Video Game Metacriticism

I wrote a couple of short posts recently regarding the topics of odd omissions from and a reductively narrow gender lens concerning video games criticism so if you fancy some short-take metacriticism you can find them on my other blog (which is mainly for discussion and daily links to good writing about things other than games).

IP Infringement and Indie PR Campaigns

To save myself from an inbox of hate-mail complaining that I'm "a dirty pirate who steals games" (because the shelves of games behind me, digital games coming out my ears, etc are apparently just not enough for me!) I need to preface this by saying that I don't download games I haven't purchased and copyright is ok. Copyright is certainly much better than patents at sanely protecting creators, even if the terms are now insanely long (and locked in by international trade agreements). I have, throughout my various careers, relied on copyright to provide value to my labour (and so meet my basic needs). Be that formulating products in a chemistry lab, writing, creating art, editing videos, or engineering code (to list the most rewarding). It has been rare when I didn't need some level of copyright protection to ensure my work retained value.

However, as I've extensively covered in the past, there are limits to copyright and to not scamming the people paying for our labour by purchasing what we create. When we play fast and loose with copyright, we lose the moral high-ground from which to express our concern about software piracy. If we engage in IP infringement or claim something is infringing when it definitely isn't then all we gain is muddying the waters of what it does mean to deprive us of revenue. If you use this as an explicit target to gain press coverage then you're working as hard as you can to destroy an understanding of copyright in our customer base and you should reflect on the harm you're doing to the industry to try and push your own revenue stream.

There have been several cases over the last few years that are cause for concern where indies have attempted to make a big PR splash by lying about when their games are and are not being pirated. Usually these involve a claim that a defective version was created by the authors and seeded out, a version that punished people who downloaded it. Recently this involved a case with an explicit claim to infringement of a band's likeness, ie a trademark violation, on top of lying about "piracy". Some people pushed back when I characterised this sort of thing as both PR by harmful deception (as explained above - this sort of thing hurts us all) and technically demoware.

Here is what happened, without any deception, so you can see if you can spot any "pirates":

1. The developer put aside significant effort to create a defective version of their new game. This was done with the explicit aim of leveraging it into a PR campaign that gained coverage and sympathy for the title on the sites that ran the story.
2. The defective (unbeatable) version included IP infringement of a 3rd party to spice up the story.
3. The developer uploaded this version of the software to a BitTorrent tracker and so, as noted in the terms of BitTorrent copied above, asserted they owned rights to all IP and granted a license to all others to distribute it (the process by which this technology works, allowing everyone who downloads the content to also resend it to others, requires this sort of granting of the right to duplicate, otherwise it wouldn't work).
4. The developer sent out a press release and got as many sites as they could to provide them with free advertising for the release of their new game based on this "piracy".

As you can see, distributing a defective version of your software isn't piracy, it's demoware. The torrenting that you caused was... caused by your own hand. To facilitate this fun PR story for your game, you had to give away that broken version as demoware. No one came to your office, created the broken version themself, and then took it from you to distribute. That was all the work of the developer. All that effort to annoy people who were looking to download a game from a torrent site. But, rather than it wasting the time paid for by your actual customers who got no benefit from it, it was leveraged into PR success. Which is why this is done so often: because this story of self-sabotage plays as if it isn't self-destructive when wrapped in the cry of piracy.

I find it really sad that so many devs are basically turned into these caricatures by the weight of something they can't control and have no method to fight. The fear of piracy, that something is owed and if only copyright could be guaranteed then they'd be rich* because of those recouped "lost sales". That a $100k/year software developer who gives it up to live on Ramen deserves to be rewarded for trying to do it all themself and trusting in closed platforms to surface their content to an uncaring world that SHOULD care.

