Taking a Cut of Digital & Megacorps Saying NO

This is Re: Comixology (now an Amazon company and now only letting people read their comics on iOS, the in-app purchase (IAP) is missing so you have to buy stuff on the web to add it to your library).

@atfmb @retroremakes Apple using their walled garden to extort a 30% cut of sales they don't make. Creators are served by big guy saying NO.
— Jess Birch (@Shivoa) April 28, 2014

I wonder if iOS users would be happier if their apps with stores hiked prices 30% to pay "Apple tax" rather than using own payment system?
— Jess Birch (@Shivoa) April 28, 2014

To start, let me be clear: digital purchases should be DRM-free to preserve the rights of the user/consumer. Comixology is not a good platform because it does not respect this right of purchase. When I think about both buying and selling content, this platform does not sound like it gets it; it seems like a rental service and I can't see the Netflix style subscription button (which can exist, see Marvel Unlimited - now with an app that isn't totally useless on Android). But companies like Image are really making a hash out of their pledge to do DRM-free (why can I buy Phonogram on Kindle or Comixology but it gets not a mention in the DRM-free Image store?) so comic fans often don't have a choice if they want to support content creators' work digitally and commercially.

You should probably not buy anything from Comixology because DRM is defective by design. Make use of their free selection to enhance the medium's discoverability/sample content (ie read the issue #1s, which should really always be a free digital sample for growing the user base/customers for all comics that have more than six issues already out) and then get bummed out when you find out there is no legal way to purchase the rest of that story digitally and DRM-free. There are signs of change, not only is discoverability coming from handing out the $2 first issues to let people know what it is they might want to buy hundreds of weekly $2 issues of for a story, but we're starting to see DRM-free sales that almost give away the first volume of a story to hook you onto buying volumes #2 onwards (to a conclusion in vol#5 or maybe it keeps going past vol#20?) at $10 each; that's good discoverability and good business. At some point they'll need to realise you have to offer occasional sales and decreasing prices over time on the older volumes and discounts on collections of volumes to generate a long tail and more of the area under the demand curve from a broad audience but it's a start. Outside of the US, 2000AD have been selling this stuff DRM-free for years.

Back to Amazon and Apple: what if we suppress our uneasiness over the Comixology platform or they announced their entire catalogue was to be sold DRM-free and their apps would just be an easy place to browse, buy, and download content you owned on any device?

The why of the change is very simple: if you have a store in your app and sell something then Apple enforces that you give them 30% of the sale. This is Apple ransoming the users based on the fact that they have yet to sell a single iOS device. You lease an iOS device and they restrict who can and cannot sell code that runs on 'your' device, including code that accesses content you already own (like digital comics). This is even for sales that have nothing to do with Apple, aren't done through their payment processing, aren't browsed on their store; if it was done in an app running on iOS then it is IAP so gets the Apple tax. Because the user does not own the device then it is not the user who has control of who they can commission to give them more stuff for it, everything goes through Apple.

Image sourced from this rather relevant article about a different kind of ransom.

Amazon have a payments processing company (called Amazon Payments, you can use them too if you want) and are building their own store inside the apps so it is crazy for them to pay Apple a 30% cut of sales when they can do the processing in-house and the store is something they built into their app, not something that uses the Apple App Store. The Apple App Store is just the conduit for their slim reader and store app, adding value to the people with iOS devices by letting them access and buy more content for them. They also do various self-publishing deals (on things like Kindle) where they take a 30% cut and the creator gets the rest. You obviously can't do such a deal if you run a store which gives Apple a 30% cut, you'd end up getting nothing for providing the store, payment processing, bandwidth for downloads (and user tracking to enable them to redownload in the future), and so on. So you either need to price everything on the iOS version of the platform at 30% above the price elsewhere (or let the content creators eat the loss by giving them per-platform pricing controls) or strip the store from your app and make it a reader app which tells people to use a browser or a different device to buy stuff to expand their collection.

Yes, it sucks for users and UX goes down by removing an easy to use button to buy stuff in the app but this was forced by Apple ransoming their user base, which is enabled by making iOS a closed platform that is defective by design. Painting Amazon as the bad guy is insane. They're an evil company but they also work quite hard to reduce the margins (often at the cost of their employees - definitely evil), to make the experience closer to a direct customer-creator relationship where they take their cut as the enabler and make it the best experience for the consumer with the smallest cut (that's how they get their market dominance).

