Point-of-sale video game activations won't work
The Entertainment Merchants Association, an organization that represents North American entertainment retailers, reported in the latest edition of its trade publication, Inside EMA, that point-of-sale video game activations could help save the industry "billions of dollars" in lost sales due to theft and piracy.
Will benefit denial be coming to your video games?
(Credit: Sony)Dubbed Project Lazarus, the organization's initiative plans to determine "the feasibility of deploying 'benefit denial' technology on retail optical discs."
According to the EMA, its study has found that benefit denial, the "concept of denying a shoplifter or internal thief the ability to use stolen goods," could lead to reductions in theft and piracy.
The study isn't complete, and associated costs still need to be analyzed. But the EMA says benefit denial could substantially improve the process of buying games.
According to the organization, games should be shipped to retailers in a "locked state and then automatically 'unlocked,' based on a point-of-sale transaction." So if anyone attempts to play a locked game on a console, it won't boot up. Only after the sales transaction is complete will the game be activated. It can then be played on the game machine of their choice.
The EMA thinks that this is the future. I think that the plan is a loser.
Piracy and theft is indeed a problem in the video game industry. But it's not so bad that it requires games to be shipped in an unactivated state. Moreover, game piracy is really a bigger problem on the PC than on consoles.
According to a study performed by TweakGuides.com, Crysis Warhead, a PC game, was illegally downloaded more than 243,000 times over a two-month period. Fallout 3's PC version was illegally downloaded more than 271,000 times in a single month. But the Xbox 360 version of the game was downloaded just fewer than 20,000 times in the same period. TweakGuides couldn't find a single PS3 copy of the game that was illegally downloaded.
Those are just a few examples of many that TweakGuides cites. Piracy is certainly impacting the industry. But as TweakGuides points out, it's not a major problem. And since most of the issues affect the PC side of the business, not even benefit denial will be able to stop piracy. Once the game is activated, it could easily be downloaded onto a computer and uploaded to torrent sites, as usual.
How will it work?
In order for benefit denial to work, the EMA would presumably require the three major consoles to have some sort of activation verification function to ensure that games were legally purchased. It will be interesting to see if Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft agree to that.
There is also a lucrative market for used video games to consider. After some gamers complete a title, they sell it back to the retailer. How will benefit denial handle that situation?
What if a gamer wants to share a title with a friend? Will that game still work on the friend's console, even though they didn't purchase it? It better.
And what about connectivity? Will video game consoles need to connect to the Web to verify activation? If so, it could pose a problem, since many users don't connect their consoles to the Internet. It's adds another hurdle to overcome before they can enjoy a game.
What about downloads?
We also can't forget that video game downloads will make this initiative obsolete before it even gets off the ground. Microsoft announced at E3 this year that it's bringing full-game downloads to the Xbox 360. The practice is widely considered the future of the video game industry. And once again, the EMA has proposed nothing with Project Lazarus that will address that.
Benefit denial just doesn't make much sense. I understand that retailers are trying to find ways to limit the amount of lost sales, but using a video game activation system will only make it worse on the industry. And since there are so many issues with the plan, I don't see how it can work.
I think it's time to get back to the drawing board, EMA.
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Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
I was supper pissed about Soulcalibur IV on the PS3 they locked down user save games by user account and PS3.. So you couldn't bring over a saved game over to a friend's house and play.. you had to bring your whole PS3.. fricking stupid..
Worth mentioning, I have owned all 3 current gen consoles at one point, and have sold them all too. The one console I regret selling was my ps3, and I may buy one again in the future.
If they were clever, they would put a keycode sticker on the packaging, and then generate a second unlock key at point of sale, and the keys would have to mesh to 'unlock' the game.
In any case, this will last at most a month before the crackers simply defeat the checks by hacking the console/PC/whatever itself to not even bother verifying, or reverse-engineer the math to generate 'valid' keys at will.
Worse-case: a key generator appears, which then cause the sucker who legitimately purchased a copy to have his console thinks the disc has been stolen, when his legitimate key had already been illegally 'generated' quite some time ago.
Single player games are going to be traded one way or another. There's no stopping that. And it would be asinine to do an online verification for something like Gradius or Megaman.
Yet another way of punishing the honest game purchaser.
The music, film, and video game industry needs to get their heads out from their backside. No matter what they do there always will be piracy. PC games have been pirated since the start, even back in the floppy disc days. They were innovative back than. Sierra (and a few others) implemented it quite well. Whatever happened to copy such and such out of the book? To circumvent those that might make a photocopy, the books sometimes were printed in a format that does not read well on copiers. Sometimes you had to use one of those red decrypt things. Some people did hack this protection, but that is going to happen regardless.