And you can't beat piracy. You can make it less of a problem; you can make your content more available and try to create goodwill (eg humanise your labour). But you can't DRM and buggy-demoware torrent-bomb your way to lasting success and you're selling your soul trying to. But it's hard to say that when you used to have a really nice software contract and now you're having a hard time making ends meet. You were sold the Just World fallacy as justification for your privilege and now the real, semi-random world is starting to become apparent.

I had a decade of crappy jobs and now have a good job that still doesn't beat minimum wage to ground me and beat the bratty kid out of me. I laugh at the idea of ever being able to live in London or NYC or SF (or afford luxury items like my own car). I still want to be a consumer advocate and can't understand why devs are so quick to say "screw the customer, I need to get mine". Devs who see the Bethesda mod stuff and say Bethsoft should have made their cut even larger because they own the game (no, the customers who purchased each copy own the copy of the game the mod runs on - you already got yours). Devs who say DRM is something that is just a reality of doing business (despite GOG). Devs who consider it a land-grab for the traditional law of goods to be exerted onto their digital law-free playground of plenty (refunds for distance goods - digital downloads should be classified as such just as much as posted disc games; the spectre of used games). Devs who would normally be with the hackers talking about DMCA horrors until someone reverse engineers something in their game and then they're suddenly happy to make engineering a crime. Devs who intentionally muddy the water by making torrents of their own games to score some free press.

* An assumption that everyone has infinite money to spend on media and so piracy is lost sales rather than most people who consume media being rather hard up and so assign their hobby/media budget as best they can and usually pirate the rest they're interested in. Ever wondered why "all you can eat" subscriptions are so dominant for media consumption: it makes it affordable and a fixed cost to fill whatever free time you need to unwind in.

Before 'Hard' vs 'Unfair', What is Difficulty?

Further to my old posts rejecting difficulty being "the point" of game design (in a *Souls style game, as an excuse for not providing difficulty levels), I made some comments recently regarding the topic of readability in game design that span out of GDC talks on difficulty.

Read that here.

The Long Form: Keeping the Fat

The 4th of five episodes of Life is Strange was released this week. A series that gets somewhat mixed, if generally positive, reviews but is also carving out a sizeable fanbase who note it as clearly one of the strongest games released this year. I'm including myself in that group, even if they can't stick the landing in two months with the conclusion. I strongly suggest everyone experience the game before engaging with the critical reaction to avoid spoilers.

So Life is Strange Ep4 starts out with a decidedly emotionally manipulative set of scenes. Interesting to see if critics embrace that.

— Shivoa Birch (@Shivoa) July 28, 2015

The opening of this episode seems to have gotten a generally positive reception so far. It is clearly emotionally affecting. While tearing up, I was also very aware of how manipulative putting such a choice in was, especially in the context of the relationship presented (the asymmetry of Max knowing Chloe far more than alt-universe Chloe knows Max and so is leaning on a past-relationship as a sign of desperation, looking back to better times). I normally get taken out of an experience by seeing the strings being pulled so clearly but here I was still very much in the moment.

After finishing the episode and considering this, I've started to wonder what made this moment different. Having spent 13 hours before this point must surely have something to do with it. The early pivotal moment may seem like it explodes out of the gate, but actually there's been the majority of an hour before the decision is asked of the player. A full hour-long episode of a TV drama has elapsed in this alt-universe before "the feels" are applied. The slow pace of narrative-based gaming allows something you generally don't get from the fat-free pace of other visual storytelling.

Life is Strange continues to not shy away from making real issues (assault, suicide) the core to their superpowers + end of the world story.

— Shivoa Birch (@Shivoa) July 28, 2015

Life is Strange is a story about the end of the world. It's a story about time-travelling superpowers and how Super-Max saves the day while unravelling the bigger threat that will destroy everything by the end of the week. Only it's not. It's about social issues, abuse and suicide and harassment. It's about friends and forming social bonds even outside those who you can feel are potential friends. Life is Strange never flinches from dealing with the very real issues that young-adults face.

