Last Thursday Shawn Gaston and I got together with the guys at Fear the Boot and recorded an interview where we talked about the comic and what we are hoping to accomplish.
Also, I sat in on the second half of the most recent Fear the Boot episode, where we talked about the problems of introducing new players to large, complex game worlds.
I gather from comments left in my year-and-a-half-old post on Steam that the service has cleaned up its act and is a lot more user friendly these days. A couple of visitors didn’t notice the age-old timestamp and thought I was either lying or stupid. So, I’m writing this post to sort of acknowledge the change in Steam and update my comments on it a bit.
I’m glad Valve fixed the various bugs and annoyances with Steam, although it happened too late to help me. The only thing worse than intrusive DRM is intrusive DRM which doesn’t work right. (And when DRM doesn’t work right, it never fails on the side of leniency. No, it always fails in a way that locks paying customers out of their media.) “Offline mode” is now a proper feature and not a hack, and Steam will let you play a game even if patches are available. So, in my bullet-list of grievances against Steam, a few of them can now be crossed out.
Having said that, I still abhor the idea of online activation. I have a drawer full of games from the mid-to-late 90’s that offer to “check for updates” once the install is done, and while the games themselves work fine, the patching service has gone the way of Pompeii. It’s long extinct, and if I want that patch I must go on some sort of archaeological dig and hope the thing is buried somewhere on FilePlanet. If those games had online activation, I’d be locked out of them now. So, this complaint against Steam still stands: I don’t want to buy a game that will turn into an expensive coaster the moment the publisher perishes or loses interest. I don’t want to pay for something I don’t own, and if I have to ask for permission then I don’t own it.
My other gripe is that Steam denies me resale rights. Again, if I owned the game, I could trade it in or sell it. I used to do this all the time. The trade-in from one game would finance the purchase of the next. The only games I would hold onto were the ones which I thought I might play again, or the ones so bereft of value that I wouldn’t be able to trade them in. With Steam, once you register the game you can’t transfer it to anyone else. You can’t give, sell, or lend it. All you can do is throw it away.
Losing resale rights is less of an issue now than it was two years ago. EB Games and Game Stop no longer accept PC games as trade-ins, so this point is moot now. But the inability to lend a game is outrageous.
I don’t have anything against people who use or enjoy Steam, and I understand the appeal of downloadable games, getting updates without hunting for the patch, and the other conveniences provided by Steam. I’m glad the service works for some people, and now that it actually works I admit the thing has merit. It’s better than recent alternatives. (Compared to the jerks at 2kGames, Valve comes off looking like Lawrence Lessig.) But I’m old enough to remember the days when my obligations to the publisher ended at the cash register, and I’m always going to resent their efforts to take up residence on my computer.
On top of all of this is the sheer futility of the entire effort. The point has been made so vigorously before on so many sites that I experience a sense of weariness just bringing it up: All of these layers of security are utterly bereft of value. Valve is denying me resale rights and hassling me with activation for no benefit to anyone whatsoever.
So, Steam is no longer a terrible product which infuriates me. It is now a user-friendly and well designed product which annoys me. (Although it still needs a “bugger off when I’m done with you option. There is no reason for it to live in the system tray.) I would much, much rather buy something and be done with the publisher. The fact that it now takes energy to sustain my “ownership” of the game is something that will never feel right to me. I’ve skipped the various games that use Steam so far. We’ll have to see long term if they can come up with a combination of compelling gameplay and low price that can entice me to try the service again. They aren’t doing so well so far. Serving BioShock up to Steam users with its various poisons intact was not a smart move on their part, and only reinforced my perception that they are comfortable treating customers like villainous cattle.
More character previews for the upcoming Chainmail Bikini webcomic:
Meet Chuck, the old-school player.
Meet Casey, the GM.
