The Gamer’s Bill of Rights in the Digital Age

When I was at PAX this year, Stardock had this display tuned out akin to the way you see the Declaration of Independence or the Magna Carta shown in museums.  The display was for an initiative they call “The Gamer’s Bill of Rights“, in which they’re trying to get the PC game industry on board with “a set of principles we can abide by to improve the customer experience”.  The current tenants of those principles are as follows:

1.  Gamers shall have the right to return games that are incompatible or do not function at a reasonable level of performance for a full refund within a reasonable amount of time.

2.  Gamers shall have the right that games they purchase shall function as designed without defects that would materially affect the player experience.

3.  Gamers shall have the right that games will receive updates that address minor defects as well as improves game play based on player feedback within reason.

4.  Gamers shall have the right to have their games not require a third-party download manager installed in order for the game to function.

5.  Gamers shall have the right to have their games perform adequately if their hardware meets the posted minimum requirements.

6.  Gamers shall have the right not to have any of their games install hidden drivers.

7.  Games shall have the right to re-download the latest version of the games they purchase.

8.  Gamers shall have the right to user their games without being inconvenienced due to copy protection or DRM.

9.  Gamers shall have the right to play single player games without having to have an Internet connection.

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

Given the recent announcements both by Stardock and Valve on the topic of DRM, I think there are arguably some adjustments to be made.  In the customer report from which that list was pulled, Stardock discusses the issue that the burden is not on publishers to provide mechanisms to sell and transfer digital titles.  I find this highly ironic considering one of the primary features of the new “Goo” system they announced is to do just that.  However, I agree, that the burden is not on the publisher, it’s on the distributor.

Video Games in the 21st century are not like games in the 90s.  Certainly to a large extent today, and ever more so going forward, games will be distributed through the internet, or will at least leverage the internet.  Games no longer exist in a vaccuum, on their own right, but are tied into a larger social platform such as Steam Community or Xbox Live.  As this process continues, it means that when users choose where to buy a game, it is no longer the choice of a commodity, buying the same game from Walmart or from Gamestop.  It’s not even the choice of interface (Do I want to play this game on my console, or on my PC).  When you purchase a game, you are contributing to your personal space within a social ecosystem.  It’s like choosing between MySpace and Facebook. 

What this means is, that for the first time, Distributor/Retailers are now also developers of a social network, with all the benefits and responsibilities thereto appertaining.

This has implications.

In the new world, the existence or lack thereof of a disc is irrelevant.  You are not purchasing a CD - you never were - you were purchasing the right to play that game.  With a CD (at least on a console), you have the ability to easily transfer, or loan your rights to another person.  Stardock is the first, as far as I’m aware, to easily enable this process on games that are purely digitally distributed.  Kudos to them, it will mean competitively, if this is a popular addition in the marketplace, that all the other players will likely have to follow suit.  Score one for the gamer.

I think there are some nuances potentially missing here as well though.  While a secondary market is important, there are also a lot of loans going on, which is not enabled by this system AFAIK.  There is a logical distinction between the person who owns the game, and the person who is currently playing (or allowed to play) the game that is disabled in a system where only the owner of the game is allowed to play it, using their account.  This prevents members of the same household from participating in their own social groups using a single instance of a game (but not at the same time), or from allowing friends to loan each other games, or for any kind of time-limited loans of titles to be made.  I’m not aware of any platform that currently supports these scenarios in any sophisticated way.

Because of the nature of these emerging environments - distributor as social network - it means that in the near future an oligopoly will form around a very small (1 or 2) number of distributors who can build our their community the fastest, with the best features.  Presently the barrier to entry to create a game distribution platform is relatively low, because game publishers treat these platforms as just another kind of retailer - if you’re able and willing to sell their games, and the publisher needs to do little or no work to get on your platform, they’re willing to do business with you.  Providing benefits like piracy protection and metrics (e.g. Steamworks) only sweetens the deal.  As users become ‘locked in’ to a specific network, where all their licenses exist, and all their friends play, and all their status symbols are kept, the barrier becomes more difficult, because in order to create a new platform, you need to shift a significant install base from an existing network.  There will be a Facebook/MySpace of PC-centric gaming platforms, and the race is on, but it’s not clear who that winner will be yet.

Valve and Google

There’s a rumor going around that Google is going to buy Valve in the near future.  While that makes some people really happy, I’m not one of them.  Google is interested in Steam, because it’s an awesome content delivery system for the PC, and it meshes well with Google’s roadmap.  What doesn’t really make a lot of sense is what’s going to happen to the game studio part of Valve.

Valve Software has some of the most talented people in the industry working in their studios - games like Team Fortress, Half-Life, and of course Portal don’t happen on their own.  Steam has lots of publishers on board already (Eidos, Ubisoft, Activision, etc.), and Google’s ability to run a game studio internally is a huge unknown (although I’ve been wrong before).

All in all, a very uncomfortable position for me.

[Update]: Or maybe not.

Stardock Impulse

I just downloaded Stardock’s new Digital Distribution platform Impulse, and thus far I’m reasonably impressed.

Without getting too far into it, it looks like both Steam and Impulse essentially have a web browser embedded in them, and they use the callbacks from this browser to kick off the downloads process.  Both services allow you to keep a catalog of your games, re-download them as many times as you want, and both services have community elements as well.

Steam has a better catalog of games, and has hooks into various Valve magic such as a Steamworks, and saved games in the cloud (which is awesome).

Impulse Storefront

Steam Storefront

But Impulse is shiny, and that matters.  I currently use both Quicken Online (at least until my trial expires) and Mint for personal finances, and even though Mint is horribly crippled by not supporting Canadian banks, I still log into it because it’s prettier than Quicken is.  Additionally, Steam has the unfortunate habit of randomly hanging in the middle of downloads, requiring me to stop and restart the download.  This isn’t a show stopping issue, but it’s irritating, and Impulse can capitalize on that.

Web design has moved forward since Steam was launched, and it’s time for Steam to bring some of those design principles to the table.

Steamworks

Valve has announced a new design platform for PC game design called Steamworks, available free of charge. The suite of tools seems to focus on easing some production-level issues rather than design issues. This includes smoothing delivery of the game through Steam’s retail channel, as well as providing certain frameworks to improve a game so delivered, notably in the multi-player arena.

Most notably in my opinion is the inclusion of hooks for getting play data back from the users once they’ve been launched.  This type of data gathering immensely helps developers get information about how the players are playing their game, and thus to take this data back and use it to improve designs for future titles.

All of this of course depends on the utilization of Steam as the delivery channel, something very few large studios would want to commit exclusively to.  I’ve asked Jason Holtman how well Steamworks would interface with XNA, as these two technologies seem to me to be functionally, if not technically, complementary.  If I hear back from him, I’ll update this page.