If MS started to charge Valve 30% for every Steam game sale that came through Steam running on Windows then what do you think would happen? The mere threat of this (with the Windows 8 Store) is why Valve are making SteamOS/pushing Linux. It's insane to praise or excuse Apple and tell store creators to just live with the 70% cut when they have no need for Apple as a middleman, except that Apple are screwing over consumers who they pretend to sell devices to. Just as it will be insane to complain when the creators go totally direct and give you a better deal by cutting out the store entirely and managing their own distribution system if they want and can do it for cheaper than the ~30% cut most digital stores implement.

The final step in Amazon's plan may be to build the best self-service store creator and web platform (on AWS) to run it on. To put themselves out of business as the (fat) middleman and act as the (thin) middleman to enable creators to meet their consumers as directly as possible. That is already the plan at Valve for revolutionising Steam. That is the natural conclusion to middlemen getting more and more lean. That future does not include Apple pretending to sell devices and then slyly taking a 30% cut of everything because the people who pay them aren't really buying anything and can be ransomed to the people building their own stores to sell to the consumers direct.

The Expectation of Free & Paying For Digital Goods

Buying zip files full of images still feels weird to me. Something to do with webcomics normalising free & selling art on Tshirt or in book?
— Jess Birch (@Shivoa) April 12, 2014

This seems like a strange outlier as I'm totally down with buying mp3s, digital games, digital movies, or ebooks. All of those were something I moved to without feeling a period of weirdness. It's not a data density thing, ebooks are clearly selling less bits. I am also very concious of my failure to read those physical comic books that I do buy (I've kinda moved to supporting webcomics by donation or buying other merch because the physical books are so unlikely to be rapidly consumed when they arrive). My preferred format for archival and reading is something that sits on my PC and can be displayed on my tablet (1920x1200 is a great pixel count for looking at typical comic book detail level art) and my shelves contain more physical books of comics I have never started reading than ones I have completed.

But every time I'm buying a CBZ/PDF or somesuch (as long as it is DRM-free, the PDFs will make it slightly harder to extract/convert to future formats to exert my continued ownership but sometime a good bundle deal will force DRM-free PDF as the only format) then it feels a bit weird to be buying a block of images. A unique weirdness to the format that isn't buyer's remorse (I'm quite happy with the thing I get for my money when consuming it) but seems attached to the digitised version of the medium (I don't get it ordering physical copies, even though I know I'll probably put it on a shelf and never read it).

It hasn't stopped me collecting somewhat of a digital archive of paid content (which I consume eagerly shortly after purchase) but it does mean I don't think of it as a standard, weekly purchase (unlike dropping a few quid on a random Steam title or bundle deal for games). It's been about three years now since I first purchased a digital comic, it hasn't become less weird but I probably do it more now than I've ever done before and have started looking at the subscription comic services are a possibility (which I've kinda done before with some monthly donation things for webcomics but never as an explicit cost of accessing the main content).

My RSS feeds indicate I regularly read about 80 webcomics (refined by: which have updated this year so not dead projects) and that's not including the stuff I'm reading (also for free) on the new digital platforms (eg. MangaBox, Comic-Walker) directly on my tablet. I would be interested to know if it's the volume of free (as in given, not piracy) content I consume that creates this weirdness (maybe someone who plays every free game/newgrounds release/F2P title without paying would feel weird buying a $10 indie title on Steam or $2-5 ad-free game on mobile because they're used to this sort of content being more than they can play and for free)?

Why Make Games When We Can Make Installations?

The participant signs the disclaimer and announces their safe word. They dress in the boiler suit required.

They're led into a dark room with a single metallic reclining chair in the centre under spot illumination.

As they sit down, the light above them starts to dim and their limbs are strapped down.

[Pressure sensors in the chair detect their resting weight distribution and tension monitors on each strap activate to record the strain. Mics pick up any noise from the strap buckles.]

As the light approaches nothing, a VR headset is positioned over the participant's eyes and ears.

The *vinc* of the light being switched back on is heard by the participant with the resumption of illumination, making them look up to the sound and then turn away from the bright light.

The participant looks down at their new body, not quite perfect but it seems to be responding correctly. They quickly accept it.