The comic launches tomorrow. I know this will be a tough jump. Most comics take a few strips to “grab” you so that you’ll come back. They introduce the characters and set up the plot, so that you want to know what happens next. Most DMotR readers arrived a little over halfway through the thing, which means they had ~70 comics to get into it. Now we’re starting over. It will be interesting to see how many readers follow and how the audience changes. I also hope that the jump from comments to forums doesn’t spoil the fun we’ve been having in the comments. I know that forum registration is an annoying hurdle, and that some people won’t bother. (I’m always slow to join forums, because signing up is so tiresome.) There are upsides and downsides to everything in this move.
Still, if we have half the fun with Chainmail Bikini as we did with DMotR it should still be a good gig.
Hope to see you there.
Here is a silly meme: Enter “yourname needs” into google and then see what the first ten entries say you need. Then post the results to your blog.
This one caught my eye because I figured that with a rare name like mine I’d come up mostly empty. But no. Witness:
Google is such a strange and wonderful contraption. Try it. It’s funny.
Enough with the comics and laughing already. Let’s have some doom and gloom! Make it a double!
I don’t know the name of the guy at 2kGames who is in charge of stirring up bad publicity, but whoever he is, he’s underpaid. I really can’t keep up with him anymore. Today’s BioShock outrage of the day is the 2k technical support gremlin who suggested that if you want to install the game into two different user accounts on the same machine, you need to buy multiple copies of the game. More info at Kotaku.
I guess 2kGames looked at the hundreds of people in the forums who have refused to buy the game, and figured they could make up for it by selling it to existing customers twice. Good luck with that.
Actually, I’m just kidding. We all know they don’t read the forums.
Additional trivia: I mentioned before that talking about SecuROM is verboten outside of a single thread. A thread which never seems to be read by anyone at 2kGames. That thread is now 2,454 posts long. 246 total pages. (Most other threads are well under 50 posts.) Yeah, I’m sure there isn’t any way to break that conversation down into any sub-topics.
Once in a while I see musings from people who profess hope that 2kGames is about to capitulate under the firestorm of controversy and remove SecuROM / online activation. I wish these good-hearted souls well, but they are doomed to disappoinment. 2kGames hasn’t even gone through the initial steps of recognizing that there is a problem, much less that the problem is of their own making and that they have the power to fix it.
Once in a while backlash does move publishers to act, but I don’t see it happening in this instance. The big problem is that blogs and forum traffic are beneath the notice of people who make these kinds of decisions. If the gaming press took up this story it might catch the attention of the shot-callers in the comfy chairs at 2kGames. But BioShock is quickly becoming last month’s game, and no self-respecting videogame journalist wants to write about that.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “DM of the Rings CXLIII:
Elfophobic”
This was supposed to be up days ago, but has been delayed for various technical reasons. Here are a couple of the characters from the upcoming comic I’m doing with Shawn Gaston.
Also, for everyone that complained about the lack of an edit button, the lack of formatting tags, and the inability to post images in the comments here, the new comic has one of those newfangled forum thingies. Alas, someone has already done the “first” thing.
There's a new graphics API in town. What does that mean, and why do we need it?
My first REAL published book, about a guy who comes back from the dead due to a misunderstanding.
Sometimes in-game secrets are fun and sometimes they're lame. Here's why.
Back in 1999, I rode the dot-com bubble. Got rich. Worked hard. Went crazy. Turned poor. It was fun.
What are publishers doing to fight piracy and why is it all wrong?
The product of fandom run unchecked, this novel began as a short story and grew into something of a cult hit.
I'm a very casual fan of the series, but I gave Civilization VI a look to see what was up with this nuclear war simulator.
Did you anticipate the big plot twist of Batman: Arkham City? Here's all the ways the game hid that secret from you while also rubbing your nose in it.
A stream-of-gameplay review of Dead Island. This game is a cavalcade of bugs and bad design choices.
What makes the gameplay of Borderlands so addictive for some, and what does that have to do with slot machines?
T w e n t y S i d e d
