Is digital distribution making games anti social?

Other Games
1

There are some fairly intelligent viewpoints on these forums, so I thought I’d make a topic to discuss an issue that is affecting the way we play and share gaming experiences. Although digital distribution has been around for a while, it’s really taken off recently with services like Steam and Xbox Live Marketplace.

These services are great for easily acquiring new games (provided you have the bandwidth of course). However, games are tied to a gamer account, which also contains all your achievements and user data. The problem is, suppose you have friends or family who also use your console or PC to game, they cannot play the games that you’ve paid for without logging into your account. The same goes for playing online on the Xbox, you can’t play on a friend’s Xbox Live Gold account without the risk of adding the achievements you earn to his account. The way I see it, this is quite a step backwards in terms of usability. One of the great things about gaming has been sharing the experience with a friend, not necessarily in multiplayer, but by playing through the same game individually and talking about the experience. For example, you could both play through a Bioware game, and discuss the different choices that your character made. If you both have to buy every game, it’s likely that your friend won’t bother, and that “sociable” aspect of the game is lost.

All “full” console games are still sold unattached to an online account, but with broadband speeds increasing, and more and more people getting Internet access, I worry that all games will eventually require online activation to play. Does anyone else see this move towards digital distribution as a problem, especially in a social context? Or, do you think I’m overreacting?

2

Maybe for people who care so much about achievements. I don’t have any problem with others playing on my accounts or vice versa. As long as we can actually use different save files, some games do rarely neglect that (due to some auto save) and it sucks.

3

You also have the ability to log out of someone’s account and log in as a guest account. Or you can “recover” your own account via Xbox Live and use that to play with.

I go to friends’ houses all the time and play games there (well, namely split screen shooters and stuff like SF4). The introduction of online accounts hasn’t really done anything to limit this. I just accept the fact that I’m not working toward actively unlocking anything for myself while I’m playing at a friend’s house, but instead just playing for the sake of playing. I mean, it’s not like we had the ability to bring our save games with us in the 16 bit era, either (unless we brought our own cartridge with us, but in that case, there was always someone playing on someone else’s game).

4

Achievements aren’t the only thing that matters, but they’re nice record of what you have and haven’t achieved. While you could let a friend play under your account, the Achievements feature is affectively ruined. It doesn’t seem necessary to have to choose between one feature or another when you could have both.

Yeah, but the games you’ve purchased on Xbox Live Marketplace cannot be played using your friend’s account. So, supposing you buy a game digitally, if you log onto your friend’s Xbox you have to be connected to Live under your account in order to play. Whereas, if you bought the game on a DVD, there would be no restrictions as to which account you could play the game under. My understanding is the Guest accounts only apply for the multiplayer portion of games?

Admittedly this isn’t a problem for full games on the 360, as they can all be purchased on DVDs, but what about map packs etc? I can see a situation in the future where some games may require a purchase via Microsoft’s Games On Demand service. Value’s Half-Life 2 on PC is good example of where this could be heading.

5

Actually, you can “recover” your gamertag on your friend’s Xbox, and then redownload everything onto his Xbox. However, that content will only be accessible while you are logged onto your own account, I believe. (At least, that’s how I think it works - after my Xbox was stolen, I recovered my gamertag onto my friend’s Xbox so they couldn’t make purchases on my account, and then when I got a replacement system, I just redownloaded my account and all the games I had purchased.)

Though I see where you’re coming from. It’s a partial issue, sure, but I don’t think it’s necessarily a showstopper. If there is a specific game that you absolutely have to play with your friend, just bring your own Xbox :slight_smile:

edit: Easier yet, if your mate has an Xbox, just bring your hard drive!

6

That’s correct. The problem is, due to Microsoft’s DRM, you can only play the games that you purchased digitally on the Xbox that you purchased them on with another gamertag. So, in your case, the thief will still be able to play your games under another gamertag on your stolen Xbox, but on your new Xbox you have to be signed into Xbox Live with your own gamertag in order to play them. If your friend logs in on to your new Xbox, it will say the game is a trial version for him because the purchase is linked to your gamertag not his.

