Take for example this interview from Computer and Video Games on July 1st:

Speaking at E3 this month, Bilson said that the Vigil-developed online game is “very friendly to the WoW player” and even he as a WoW fanatic will be switching games.

“Have you seen it? The movie? I think it speaks for itself,” Bilson told CVG. “I’m a diehard MMO player myself – going back to EverQuest. I’ve spent lots of time in WoW. As a WoW fanatic, I’m going to go right to 40K as soon as it comes out. It’s very friendly to the WoW player.”

“The brand is fantastic – it’s so deep and so wonderful,” he said. “There’s just so much for us to play with. There’s more vehicles in our thing [than WoW], the combat’s completely different; you can get four guys in a tank and go.

“[40K] is stunning. It’s going to be a masterpiece. It’s been in development for three-and-a-half years already. It’s got two more to go. Look at it.” Go on then: Look at it.

“It’s sensational. I believe within the next six months we’re going to be showing playable sections of the game, not just a movie.” According to the THQ exec, the online game only needs to poach “a million” World of WarCraft players to be successful.

“They’ve got 14 million players! Gimme a million and I’m good! We’re real good at a million, right?” He added: “We don’t need everybody to migrate. We just need some of them – and I’m full confident we’re going to get them.

Two things that strikes me about that interview. Firstly I’m gong to be generous to him and assume that the ‘we only need a million players’ line was just playful banter that he didn’t actually mean. The history of such claims for other games is an unhappy one. Secondly, I couldn’t help but notice that he mentioned WoW a lot more than he mentioned his own product. Which is an unusual marketing tactic by any standards. I thought this was a one-off and perhaps reflected a certain single-mindedness on the journalist – I certainly remember talking about WAR to press who were basically only interested in framing the interview in terms of how that game stacked up to WoW. This week however at the Gamescom in Cologne, Mr Bilson was at it again, this time talking to Eurogamer.

Eurogamer: I’ve been excited about the Warhammer 40K MMO for a long time. When will it be out?

Danny Bilson: A couple more years. It really is about two years out.

Look, there is an 800 pound gorilla out there called World of Warcraft, which is a fantastic MMO that’s going to get updated with Cataclysm soon and drive a lot of people including myself back into it.

I’m a big MMO fan and player. I’ve played EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot, City of Heroes, I’ve got a few level 80 characters in WOW. Now, imagine that the people making Dark Millennium Online are all a bunch of guys like me, who love WOW and the expansions it’s had along the way.

We all say to ourselves, ‘We’re not going to get all the WOW players to move to 40K.’ 40K has its own unique coolness and edge. And that edge and glorious gore is not going to appeal to everybody. It appeals to you and I.

But what I know about our 40K game is that if you’ve played WOW you’ll be able to pick up and play this instantly, and you’ll find all these things that feel like upgrades, in a way.

Wait.  WoW again? Sure I guess it’s a reference point for the industry and he’s certainly right to describe it as the ’800 pound gorilla’ of the scene but really, could you, y’know, talk a bit about 40k online rather than WoW for a change?

It has a lot of the same qualities of WOW in terms of ease of use and how the interface is. I want to say that if you play WOW, you’ll be able to jump into Dark Millennium Online really easy.

But you won’t be able to be a Space Marine right away, because that’s a very unique class, if you know the universe. The road there is a great road, and they are in the game.

WoW once again. Man can this guy stop talking about the competition. Seriously Activision Blizzard can afford their own PR guys and.. hold on for just one moment. Run that past me again.

But you won’t be able to be a Space Marine right away, because that’s a very unique class, if you know the universe.

In a Warhammer 40k game ‘you won’t be able to be a Space Marine’ straight away? What the hell? The single most iconic thing about the IP, the poster-child for the entire setting, the first thing that comes to most people’s minds when you say Warhammer 40k isn’t going to be playable at launch?

Scott Jennings said it best so I’ll just point you at his rant here.

Dear THQ, please don’t make this suck. Also please stop talking about WoW and tell us about your game instead.