[Leap Motions hidden below the end of the arm rests record the precise hand movements. This will be the key point of freedom the participant can use to bond with their virtual self at the start of this simulation. A fast-track camera records the body motions and merges that skeletal track with the pressure sensor data.]

Slowly things start emerging from the darkness and into the light, floating above and around the participant. A semi-transparent fish floats through the air and brushes the participant's arm. They violently react to the light touch they feel.

[A performer has walked up to the participant with a soft foam stick and used their mobile device to indicate to the simulation where to interact, viewing the scene from a virtual camera above the chair and using the timer they set in motion by selection an interaction point to match the virtual scene.]

From here, it's up to the simulation designers and performers to define the entertainment. We can shape your vision to anything our imagination can conceive. For the next hour, we will control all that you see and hear.


VR is going to be interesting for gaming. I don't think any of the existing stereoscopic (main brand: nVidia 3D Vision) & head-tracking (main brand: NaturalPoint TrackIR) communities are in any doubt about the experiential and ludic possibilities this extra input (the tracking of the VR unit is a major new source of input, discounting any ludic changes from this new input is crazy) and immersion (finally reaching a presence effect that isn't fleeting is very cool, maybe not AR presence cool but that's a problem for a future decade once we nail down VR and where we can go with it).

VR is going to be interesting for people with game development skills who want to do other things. We've already seen this sort of thing emerging in the last decade and finding a spare in the indie scene. Games that use non-traditional output devices to manage the players and track the rules. Games that require specialist equipment to experience and are found in art installations.

Computer and video games are interactive experiences watched over by machines. The question in the title answers itself. We've already accepted video games that are installations; VR is, by the interactive requirements, primarily a game technology. The next decade of VR is going to let a lot more designers play with the boundaries of the previous four decades of games designed for fixed screens.

We're finally at the point where all this might actually work. I'll see you all in 11ms when we've got to finish the render for the pre-warping and scan-out.

Big Numbers

In response to an email on the Giant Bombcast, I wrote a quick reply with some calculator spam concerning how big numbers can get very big, very quickly. Too big to really think about. By the end of it we had covered the death of the universe, why an 8 by 6 pixel display is actually a really big space, and why a tiny Mariachi band playing inside someone's mouth isn't all that strange. You can read it here (scroll down for part 2 responding to some comments).

Copyright & Limited Run Works

Further to the discussion last year and the year before, here are two (potentially complementary) ideas for changing how copyright and trademarks work. This should, at least, provide direction in which there are solutions to orphaned works, hostaged works, and providing access to lore/'IP' without forcing very short terms on all works.

The Right to Refuse to Sell More

I think there's a pretty big line between: abandonware as sort of unofficial copyleft system of distribution for items that have no commercial availability or value and are hard to access for the millions of people who do have ownership rights to one copy due to advancing technology; and people who sell ROMs and so on for profit without correctly paying the fees to the copyright holders and those who are due royalties.

When I did a big "complying with copyright" thing in ~2010 (partially to explore things like Spotify as the potential future of managing to process consumption of media and distribution of fees to creators without a barrier to discoverability issue - other systems like try before you buy / free streaming of music / etc seemed to have the issue that when you move to this online, rental model they you can kinda subvert discoverability access to be free consumption so I wanted to do a deep dive into the all you can eat model of rental), I wiped all my ROMs (along with all my mp3s, etc). So since then I've been trying to keep it 100% legit. Stuff like GOG make that a lot easier than it would have been a decade ago but my nostalgia burns brightest for PC games/ports so the lack of available non-DOS stuff is less of an issue for me.

For copyright black hole content then I do think laws need to be tweaked (like defined limits on profitability before work enters the public domain, considered paid for in full by society, and changes to the copyright limits; here's what I plan to limit my work with as a personal experiment and not what I would consider guidance for legal limits) and thanks to Mickey Corp we have the legal standard that copyright changes are applied retroactively (despite this making no sense to the arguments given for creating a better incentive for current works by making them more profitable, previous works have already been created so that argument would not demand retroactive extensions to limits) so we can free a lot of content with changes that put the public interest before profits from long delivered commercial works.

