Fallout 3 over Securom

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"Nothing more frustrating than doing the right thing and being punished for it" - Broken wisdom.

I'm going to post about my experiences with installing and playing the new Bethesda title Fallout 3, not because it's new and not to give any review of the game. I'm going to jot down how I have found myself on the sharp, pointy and ugly end of Securom. Yes that's right, I have found myself in a "I'm that guy" moment where something that normally happens to the other guy, is happening to me. After some surfing around it appears that my particular problem isn't commented on, so here goes.

The story starts a few months ago when I pre-ordered my collectors edition of Fallout 3 at a local EB Games. Yes that is right, I purchased the game, and have the receipt to prove it! Now I also own other Bethesda games and apart from needing the odd patch, I have always had a good experience with their products. On the strength of that, and the promise of a platform saving game, I ponied up the cash and took possession of my new timewaster.

I'm a busy family man, so I finally got some time to install the game at 9:30 last night. After opening and organising the cool goodies in the collectors tin, I threw in the disc and sat back to read the booklet. After the drive spun up, I was shown a Securom message telling me that I had "Disc Imaging Software" and that I wasn't going to be able to install the game.

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The PC Gaming Crysis or Box Office Blues

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In the rush to turn Gaming (both PC and console) into a main stream entertainment industry, are our beloved developers, publishers and gamers shooting themselves in the feet?  Is the striving for a "best voice acting in FPS" Oscar pushing Gaming into a space which is not set up to properly handle or quantify the medium?  Is the longing to have Gaming up there with Football, Movies, and long walks on the beach going to put undue pressure and stifle development as we see in the Movie industry?

The Gaming industry used to work on the slow burn principle.  There would be some ads in the trade papers and a game would be released and reviewed.  The sales would be driven by word of mouth and reviews from the people you trusted, or what was available on the shelf.  In the PC space I guess not much has changed, but when you glance over at the behemoth that is the console space, things have become a little, well, Hollywood.

I guess when you have only 3 players in the space, and one is also in the movie business, you're bound to see a few dollars being thrown around.  Exhibit A: The marketing campaign for Halo 3.  So it is no wonder that the stakes are higher, and I guess that it was inevitable that Gaming would be measured in the same ways as the other mainstream entertainment medias are.  And just as we see the clashing of old school thinking with new technology in music and movies, we are seeing gaming being forced into a mould that in the end won't be good for PC gaming.

I don't want to harp on Crysis but it was well documented because everyone else was harping on it, so it makes for a good example.  November 2007 was an OK month in general but the highlights were the release of Crysis on the 13th and UT3 on the 19th.  At the end of the month of the November, a couple of weeks later, both games were canned by press and bloggers as failures.  Fair enough if those couple of weeks were all that mattered, like for example, a movie.  We will never know if the bad press hurt sales or not, but I can't see how it would have helped much.  Having such high profile PC games seemingly fail began the question "is PC Gaming Dead?", which I even weighed in on.  Even though my comments were directed at the future of hardware, and a shift in the way gaming is done, we all commented without remembering the "slow burn principle".

Over the month of December, Crysis rose to 2nd place in the NPD's, and EA announced 1 million sales worldwide a couple of months later.  Crysis still sells well as do most PC games.  Well, PC Gamers have to play something during the WOW maintenance Tuesday nights.  But I wonder how much the "first week failure" will become a factor in the future of PC Gaming.  Gaming is big business, and like any big money making business it needs to make money now.  $170 million in the first week is going to make shareholders happier than $170 million over 6 months or a year.  And at the moment, those sorts of figures in that time frame has only been achieved in the console market.

Comparing games to movies is dumb, and we really need to think of them differently.  I prefer to put gaming in the same section as books, and it is a better fit.  Books promote imagination and knowledge and can allow you to escape, a good game in a genre that appeals to you can do the same.  This isn't that marketable though and gamers want to make gaming as mainstream as movies and similar media, in an effort to add meaning to their lives.  I do agree that there are some real artists in the industry, and that they should be paid well and recognised, but we need to think about what the future will be if we don't stop and get the systems sorted now.

We may start to see a bit more on this subject in the upcoming months as we await the release of GTA4 for the consoles, and Fallout 3 for the PC.  From the hype GTA4 is already a success, and Fallout should do well but it will be an interesting match up, I wonder if the loser will be Ironman?

Jason

Is PC Gaming Dead? And what does this mean for the Future?

With the rise of consoles, or more rightly the first pressing of AAA game titles going to the consoles, I have been wondering/worrying if the PC is going to be relegated to a terminal for World of Warcraft, or the next MMORPG.  This seems to be a belief only held by me, game developers, gaming press and the odd blogger.  As for my friends - there is a strong belief that I'm very, very wrong.  To the point of heated name calling, and and the sharpening of pointy knives.

As a PC gamer my heart wants to bow to the peer pressure, but the realist in me keeps shouting "Follow the money".  And that money, the dirty great big mountain of money, is moving to and from the army of console owners and their disposable incomes.  And who can blame the starving developer in this cut throat industry?  It might start with a small and annoying casual game for Xbox Live Arcade, Wiiware or whatever Sony may end up with.  Then once you have had a taste of the code and the protenual audience, next thing you're sucking down mana potions on all-nighters in an effort to ship the next Call of battlefield 18.

Why would PC developers move to the consoles?

One case would be that of the Crysis from EA.  In a interview for IGN Chris Taylor probably hit the nail on the head by pointing to the poor sales of games like Crysis being related to piracy.  We all know that piracy on PC happens, but maybe now with the console and PC angle we can get a better idea of the impact.  Not saying that there is no piracy on the consoles, but it is a lot harder than on the PC, for proof, check out The Broken-Episode 4.  Plus the demographic with consoles aren't full of hackers.

Crysis also shows up the whole hardware issue still plaguing high end gaming on the PC.  To play Crysis you need to look at dropping $300 - $400 AU on a video card to run it.  That is, if you are lucky enough to already have the rest of the hardware to support that video card.  I bet the developers for the consoles are happy they don't need to program for some obscure sound card from a small province in China that happens to be the new Via standard.

For the longest time, if you wanted to be cutting edge you would need to develop for PC, and although Crysis proved this still sort of true, the gap is beginning to close.  If you look at the quality of game that they were doing for the PS2 towards the end, can you imagine what they will be doing by the end of the PS3, and again with the next generation?  Not that too many can really tell the difference now.  And if you can get all those graphics and game play goodness on a $600 - $700 device that sits under your TV, why would the average consumer race out and spent $2000 - $3000 just to get Vista ?

So why the consoles?

1. Less piracy through design and consumer ignorance.
2. Easier to develop because there are less hardware models to deal with.
3. This is where the consumers are, the ones who are buying games.

But what about the traditional PC titles and genres? What about WOW? What about the future???

Wireless keyboard and mouse anyone? Now I may be oversimplifying the answer, but really, is there anything else we need?  It may not be in this generation but I could see Blizzard doing a pack with a keyboard, mouse and a WOW pre-installed HHD.  I'm not ignoring the fact that some TV may not be able to display the detail, but have you seen the quailty of some the new LCD TV's ? Mark my words, MMORPG gaming from the couch is not for away.  It has to be to tap into the new gaming markets.  Our young no longer hack around with computers and electronics, because they are being conditioned by the consoles, mobile phones, and Apple into a pre-packaged universe where innovation is changing in the colour of the iPod from white to black.

There, I have said it, the death of PC gaming is the the beginning of humankinds decline into Idiocracy.

Jason.