This isn’t a new thing in Germany, some years ago (after a similar incident in Emsdetten) the topic was raised but quietly dropped again after many German developers advised that they would leave Germany if this law came to pass. Now we are in an election year, the Winnenden massacre has created a lot of media frenzy over the issue of violence in culture and there are strong calls from many quarters to be seen to do something. And so now the German Congress is considering a law that would make it illegal to develop or distribute these games in Germany. There’s a good chance that nothing will come of it, but the fact that it’s even being discussed in such terms should be worrying.

To be clear, these aren’t simply media soundbites from off-the-cuff interviews with fringe politicians, these are serious policies put forward by senior state ministers.

In the interests of full disclosure I should point out that I work for a German developer working on what would be classified as a ‘killerspiel’.

The argument that’s being used is that the people who do these horrific acts often play violent games and so there is an unspoken causality made between the two events. The assumption is that playing violent video games either makes ‘normal’ people into violent killers or it makes disturbed people more likely to externalise their feelings and become violent. Additionally some of the more… excitable… elements of the press are performing he usual hand-wringing ceremony and asking ‘but what about the children?’ as if Counterstrike (which is the most often referenced game in this debate) has the power to turn rosy faced cherubs into remorseless psychopaths.

Let’s deal with the first point. People who find violence attractive are attracted to violent entertainment. This shouldn’t be news to anyone. If you like hurting people, you are likely to enjoy games or films where people get hurt a lot in graphic ways. Somehow this fairly self evident piece of analysis gets turned around by magic logical leaps to ‘violent entertainment is enjoyed by violent people therefore anyone who enjoys violent entertanment is a psychopath.’ This is clearly false but it is at the heart of the argument being used against our games.

To be clear, I think that there is truth in the claim that constant portrayals of graphic violence have a desensitising influence, but how much that is has been a topic of several studies with no clear answers as yet. In any case the base assumption that bad people won’t go on shooting sprees if they never get to play GTA or Counterstrike is clearly absurd.

Secondly the ‘why are our children being exposed to this’ argument. Short answer, ‘Because you are a terrible parent’. I look forward to the day when the generation in charge have grown up with video games their whole lives. At that point we’ll finally bury this pervasive misunderstanding about games in general. Politicians assume that computer games (because they are games after all) are targeted at children and so when they are confronted with a game that is very much unsuitable for children they naturally question why this is allowed to happen. To them it is like putting a chainsaw rape scene in a Disney movie; it’s a fundamental paradigm clash.

Games are entertainment (or art if you must), and like all entertainment choices they are tailored for different demographics. The sooner that this is absorbed the better.

So what is to be done? Well, firstly consumers (especially parents and politicians) need to become more aware of the various ratings systems and how to use them to make informed decisions. PEGI in Europe and the ESRB in the US both provide clear and unambiguous guidance on any rated title. People need to pay attention to these. Retailers need to be better at restricting sales to underage customers and in helping parents make an informed choice. Yes I appreciate that this is unlikely to happen without at least some state coercion. Finally, people who need help need to be identified and treated before they become a problem. This means better resources for parents, teachers, colleagues and friends to spot the signals and provide assistance. There have always been crazy people who did terrible things well before we had computer games or movies or heavy metal music or books or whatever. The sooner that we can help these people, the less often we’ll be having this debate.

Looks at datestamp for the last post here.

Yeah I know.

Anyhow, I’ve been super busy and in fact still am super busy. I’m off to Dreamhack tomorrow which will be fun in new and exhausting ways. Then I’m back in the office for a couple of days before gadding off again, this time to a field near Derby where I’ll be on holiday doing much the same thing that I do at work but with fewer creature comforts and without the whole ‘online’ thing.

Anyhow, I wanted to talk today about something I read in a magazine recently.

Some of you may have seen or heard about the review of WAR that was published in the June edition of PCGamer. They were fairly critical of the game which is their right and I’m not going to get into a long and involved post about the specific criticisms they levelled at the game – I think you can guess what my general editorial tone towards WAR would be. Instead I want to talk about a claim that was made at the start of the article.

I’m paraphrasing a little here because I left my copy at work and I’m writing this at home but essentially it went like this:

“The first ten minutes in an MMO is critical. If the game fails to grab you in that time then it has lost.”

Basically the first couple of paragraphs is expounding on the opinion that an MMO has ten minutes to hook you in.