The issue here is that for families, or groups of friends, flatmates, etc who share their games, there isn’t the option to play each other’s digital purchases without logging into the account that paid for the game. With achievements being inseparable from purchases, this creates a major dilemma. Imagine a family with five children who all share an Xbox - they surely shouldn’t be expected to all save up for the game separately in order to keep their achievements separate?

7

I think the market itself will regulate this through simple supply and demand.

Accounts aren’t so much a means to prevent piracy as they are a necessity to bring order to chaos, thereby giving access to a new realm of opportunity. The key thing to remember is you don’t have to pay for it if you don’t want it. It’s your choice.

The publishers are only going to aim for what people are willing to pay for anyway. If those publishers demand too much or are too controlling, then lower demand regulates itself.

What NEEDS to happen is that people pay attention to spikes in demand fast enough to anticipate a trend. That is what I see as one of the bigger challenges still faced today.

In my humble opinion of course.

8

I partially agree with you Geoffrey. The market will determine what gamers have to put up with to an extent, but where an alternative doesn’t exist, gamers won’t have a choice. I imagine that many people will put up with some level of compromise, especially if they don’t know any better. However, aside from services such as Good Old Games, I can’t think of any digital distribution system that offers the same level of flexibility as buying a game on a disc.

Interestingly, Nintendo has chosen a different approach to Microsoft and Valve. Games are downloaded to a particular system, rather than attached to an account. Of course, this system isn’t perfect either. Buy a new system, and you have to repurchase all your games (there is no way of transferring them).

The way I see it, there are several solutions:

  1. Have two accounts, one for digital purchases, Xbox Live Gold subscriptions, etc, and one for achievements and user data. That way, user data is kept separate from user information. However, users generally don’t like having to deal with multiple accounts and it could get messy.

  2. Make all downloaded games playable by any account on the console, offline and online. This way, if Xbox Live goes down, the games are still playable and achievements can be gained under other accounts. Of course, this could potentially mean some degree of piracy, but I think the trade off is worth it to make digital downloads more accessible. You could have server side checks for online games, e.g. you can’t have two people playing Gamertag X’s license for Halo 3 online at the same time, even if both users are signed in with different gamertags.

  3. Have an option to disable achievements/user data when the user signs in, or have these pumped to another account. E.g. have a message, “Would you like to save your game information to this profile? Yes/No”. However, it could get annoying having to answer this question every single time you sign in.

To be honest, I think option 2 is the only one that could work in the long run. It’s happened with iTunes (all music is now DRM-free), so maybe the games industry will loosen up on the current restrictions over time.

9

Impulse and GamersGate work similar to GoG afaik. You can install and run the games independently to where they were purchased. All it will take is to login with your info on the GamersGate site or the Impulse service and download the games you own in that account. After install they’re independent of the services, you won’t need to run the Impulse software to run the games, and you won’t need further GamersGate logins.

Of course, if a game has its own login systems like say, Modern Warfare 2, Mass Effect 2, or whatever else, and they somehow authorise your specific copy to such an account, meaning you can only create one valid account per copy, you will have the same issue. But you’ll have said issue even if you bought such a game on disc. So, it’s really not a DD issue, it’s an issue with how companies handle cd keys, accounts, etc. Imo it’s clear they’re mostly trying to harm the second hand market rather than piracy or anything else.

Again though, I don’t care about achievements, I care about the game experience. If something is fun to do, I’ll do it even if I don’t earn an achievement. If it’s not fun, then I won’t do it even if there are achievements to be earned. It’s a non issue to me, other issues like the inability to lend games depending on the strictness of such systems are far more important, but again that’s applied to disc releases as well as DD since they’re becoming one and the same and since games use more and more online features that require account creation to offer experiences you can’t have without such systems.