There is a case for adding new elements to the balance of copyright (because, ultimately, a government can simply refuse to grant any copyrights to creators, the hard-ball deal is "we currently give you all this and you've been asking for more at every turn, we could give you no protection; there is no inherent right, only a government granted license of exclusive duplication to the creator to inspire the creation of works") like a restriction on the creation of limited works as a pre-defined special work. So before something went on sale, you could register it as a limited work with up to, say, 5000 copies (all numbered) and that would be the total run for this work and any sold derivatives. Those units could be sold and restricted with normal copyright. This would be how bespoke art would be managed, one off paintings with some reprints but a market that requires limits on the right of duplication of the original creator/copyright owner to ensure value. Rather than a contract from the creator it would be a legal structure that created a limited run work.

What this would allow was for mass duplicated works to not have to worry about this specific ecosystem of limited copies creating a vibrant second-hand value market with speculation and appreciation. You could then say anything not registered as such before it went on sale would be a mass market work. Mass market works could not be withdrawn from the market. If someone wanted to buy then they would be allowed to (at reasonable cost, based on the sale price of the previous copies and judgement on the increasing costs of materials to generate another duplicate) unless a work was forced from sale by legal issues (say it turns out the creator was only a "creator" as the work was copyright infringement itself). This would prevent the creation of limited time contracts that strip works from sale currently and also make it impossible for someone to sit on a copyrighted work, it they refused to make a duplicate then someone else would be paid the material costs of duplication and the difference handed to the owner by the state. The fair value of sale would be taken from their hands and put into that of a judge so it would be in the interest of the copyright holder to declare a value at the upper end of reasonable and contract the duplication themselves to maximise their profits from the sale.

As long as there was one duplicate in existence that had been analysed and the skills to make another duplicate then a mass produced item would remain on sale to any potential buyer. This would provide a strong protection to a cultural heritage without mandating very short copyright terms that could limit the scope of commercial works which required long tails or reward creators who are some years ahead of their time or slow to find widescale commercial exploitation of their work (although we generally don't see such a thing outside of a few exceptional cases which a sane copyright term would already prevent - the Lord of the Rings should be public domain about now and my earlier suggestions to a profitability and term cap would make sure that was true).

A Work vs the 'IP'/Lore & are Games Special?

There has been recent discussion of copyright in games being special and the evolution of the medium requiring radically shorter terms than other types of works. I don't see why games are a special case so an argument like that seems very weird. Are we to propose a way of determining the maturity of a medium and build copyright terms based on a curve that slowly grants more longevity based on the progress the medium is making? "Games had three revolutionary new techniques discovered according to the judges so keeps the 20 year copyright terms but cinema hasn't had one in 5 years so that 50 year copyright is extended to 55 years now." I just can't see it working and I also don't see the need from a place of providing access to the shared culture to the next generation to remix without concern of transformativeness. I don't see games entering into the public awareness and integrated into culture at a different rate, so why would it need different terms?

Lord of the Rings is in just as much need of handing over to the Public Domain as anything games have to offer (LotR being ~60 years old seems like it should be public domain by now, it has captured any due remuneration associated with the period of creativity during WWII and become part of broad culture - in fact it lives there often by people sidestepping and making derivative works that are transformative; by now it seems like others should get access to the core, the copyrightable block in the middle to mess with as more expression of culture that does not need to avoid treading around transformativeness) - even our icons like Mario are barely 30 years old. There may be some more time where the creator's right to sell Donkey Kong comes before the needs of the people to be unconstrained in riffing on their shared culture created when Jumpman debuted.

Each game in the Mario series would clearly create new copyright for that as a work but the character is born with the first game, which may follow on to a need to de-link the right to the IP of character created from the copyright of the actual work. Maybe our demand for Aragorn to be a PD character in a PD Mordor puts pressure on limited copyright terms that should not also drag the work, the LotR books, into the public domain with it. The words as written keep their copyright but if you want to use characters, locations, events then as long as you're not stripping vast chunks of original text (clear copyright infringement), you're golden. But how much quotation from the common lore of Aragorn's history is fair use and how much is simple infringement on the copyright of the book as written? That discussion would be critical to splitting culture's absorption of lore from the first work in which that lore was crafted.