Rubbish I say.

Unless the game is so horrible that it’s physically painful to play, the first ten minutes is not even a factor. Of course you want people’s first impressions to be full of shiny, but after they’ve futzed around in the character creation system, logged in and got an eyeful of your starter zone the next ten minutes is purely groundwork.

If anyone quits after ten minutes then your game is either so broken that even a killer new player experience won’t save it or that person was always just going to quit after ten minutes and you had no way to convince them to do otherwise.

The first MMO that I played properly was Dark Age of Camelot*. I really don’t remember my first ten minutes although I suspect it involved hitting frogs near Ardribard’s Retreat in an ineffective manner. My first ten minutes in EvE online was probably spent wondering how much longer the tutorial was going to go on for. In LotRO, my Tolkien fanboy rage was rising as I found that I had to rescue Elrond (Elrond!) from a couple of not-very menacing looking Goblins within seconds of logging in with my brand new Elf. In fact that’s pretty much the only MMO intro I remember with any clarity, even more recent forays like Pirates of the Burning Sea and Hellgate: London don’t especially grab my attention. I vaguely recall PotBS having a rather irritating scripted intro that went far too slowly but it wasn’t that which made me decide not to subscribe.

While the initial experience should be as awesome as possible, it’s rarely if ever any indication of what the game proper will be like. For the most part the first ten minutes are spent introducing you to the various parts of the UI and explaining the backstory to a greater or lesser extent. Here’s a huge generalisation for you because we like lazily pigeon-holing people around here:

There are two kinds of MMO gamers. You have the clickers and the readers. The clickers want to get going as fast as possible so they click on all the guys that look important and ‘accept’ on all the dialogue boxes as soon as they open. The reader wants to know why the Secret Goblin Cabal is trying to get the Sceptre of P’lotdev Ice and why them having it would be a bad thing. He (or more commonly she) reads the quest information, looks for the NPCs who give the backstory spiel and doesn’t do anything actually game related until the scene has been properly set and the main actors identified. Both of these people care about the new player experience in different ways, the clicker wants to get on with blowing the crap out of stuff without all that boring exposition and tutorial stuff, the reader wants to know that there’s more to the world than just random monsters to thump. What turns one of these players on will be a disappointment to the other.

There is however an important demographic for whom the first ten minutes is critical but it isn’t the MMO player.

It’s the MMO reviewer.

* I had previously tried to play UO but it was ugly and hard. I still gave it significantly more than ten minutes however.

• Forumwarz
• Eve Online and Eve Poker.
• WAR Beta
• Guild meet up
• The Cult in concert

Yeah, I’m weak.

So anyway that’s enough about me. Let’s talk about computer games. A perennial issue for the entertainment industry as a whole is piracy and computer games have been feeling the burn just as much as Hollywood or the music industry. Particularly PC games where their native environment lends itself so well to casual piracy. Let’s get the moralising over and done with. Piracy is theft. People can try to justify their actions if they like but if you own a copy you didn’t pay for then you stole it. Sadly stealing seems to be seen as cool amongst the mouthbreathers who make up the loudest part of the internet.

Here are some interesting perspectives from different industry sources.

The Titan Quest Dev.

Two, the numbers on piracy are really astonishing. The research I’ve seen pegs the piracy rate at between 70-85% on PC in the US, 90%+ in Europe, off the charts in Asia. I didn’t believe it at first. It seemed way too high. Then I saw that Bioshock was selling 5 to 1 on console vs. PC. And Call of Duty 4 was selling 10 to 1. These are hardcore games, shooters, classic PC audience stuff. Given the difference in install base, I can’t believe that there’s that big of a difference in who played these games, but I guess there can be in who actually payed for them.

Let’s dig a little deeper there. So, if 90% of your audience is stealing your game, even if you got a little bit more, say 10% of that audience to change their ways and pony up, what’s the difference in income? Just about double. That’s right, double. That’s easily the difference between commercial failure and success. That’s definitely the difference between doing okay and founding a lasting franchise. Even if you cut that down to 1% – 1 out of every hundred people who are pirating the game – who would actually buy the game, that’s still a 10% increase in revenue. Again, that’s big enough to make the difference between breaking even and making a profit.