One of the smart moves that the game employs to distance itself from time and space is in the setting. We're looking at a college/boarding-school setting. Canonically it is an 18+ school in America with a 21+ drinking age. But it isn't University and feels just as close to a final tier of school. This setting allows for underage drinking, early partying, the removal of parental supervision, and discussion of sex. If this was set in Europe then you'd only need to change a few numbers and it would be talking about boarding at 6th form where the age of consent is 16, unsupervised drinking age is 18, and the kids are more solidly teenagers rather than young-adult but dealing with the same social issues. While some have been critical of this unreality that the distancing from the setting creates, I see this as an important act of universalising the narrative for a larger audience.

So we have an incredibly relatable story, despite the fantastic premise, and a slow pace. This is 13 hours of how Max and Chloe went from being childhood friends to... we don't yet know how that story will resolve. But it is clearly a loving relationship of some form that may be more about the confusion of youth than queer-baiting.

I posit that the opening of episode 4 can only land because games are not yet at the point of being tightly scripted packages of the absolute minimum required for the narrative. That loose form makes the moment so much more affecting because you've walked so many more miles in those shoes when it occurs than with a theoretical TV version of this same story. The audience for the medium has a tolerance for long and meandering. Each episode is 4 hours of immersion in this situation; it all builds up; to the point you can get away with such bare-faced emotional manipulation.

AMD Doesn't Make $100 for Every Console Sold

[I]f these talks were to result in Microsoft owning AMD, it would save the firm a lot of money. Microsoft, as well as Sony, pay AMD in the range of $100 on each console produced. On top of the savings Microsoft would be making on each console, sales of PlayStation 4 would also directly benefit Microsoft. [nonsense]

Today we are going to unpack what's on display at VG247. This is why you need to pay more than minimum wage for writers to fill your news feeds if you want to get something that provides positive value for readers rather than misleading them with speculation that doesn't stand up to any scrutiny.

These numbers, which we'll go on to show are created by people misinterpreting what is just speculation, smell completely wrong. Any editor who has an understanding of chip sales should have flagged this. $100 is not the important number to look at. Sony has not added ($100 * 22.3m) $2.23bn in profit to AMD's financials in the last 18 months due to per-console fees. Note that AMD's market cap is currently $1.82bn.

ARM, who publicise their offers for IP licensing so you can get a chip design and ask anyone to make it for you (or customise it), charge in the region of 1-2% per wafer. After Microsoft got burned by nVidia on the original xbox, they're highly incentivised to pay a bit up front for R&D and minimise their licensing fees. They want to own the semi-custom design they paid to get developed. Sony have in-house expertise and are unlikely to be taken for a ride by AMD when they've done so many deals with people who generally only make this 1-2% profit on supplying the IP/chip designs.

So where did the number come from?

AMD makes more profit than Sony on the PS4 [...] This sees AMD making quite a healthy profit per console. [nope]

The Inquirer failed to understand a report from the IHS Teardown Analysis service. In this report, IHS estimated that a large (~350mm²) chip like this is likely to cost Sony or MS about $100. This is assuming a good deal from TSMC or GlobalFoundries and very little profit for anyone. So a cost of $100 for a part gets written down as a profit of $100 on that part. This is very stupid but also not the end of the journey. Note that I didn't say AMD was making the SoC.

AMD used to be able to make chips but they spun off that semiconductor fabrication plant operation, following the foundry model. They have completely divested themselves of GlobalFoundries so it doesn't matter who makes the chips, AMD doesn't profit from the actual production being profitable. I'm not sure if some of this analysis is done by people who think that GF is still part of AMD and something MS would be buying.

When MS or Sony pays AMD $100 for a SoC for their console (assuming they can't buy directly from a foundry - something ARM contracts often promote as the normal way of doing business) then AMD need to get a foundry to make the chip and provide it to the console manufacturer. This is not a highly profitable venture as that is not a small chip to make. The IHS estimate of $100 doesn't seem completely off but is an estimate that assumes AMD make virtually no profit, the actual number (or how close this guess is) isn't actually all that important. That 1-2% per-wafer fee sounds not unreasonable. That's cents to a couple of dollars. Not $100.