Sometimes such strictness is necessary because it would be easy to otherwise abuse and share the games among many people who can all play at the same time, meaning it’s essentially piracy, but of course that doesn’t mean consumers should be happy with it either. Perhaps games could come with some kind of USB based authorization key (when they come in a box, perhaps some kind of authorization application can be used for DD) which means that this can only be used by 1 person at a time therefor you can lend it out as many times as you want, and you’ll be unable to play it at the time just like if you lent out a disc. I suppose it would still be easy to abuse online however, it’s one thing to share among 10 friends locally and another when you can pass any games you no longer play to 1000s of strangers on the internet, even if it’s only one at a time. Sites and forums dedicated to such sharing would probably pop up overnight, and the issue would be as widespread as piracy, especially for single player titles. It’s a very tricky issue for sure, this ease of use and data sharing with the internet comes at a price, and all possibly solutions will somehow hinder the ease of use for the consumer. USB dongles will be cumbersome to keep and keep switching, online logins will require internet connections even for single player games, etc. There’s really no easy way out. Even just stopping DD altogether and going back to disc only releases would cause backlash.

I agree that they should be able to separate statistics and achievements and such though. I could have for example my Steam login, and then player profiles within. I login to my Steam account, and then I could have a sub-account for me and for my brother with the same games purchased and authorised, but completely different achievements, saves, player data, etc. Since the account login would still be required it wouldn’t make it easier to pirate or anything, and I still couldn’t really lend the games out to others, but at least I could have different statistics per player. I don’t care about achievements but since they can fix that, they should. The same could work for games with their own logins like ME2, I could have a login that authorises the game and the DLC content and what not, and then player profiles within. Otherwise they kinda wanna force you to buy 2 copies even if you play them on the same PC, lol, no thank you.

10

I had a quick look at the GamersGate site, and it seems be more like Steam than GoG. It still uses DRM for activation purposes (you have to connect to the net on every PC), but it doesn’t offer the server side benefits of Steam… achievements, Steam cloud, friends lists, etc. While it’s good to have options, I can’t see any particular reason to go with this service over Steam. Not sure about Impulse… it does seem to have some community features.

This is mainly a problem on the PC for games bought on a disc. Console games bought on a DVD don’t require activation (for the time being), so you can still have achievements and user data separated into different accounts. Maybe some modern PC games work like this too?

Yeah, I don’t think shipping a USB dongle with every game is feasible, and sooner or later it’s not going to make sense to sell games as physical copies (this is already happening with services such as Xbox Live Arcade - you cannot buy physical copies of most of those games). A digital solution is really the only one that can work in the long run. I’m not against digital distribution in principal, just the way it’s currently being handled.

Mmm, this is indeed a dilemma. IMO it’s crazy if companies expect users living in the same household, using the same system, to buy two copies of the same game, which is why I named this topic the way I did.

I like your idea of separating user accounts and purchase accounts, but I also feel it could confuse users. Users generally don’t like signing up for accounts, so having to sign in twice before playing a game is unlikely to be popular. I think it could work if you didn’t need to be signed into the account you purchased the game under when playing it. So for example, you turn on your PC/console, and sign into any account, and the game will run regardless of whether or not that account was the purchaser.

11

I really don’t think GamersGate authenticates your game with the service every time you launch it, I got ME2 from it and I don’t notice anything like that. It authenticated only before the install. I suppose it may work that in the background, I’ll try to disconnect from the internet and run ME2 and see if it works…

…It launched fine and I could play the game. Cerberus network couldn’t function offline but that meant I couldn’t get potential new DLC (duh), the already downloaded and authorised content was functional, and that’s a game feature regardless of the service.

What part of its DRM you think works like Steam? The game to me seems completely independent to where I purchased it from. I got Mount&Blade Warband via GamersGate as well, and again it required authentication to initiate the install alone, the game seems just like a fully functional stand alone disc based release after that with no modified files.

It doesn’t seem to save any login information per game to make it dangerous to lend games to friends or anything, I’ll just have to login to authorise the install and then they can play at will with no further DRM checks outside the game’s particular systems.