Titan Quest did okay. We didn’t lose money on it. But if even a tiny fraction of the people who pirated the game had actually spent some god-damn money for their 40+ hours of entertainment, things could have been very different today. You can bitch all you want about how piracy is your god-given right, and none of it matters anyway because you can’t change how people behave… whatever. Some really good people made a seriously good game, and they might still be in business if piracy weren’t so rampant on the PC. That’s a fact.

That certainly puts the issue in some perspective and to an extent it’s backed up by some quick-and-dirty analysis from Rock Paper Shotgun

Thirdly, let’s try a little really rough – if conservative – maths. Call of Duty 4 has been on sale for 113 days, assuming day zero piracy. A seven gig torrent, assuming a 100k download speed, takes just under a day to download. Assuming that the rate of downloads now is constant across those whole three and a bit months – which is incredibly conservative, of course, as it’d have been much higher upon release – that means 993496 copies will have been illegally downloaded via Mininova alone. Which is the sort of number that makes Infinity Ward sad.

Again the chap from Infinity Ward agrees:

On another PC related note, we pulled some disturbing numbers this past week about the amount of PC players currently playing Multiplayer (which was fantastic). What wasn’t fantastic was the percentage of those numbers who were playing on stolen copies of the game on stolen / cracked CD keys of pirated copies (and that was only people playing online).

Not sure if I can share the exact numbers or percentage of PC players with you, but I’ll check and see; if I can I’ll update with them. As the amount of people who pirate PC games is astounding. It blows me away at the amount of people willing to steal games (or anything) simply because it’s not physical or it’s on the safety of the internet to do.

However at the last, putting the cat amongst the pigeons comes Draginol from Stardock who claims that piracy isn’t a problem after all:

When you blame piracy for disappointing sales, you tend to tar the entire market with a broad brush. Piracy isn’t evenly distributed in the PC gaming market.

Blaming piracy is easy. But it hides other underlying causes. When Sins popped up as the #1 best selling game at retail a couple weeks ago, a game that has no copy protect whatsoever, that should tell you that piracy is not the primary issue.

In the end, the pirates hurt themselves. PC game developers will either slowly migrate to making games that cater to the people who buy PC games or they’ll move to platforms where people are more inclined to buy games.

In the meantime, if you want to make profitable PC games, I’d recommend focusing more effort on satisfying the people willing to spend money on your product and less effort on making what others perceive as hot. But then again, I don’t romanticize PC game development. I just want to play cool games and make a profit on games that I work on.

Now to me, Draginol’s comments seem a little contradictory. He seems to be saying that if you don’t make the kind of games that are likely to be pirated then piracy stops being a problem, therefore piracy shouldn’t be affecting PC games. Errm…

He makes some nice points about ‘rockstar games developers’ and the obsession with shininess over substance – which I rail against in this industry as much as I rage inwardly every time a new plot free, CGI fest is released by Hollywood. Essentially however his message seems to be that pirates have won, you either abandon the PC as a platform for anything approaching an AAA title or you accept that you’ll be developing the game for a loss due to the fact that the vast majority of your players are going to steal your work. Both of which are depressing prospects.

His penultimate point is spot on however, pirates are hurting all of us through their actions and we will all pay for those actions – either in super restrictive DRM or in games that we want to play being available solely on platforms where piracy isn’t so easy for the average user. We all lose so that Johnny Mouthbreather can extend his epeen by being part of the cool crowd that get their games for free.

So the Jack Thompsons of this world get given their ten minutes of infamy to declaim on how things would be so much better if it weren’t for those damn video games. And the really messed up part? We give it to them. We the ‘gaming public’ validate them and give their viewpoints the exposure that they crave. I was prompted to write this when I saw a GU comic on the subject. Woody was linking to an initiative by the Videogame Voters Network to produce a Wall of Protest. Everytime I see something like this I grind my teeth. It’s not that I don’t approve of the sentiment, really I do but it seems all so superficial. What are the odds that any anti-gaming legislator is going to read the site and see the pictures and be scared off from a course of advocating strong censorship on videogames as a result? Practically none I’d warrant.

