won’t install hidden drivers or other potentially harmful software without their consent. So it's ok that the game *requires* hidden drivers such as Starforce, as long as the user is presented with an "ok" button first, so they can consent? It doesn't say that the game should work if the user declines. It also doesn't say that the user should be notified of this requirement before buying the product. How exactly is this an improvement?

To be fair I think massive great warnings ON THE BOX, not burried inside waiting for you to be lumbered with an unreturnable coaster or on the website saying "Contains SecuROM" would cover this nicely. At least that way you can choose to avoid the game. Now from some appearances it does appear Stardock are warning people about products they carry which contain... selubrious code of an invasive nature; which is a 100% improvement over say... EA and as an example SPORE, which carries bugger all about copy protection/activations and limitations thereof on its box, manual or anywhere else.

This is something I comented on a while back in a different thread that also, oddly enough, featured on El Reg. It's a catch-22 situation for us PC gamers, we're treated like theives and have companies constantly telling us our format is dead/dieing. Because we're all theives. Might as well just P2P from the get go and save £40 I say.

Other than Stardock's stuff because... we're not (treated like theives that is).

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. But LAN games are allowed to require internet connection? They're not singleplayer, after all

Online checks for on-line multiplayer. I find nothing so irksome as having to install <insert chosen games MP lobby system> just so I can play a game with someone sat 4 foot away from me. TBQFH having some unknown program (none of those lobby systems are OSS) and generally unwanted roaming around my LAN, using my bandwidth and getting in the way puts me right off the sodding game,

Example: Red Alert 3, two copies sat on the shelve because the lobby system was to freaking annoying to set up a LAN game. I can play with random retard (actually that's a good nick to use... hmmm) but not, the actual person I want to play with. I've seen systems that are supposed to rank you by proximity utterly fail to spot two connections from the same damn IP address.

And while we're on the subject of download apps and lobbies. WTFBBQ is SPORE telling me I HAVE to have the EA Download Manager installed to patch the game? Ahh, look, it's trying to sell me more of their crap. Isn't it wonderful. Hell. NO! You're a single player game, STFU and get back to entertaining me. If I want to patch you I'll visit the website and download it. Yeah fine, if I brought the digital copy of it I'll let it slide but... I didn't.

2. Gamers shall have the right to demand that games be released in a finished state. How does this apply to something like a MMO? When is World of Warcraft in "a finished state"?

I wouldn't say this is Stardock specific. If you release something, it should be finished, bug hunted, balanced, code. For anyone who plays EVE:Online (a MMORPG) I have two words to say: boot.ini and Trinity. Basically a typo vaporised C:\boot.ini instead of C:\Progra~1\CCP\EVE\boot.ini. That's an example of "unfinished state" right there. Take my experience with the Atari product Test Drive, the installer repeatedly didn't ask for a serial number. Resulting in a CTD when it started up.

I think this one is more "Thou shall QA the boswellox out of thy product" or "Thou shall not foist beta code on thy customers, for thou are tasty". I'm not saying a game shouldn't ever need patching because you can't QA every possibility out there, but you can QA it enough to not require a release day patch that has to be downloaded just to get the sodding thing to work.

3. Gamers shall have the right to expect meaningful updates after a game’s release. Doesn't this contradict #2? If the game is in a finished state, what can a meaningful update possibly contain? If it is supposed to add *new* content, that may prove quite a burden for some developers, who are then not *able* to live up to these rights.

See above, it doesn't preclude bug fixes, it's more akin to "You sent it out in to the big wide world, so fully of joy... then it ate my hampster and wet itself. NOW FREAKING SUPPORT IT!" The number of games that appear, get 1 or 2 patches that don't fix show stopper bugs (or provide the promised new content) is more than I can count. True some publishers are more likley to do this... I'm looking at you Atari. IMHO, if you push a product out you should support it with patches for a minimum of 12 months.

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. How does this apply to Impulse? Or Steam? Is it really such a universally bad thing that a game autoupdates before you run it? And again, how do you propose that MMO's should live up to this requirement?

Oddly enough Impulse on my system doesn't run at start up, nor does it fire up when I click on a games icon on the desktop. Steam uses a different system (the shortcuts are just Steam.exe -<product> basically) but can be bypassed I think. The EA Download mangler... that embeded itself and is nesting 'somewhere' complaining that my wireless isn't running the second it fires up just after boot. It's not a bad thing that the game can update itself, it's a bad thing when a fundementally single player game, REQUiRES internet access to even think about running.

I would add one more comandment/right to the list. It's a personal irk, but perhaps others share it:

"If you run a forum, hosted on your corporate domain and fed from corporate provided resources then it is YOUR forum, YOUR responsibility and it represents YOUR company and YOUR product(s). If you allow non-paid volunteers to moderate your forum and/or make use of your corporate logo, colour scheme, slogan and other trademarks, interllectual properties and copyrights, they are representatives of YOUR company, products and customer services."

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Ok, I'll chime in here. Everyone has posted eloquently thus far. I'm proud that this hasn't become a flame devs thread.

The only thing I can add to this is the bit on Rule #2. Finished state should be defined as "works as advertized". That would cover all genre of game, and would put more importance on the add campaign for a given product. If you say the game will provide X,Y,Z....then it better provide X,Y,Z without errors. No piece of code can be 100% bug free in the Windows world. There are too many vaiables. On a Mac, sure... You know exactly what hardware is going to be there. You should be able to product a bug free piece of code that is guaranteed to run in a specific version of the OS. That doesn't cover interoperability problems with third party code, but those problems can be easily solved by removing or disabling the offending piece of software. Anti-Virus and Anti-Spyware are good examples. I've derailed... Anyway. On a Windows box, it's hard to be able to account for every combination of hardware/drivers out there. Even Microsoft has trouble with that. It's hard...

I say that to say, bugs happen. I can understand this, and will patiently await patches. However, there is a difference between their being bugs and software that is pushed out the doorbefore it's finished. Master of Orion 3 is a great example.... Asheron's Call 2 is another. Both purchases were rip offs. Neither game provided the experience advertised. In teh case of Master of Orion 3, it was the player community that ultimately released a fix that made the game playable. That's sad. I'd rather the project have been strapped than it be released unfinished. That's painful for the developer as they take a loss, but that's how it should have been. It's a risk a developer takes. It's sort of like gambling. They invest money into making a product with the hopes that they can sell the product for enough to cover their costs and turn a profit. I can understand why some companies will rush something out the door when the dev time and costs have crossed the line. It is a business after all. Not that it's an excuse. Beyond profit margin, you've got to take pride in your workmanship. No one could have been proud of Master of Orion 3 when it left the gates....

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