As for going with GG over Steam, well, of course they don’t adhere to the Steam standards so they don’t have Steam achievements but any game with its own achievement system (like ME2) still works as intended. Of course you can’t share those or have a unified list of everything you’ve earned either. But really, I don’t care about achievements, I don’t need friend lists for something like ME2 or Warband, and I merely use GG when something is cheaper than on Steam. The same for Impulse actually. Imo achievements are not worth paying extra for, and as for friend lists, I’ve been online for many years before Steam, most of my online friends use other systems like instant messengers and what not.

Impulse has various community features but if you want those you’ll have to run their Steam-like application which means you’re again tied to Steam like restrictions. But you can also run the games independently without first running the Impulse application to be free from those. Of course online games will still require a connection and some kind of authentication as they do regardless of service.

For the issue with multiple account creations, I don’t think they’re important. When you setup a new Windows based PC you set up administrator accounts and sub user accounts as well. The sub accounts don’t even have to be accounts, just user profiles with no login information unless so desired, so you could just login to your standard Steam account, then choose who you are, Alex, Mary, or whoever, with your own saves and what not.

12

[quote=“Al3xand3r”]I really don’t think GamersGate authenticates your game with the service every time you launch it, I got ME2 from it and I don’t notice anything like that. It authenticated only before the install. I suppose it may work that in the background, I’ll try to disconnect from the internet and run ME2 and see if it works…

…It launched fine and I could play the game. Cerberus network couldn’t function offline but that meant I couldn’t get potential new DLC (duh), the already downloaded and authorised content was functional, and that’s a game feature regardless of the service.

What part of its DRM you think works like Steam? The game to me seems completely independent to where I purchased it from. I got Mount&Blade Warband via gamersgate as well, and again it required authentication to initiate the install alone, the game seems just like a fully functional stand alone disc based release after that with no modified files.[/quote]

According to Gamersgate the FAQ, you need to connect to the net each time you install the game. So, for example, if your PC dies but you have the game backed up, you’ll still need to connect to the net to reactivate the game. In this respect it’s very similar to Steam, which also has an offline mode. GoG allows you to take the games you’ve downloaded and copy them to another PC. If the service ever disappears, you can still play the games from your own backup since they’re DRM free.

13

That’s what I said from the 1st post, only on install. That’s very unlike Steam, imo. Most games would not function fully either way if their original companies die. Won’t be able to play multiplayer online if the matchmaking servers are down, won’t be able to acquire DLC you may have lost, etc. Not without dabbling in piracy at least. If I go online to get the game then clearly I have an internet connection and can authenticate the install so it’s not a big issue. After that it’s fullly functional and stand alone from GG. Asking for no checks at all would be unrealistic as it would be more prone to piracy.

For certain games like Warband you’re safe even if GG goes down, since the creator offers the full game for download and you can authenticate it with the cd keys you get from them directly or GG and other services as well, authenticating via the creator than with GG. Of course, that means if the creator goes down (more likely than GG), you can’t play, unless you trust them to release the game as freeware when/if that happens (as Valve claims) but of course if they’re ever in such a position they’ll have bigger things to worry about than pleasing customers and they have no reason to believe this.

Even if Microsoft goes down you won’t be able to fully play many of your 360 games, unable to get potentially required firmware updates you didn’t get before it happened (or perhaps your 360 broke and you can’t find to buy a fully updated new one), unable to play online, unable to use achievements, friend lists, etc. Online features come at a price.

14

My point was that Steam also has an “offline” mode that you can use after you activate the game online. So, the restriction is the same. Yes, you have to run the Steam client as well, but that’s beside the point. If you replace your PC and the service has gone down for either system you’re stuffed (unless they release a patch to remove the activation DRM).