While I believe it’s important not to roll over and ignore rumblings from the legislature I do think it’s naive and somewhat patronising to ‘mobilise gamers’ as though we were some secret underground movement and not for example a multi billion dollar industry with professional lobby groups and very high powered political focus groups. The government isn’t going to take away video games for the same reasons it hasn’t taken away action movies or porn or gangsta rap. The people who make money from it are also the people who are dipping into their pockets for election campaigns. EA or SCEA or Ubisoft or Microsoft independently have enough clout to marginalise the lunatic fringe who pop up in opposition. Collectively they are a huge industrial juggernaut on the same level as Hollywood or Big Tobacco. Nobody who is sane seriously believes that playing video games makes you a monster. Those who profess that they do, are generally making noises to appease a loud minority safe in the knowledge that there is zero chance their proposals will even reach a debate let alone be signed into law. They are playing both sides and we are giving the opposition the validity they need. If we ignore them they will go away.

Frankly the sooner we stop giving column time to uninformed activists (on both sides of the debate) and more time to properly educating the public on how to look after their damn kids then the happier I shall be.

Let’s firstly call it what it is. Cheating. Any other way to obtain a game reward without playing the game would normally be considered cheating by most CS departments. Whether you’re earning the reward directly by playing through the content that provides the reward or earning it through other means (such as farming gold to buy the reward ingame, or even building the social networks to be given the item for free), you’re still engaged in legitimate play. Once you step outside of that then we are in murky waters indeed. There probably is a line in there to be drawn but I’d hate to have to draw it. The argument that it’s a victimless exploit is disingenuous and not entirely true. For a start, many exploits are victimless but players still expect that we as games providers will keep the game fiar by punishing those who cheat. Secondly, people do suffer. Not directly of course, there’s no actual, physical pain involved when you buy your Sword of Greater Pwnage however there is an effect on the community as a whole.

Gamasutra interviews John Smedley, the CEO of SOE about the white paper and, not surprisingly, he backs up the conclusions that it draws. Those conclusions are, briefly, as follows:

Hardly anyone is making a living out of RMT.
In general the value of items on Station Exchange mirrors the price of the same items on unsanctioned 3rd party sites.
The economies on Exchange enabled servers are not wildly different to those on regular servers.
The actual amount of money involved is non-trivial but quite small in the grand scheme of things.
People prefer to buy coin and use that to obtain items ingame rather than buying the items directly from the Exchange.

I would suggest that the conclusions that are drawn are only valid for the Station Exchange servers and can’t be applied to the wider issue of RMT on other servers or in other games. In my view the biggest reason for the apparent low-impact of the Station Exchange is that the service is limited to US residents. SOE’s own metrics state that the majority of sellers on the Exchange are between the ages of 18 and 22. These people generally have a lower earnings potential and so it can be worth their while to sit and farm gold all day for $7 a plat. In the developed West however there’s a limit to the number of people who can’t earn more than that doing something else. The same is not true of places like Korea, China and Eastern Europe where goldfarms are normally located. If the Station Exchange was open to international customers, I would put money on the system becoming swamped by goldfarming sweatshops and all the conclusions of the white paper becoming invalid as a result. I would expect the ingame economy on Station Exchange servers to very quickly go out of whack in that case and for goldfarmers to be very much in control of the server community.

Mr Smedley talks about people putting themselves through college by farming gold on EQ2 but frankly I’d be astonished if the power sellers have a future that involves college. If they are playing enough EQ2 at age 18 to earn $35k a year then I strongly suspect they aren’t attending many classes. It may be comfortable for him to think of goldfarmers as poor kids trying to scrape college money together but the rest of us have no such illusions about the international trade in virtual items.

The real value of the RMT market is hard to pin down, there can be no doubt however that it is very big business. In my game I have deleted virtual assets amounting to millions of dollars that were being held by gold trading companies. One company I investigated had over $800k worth of assets on just three servers. In some cases it’s still been worthwhile for companies that have suffered tens of thousands of dollars in lost assets to start up again on the same servers.

As long as it continues I will continue to oppose it. It’s inherently unfair, unjust and, at the end of the day, cheating. Nobody cheats on my watch.