This would be the profits that MS could save on production of the XBOne and could extract from Sony for production of the PS4. And this is assuming Sony don't have the rights to produce the PS4 SoC paid for in full via their R&D budget and so have to buy SoCs via AMD rather than buying them directly. It's pennies, not almost a third of the current price of the console.

But this isn't to say Microsoft are definitely not interested in AMD. The failure to crush nVidia with their new generation of GPUs (despite having a 6-9 month head-start on nVidia with stacked DRAM) and pinning their hopes at clawing back a competitive x86 part that uses more than 3 Watts being entirely reliant on a 40% IPC increase from Zen means AMD are not in a good space. They're ripe for acquisition. MS have lots of money, especially as AMD are rather small compared to people with similar IP portfolios like nVidia (who Intel is still paying to not develop x86/claim they could if they wanted to - something AMD do have). MS also have that hardware division that does Surface tablets and the xbox consoles. Although they use the best Intel has to offer for an x86 tablet, they could probably move to AMD without ruining the devices. There is some synergy there. It's just not a $100 per console obvious move.

Legalised theft

I've used the phrase "legalised theft" a few times talking about Microsoft's policy of currency conversion that moved their digital stores from MSP (Microsoft Points) to local currency balances/credit.

Any Microsoft Points that you had remaining in your Microsoft account have been retired, and we’ve added to your Microsoft account an amount in your local currency equal to or greater than the Xbox stores’ value of your Microsoft Points. This value we added is promotional and will remain in your Microsoft account until 1 June 2015. However, the currency you purchase and add to your account will not expire.

You cannot, for a single moment, believe that last line. Adding credit to your current MS account will provide absolutely no guarantee that the currency you purchase and add to your account will not expire. We know this because the entire transition to local currency described before this explains how they have stripped the non-expiring nature of the MSPs you purchased before. This is theft, but done in a way as to be technically legal.

You should never buy credit for an MS store (say, in a sale or other offer) that you do not intend to immediately use because their statement on credit expiry is known false. You may use this example of dishonesty as a reason to blacklist MS and totally avoid their digital stores, I know I will be less likely to spend money in their stores after this behaviour.

But some people seem to think I'm grossly exaggerating or lying when I make the claim this is theft, even if qualified to be a spin on theft that has been crafted to be technically legal. Let's look at exactly what happened and could happen again to see if we think this looks like theft.

1. Someone offers for sale currency for their store (advertised as not expiring, can be used forever) and a supply of goods to be purchased using this store credit. Items have a real value of the real money required to be converted into this store credit to make that purchase.
2. People use this store and buy credits in advance of needing them (the store actually makes it impossibly to by exactly the credit you need, you have to buy it in blocks), converting their real money into the equivalent value of store credit.
3. The store owner, after accumulating significant real world money that is not spent but sitting as store credit that cannot be converted back to real money (thus avoiding the legal requirements applied to actual banks who provide an internal balance for people paying in real money), decides to end this situation.
4. The store owner removes all items from sale using the store currency, making the value (in purchasable goods) of outstanding credit to be zero. But the credit has been guaranteed to not expire so cannot be removed. It is simply made worthless by removal of places to spend it. This is the opening for theft.
5. A new store is created by the original store owner that sells the same goods and for the same real world prices, only there is a new store currency. This is where the people realise they've been stolen from.
6. The store owner offers to convert the old, worthless currency to the new currency for use in the new store but the conversion process will create new currency credit that does expire. This is the scam that softens the theft, allowing users to sign over the non-expiring nature of their store credit for access to the credit in the new store (credit they previously thought they could spend on goods in the store forever).
7. The store owner assures everyone that the new store currency you can buy will result in credit that never expires. Somehow the store owner doesn't think the people are on to their scam.