I don’t know of any 360 games that require a firmware update in order to play the game off a disc - if they do, the firmware update would likely come on a disc (the exception being for original Xbox games, but those were never designed to work on the 360 out of the box). Microsoft doesn’t require their console to be hooked up to the net (yet) as that would alienate users without an Internet connection. Of course, you will miss out on some content and online play if the servers do eventually come down, but it’s no worse than Sega taking the Dreamcast servers down - most (all?) DC games are still playable offline to this day.

15

Again, it’s different to Steam, you can actually patch GG games without login as well. Not so with Steam. After install the game is completely independent via GG, just as if you had bought it on disc, and only restricted with whatever the given publisher/developer saw fit, not with Steam-like restrictions on top. You could play online as well without further authentication, which is not the case wiith Steam’s offline mode, which has you completely disconnect from the internet to even kick that in. After install, it’s independent to GG and the same as any disc installation with no additional protection measures.

16

All the Major updates are included on game discs (even demo discs) or you can e-mail/write to Micosoft for them to send a disc out to you . All achievements work offline too , and updated as soon as you go online , and a online friends list is pretty pointless if you’re console isn’t online.
Though you can link your X-Box account with MSN and XBox.com to add/keep in touch with mates on-line through your PC, Should your console not be set up online

17

Al3x - I’m not sure what you’re arguing against, exactly. Of course there are differences between all the services. When I compared Gamers Gate to Steam I was talking about DRM and activation requirements, which both services have. That was my point, not that the services have no differences between them.

I’m sure there are pros and cons both, such as cheaper prices for some games on Gamers Gate as you mentioned. But from a DRM perspective, both services are suspect (whereas Good Old Games is an example of a service that has no DRM).

Team Andromeda - While it makes sense that the online features are attached to the service, what do you think about Xbox Live Arcade and Games on Demand purchases being inseparable from your gamertag (and presumably requiring a constant Internet connection to play the games)?

18

Its never really been an issue as I?ve been with LIVE for 6 years , and almost every one of my mates have 360 set up to LIVE. It only was an issue , when my mate moved house and wasn?t online for a while , and we wanted to play Sensi Soccer up his house , and couldn?t , That said , these days for all sorts of services you need to be online .

What I don?t like , and what I think its unfair , is that families can?t share the LIVE Gold sub between members in the same house hold , or there is no discounts for members of the same family in the same house hold .
It?s a bit much to expect a mother and father to buy a Gold Live Sub for each of their kids , Mind you, I find it equally unfair that I can?t use my legal copy of Winows 7 on more than 1 computer , same for my Anti Virus . Even though I 100% bought them legally in the shops .

19

So, would you not usually play each others Xbox Live Arcade games? I guess, often these are bought on personal preference…

[quote=“Team Andromeda”]What I don?t like , and what I think its unfair , is that families can?t share the LIVE Gold sub between members in the same house hold , or there is no discounts for members of the same family in the same house hold .
It?s a bit much to expect a mother and father to buy a Gold Live Sub for each of their kids , Mind you, I find it equally unfair that I can?t use my legal copy of Winows 7 on more than 1 computer , same for my Anti Virus . Even though I 100% bought them legally in the shops .[/quote]

I agree with these points. Regarding your anti virus issue, you can download Microsoft Security Essentials for free: microsoft.com/security_essentials/ Alternatively, if you don’t need to run any particular application on Windows, consider OSX or Ubuntu. Ubuntu is free, OSX has the same issue but OS licenses are significantly cheaper since Apple make their money primarily off the hardware. Both don’t really require anti virus software in the way that Windows does.

20

In most cases yes . Its just that I had bought Sensible Soccer and now and again we like to play the game,. Trouble was after I bought it , me and my mate both said it wasn’t a patch onthe old Mega CD version (which used a different button to shoot and pass ECT) So he never bothered to buy the game for himself

Thanks for the lookout . I’m ok and my 2nd PC is fully covered(though I would to have been able to update it from XP to Windows 7 )
I just feel that seeing as I bought the retail version of Windows and Kap, I should be able to put them on as many PC’s in my House , as I like.