My favorite site game seller has it right. GOG.com sells DRM-free versions of classic PC games. Steam, Direct2Drive, and GamersGate do a decent job as well (though some do limit the installs, which is a pain, if you need to reinstall). I am a huge fan of digital distro and thing this is where the future lies. There are many ways to make digital distro work, without making it so restrictive.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/1-Billion-Dollars-Worth-Pirated-DS-Games-Were-Seized-83135.shtml
This would de-value the software so much that MANY who might otherwise legitimately purchase it will go out of their way to get hold of a pirated version. Nobody's taking this crap seriously, are they? If so, they should be taken out an shot as well.
Here's their logic: "We want to stop piracy, so we're going to make things harder for people that actually want to go to a store and legally buy our games!"
What's next? They start draining septic tanks and depositing that inside games cases instead of game discs?
I hope they realize how dangerous it would be to alienate the people who actually want to go out and buy games.
The massive multiuser on-line games don't really have that problem. Their major revenues come from the monthly connection and access level subscriptions, not the sale of client files. Sure, you pay more than the cost of the disk, but then the buyer gets a manual, and other trinkets witht the game that copied disks don't have.
Now, I am almost 100% console for gaming. Only DRM free PC games are even considered. The main reason consoles don't get more piracy is that there is a hardware layer to accomplish this; however, if DRM interferes with people playing games or getting their money's worth for a title, it will just spark more people to make the jump. Consoles might have DRM now, but it is mainly silent and does not usually interfere with gamers.
Gaming should be easy. When DRM keeps legitimate owners from playing then piracy takes over.
I had a chat with a Cable internet company in the mid west about what is going on with the movie download issue and the torrent and game download issue. It was stated now that even if someone hacks or uses your wireless or router and or internet to download something illegal you will be charged! There are so many programs out that will ghost MAC address and IP address that it is unreal. If we do not stop this somehow then we the customer's are going to be charged for just about everything a company say's we did without legal recourse .
And as it stands now as the company rep said there is just about no way you can prove you did not do what they are charging you with! And he stated that they are being allowed to hack to get IP and Mac address where even the Internet company can not do so.
As I read your story on this I can see that there is a grab by company's with the attitude ( Get what you can get!) while you can. I challenge everyone here to call your cable internet provider and check for your self. Talk to the department that handles these issues and see for your self! I did and was shocked by what I learned.
But I say again these company's are in real trouble as people are not going to stand for what is going on forever. The (sell) the game to us at the store,but we have just about no rights after that and as far as they see it they still own the game. I am not renting a game a full sale price! And that is what we are getting to the point of doing. We need more writers at these mags to start coming forward and helping by letting all know what is going on and putting this to an end.
Or even there Mag's and jobs will be at risk as the decline of the game and movie and music industry are going to end as people say NO!
And that's because the whole project is about elimination of physical theft of discs, whether DVDs, or CDs, or games on optical discs. It has nothing to do with piracy. Zero.
The technology they are contemplating does not require the cooperation of any console or other hardware manufacturer. You do CNET, the EMA, yourself, the entrepreneurs involved, and even your ranting readers a disservice when you dismiss technology that you don't know a thing about.
You may just be a blogger, but I don't think that relieves you of the obligation to learn at least a smidgen about what you are writing about, and to refrain from misleading your readers.
- by Thranx June 25, 2009 10:07 AM PDT
- I have no beef with online activataion DRM solutions for PC games. If you're PC gaming and you don't have an internet connection... you're lost in time, or playing games old enough that this DRM won't affect you anyhoo. :)
- Reply to this comment
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Showing 1 of 2 pages (33 Comments)Consoles are a different beast. It's much more a pull out of the package and play world than PC.
The industry sees 180k downloads of Sims 3 two days before it hits retail and views it as 180k x $50. In actuality the bulk of those people wouldn't be buying the game, but it is completely fair for software makers to want to recieve payment for thier work.
DRM is the result of having no means by which to control the flow of data. Books are physical devices, and a book made on a copier just doesn't work well. If books were as easily reproducable as a game DVD, you'd the the publishing industry in much the same uproar.
The answer is one of two things:
1) Digital Distribution. It's 10 years before we see a major cross platform release without any media, but if you distribute it digitally and attach it to an account, you greatly reduce the ability to copy and use said data. Additionally digital distribution opens up the posibility of dynamic digital watermarking that would allow for tracking of people who do try to distribute.
2) Hardware. A new data storage/hardware standard in which the ability to rip or copy doesn't see the light of day. It will eventually be able to be ripped, but if the copier technology never gets out main stream it will take alot of time before anything ripped can be playable.
Security isn't secure. Security is all about levels of deterance. DRM's various forms are just that, deterance. Increase the deterance and you increase the risk that people who legitimately bought your product can't use it. It's that mid-point that I think everyone's looking for.