More complicated would be how that lore developed. Say we put a 50-60 year copyright term on our mass duplicated media but the lore (definition required but roughly anything that isn't the work, any trademarks or copyright that relates to the trademark protection rather than the actual work; lowering of the bar for derivative works to be transformative) enters the public domain in 30 years, your children will be able to use your characters for their own work but you will still probably be able to sell the copyrighted works you create without competition for your entire life. Jumpman is not Mario, but he is. But you couldn't use to release of Jumpman lore into the public domain to get at Bowser Jr. or Birdo but in that lore they exist. Would this lead to the universe that characters inhabit slowly entering into public use as it was expanded in later titles? Mario starts out and then two years later the PD Mario gains a brother and two more years later Bowser turns up. After 7 years PD Mario can talk to Birdo but not a day sooner? There seems to be a conflicting demand to have access to the lore, all of it, and the way this will discourage connected universes if it collapses the (what we're mainly talking about is) trademark (and some copyright) protection of a new work by setting it in a universe that is about to expire from protected term. Maybe we can live with franchises that are 30+ years old having an incentive to be left behind by their original creator. That does not sound like the worst of worlds. But there's a discussion to be had about what we consider fair to the creators and fair to the future creators who want to riff on the shared culture they were raised with, without worrying about transformative tests or protected names.


Edit 04/02/14: Inspired by the same discussion points about the public domain and games, m'very'good'friends at Mode 7 were also narrowing down on some similar sticking points in that debate. While I don't agree with everything Paul has to say, it is a compelling argument with a lot of good points.

Difficulty Isn't the Point & Often is a Problem

Here's something about what games are. Only weeks ago I was also riffing on the idea of how we all experience games differently, but I believe this piece is taking us down a path we should not travel. It's a very narrow definition of difficulty that tries to strip it from other mediums; the traditional narrowing of the definition of computer game to exclude things like Dear Esther, Proteus, Sim City, Gone Home. To try and point to competitive games as the origin and then rob the computer of player status if it does not participate enough and reject the notion that solitaire games have always existed, where there is no other player with agency in the system.

Computers are interactive, computer games can thusly be made to react to the player, to reform the words and images in such a way as to allow the continued consumption and understanding of the message despite the issues of the consumer. This, not their offering of roadblocks, elevates them beyond a book or a film, which must be repetitively consumed in the hope of being able to understand it for anything which wishes to have a message beyond the surface or being fully read by audiences of a range of abilities. Difficulty is not the enemy, but saying one size fits all and difficulty should not be complained about (as a wall that should not move to meet the height the player needs) is holding the medium back. Also, just immersing the playing in a virtual space has no traditional difficulty, it's still a game. There is nothing special about being blocked from continuing, which is the very specific form of difficulty being expressed in that piece, and nothing core about games that ties them to that design choice.

Here is Jeff Vogel talking about the repeated consumption of something to grok it, to endlessly mine it for more meaning, as being a sign of great art. You may not like his assertion that games have not reached that point but he does point at both the opening fallacy of the first piece (that a book is read by merely looking at every page or a movie is completely consumed by sitting in the room as it plays) and that games have the potential to really be incredible as adaptive systems that can work on many levels and tune what comes out for which level you want to read at, one size does not need to fit all. And it's got nothing to do with difficulty as blocking progress, of giving a path to some mastery or repetitive task.

That difficulty is certainly not THE POINT of games. Failing to understand the variable skills of the many players that will engage with the system, hiding anything beyond mechanical mastery of a system as the proposed pinnacle of gaming, is part of the problem. We can do so much more, we can make reactive systems that guide the player to different readings and provide alternatives to repeat consumption to see a piece on a different level, we can adapt. We must adapt. That's what makes games able to do things books and movies cannot, but we're still maturing and we've got plenty of work to do to get to a place of strength, to our truly great works. If we (not to say we will) start to get there in virtual spaces, using the power of VR to put the player somewhere as a jump from immersion to presence then I'm not going to be there complaining that there are no roadblocks in this interactive virtual space and it isn't a game and misses the point of games to be difficult. Computer games can be so many things, difficulty is a tool in many dimensions and the single dimension talked about in the original piece is something that must be tuned to the player as we move forward.

Edit: the repost of this on GiantBomb got some conversation flowing in the comments. I also ended up responding with a second piece on difficulty which half-stole a post I've been writing for here 'More on Skill & Flow' so maybe I'll actually finish that soon and post the complete, developed point. Think of my comment on the GB blog as a sneak peek of what my next blog post will be about.