Piracy

I don't want to get into the habit of making bad cartoons in Paint, but I made this one, so here it is.

And now a long disclaimer.

It's not that I care so much about piracy. If you're going to do it, then do it. I've done it a couple of times myself, so I'm not here to pass judgement. I'm not even going to say it's "wrong" (morally or otherwise). I'll leave that in the hands of the justice system or whichever supernatural being you like. The fact that a law exists doesn't necessarily mean you're a bad person for not following it. You might be a terrible person anyway, but if you die tomorrow and end up in your preferred version of Hell for all eternity, it's probably not because you failed to obey the speed limit, and it's probably not because you downloaded a video game without paying for it.

Some will tell you that software piracy is essentially theft and that it harms the video game developers and the industry as a whole, but it's pretty obvious that such claims are still up for debate. Since I don't have any hard evidence that software piracy has ever caused a video game developer to go hungry, I won't tell you what to do. Make your own decision and live with it.

What I don't like are the attempts to justify piracy and the claims that it helps the industry in some counter-intuitive way. Let's get something straight: People download games illegally because they don't want to pay for them. It's that simple. They can take a game for free instead of paying, so they do it. Surely there are those who engage in piracy for the sake of trying a game before they decide to buy it, but I have serious doubts that these conscientious pirates are the majority. There are others who use piracy as a way of boycotting a publisher or developer, but if you want to commit to a boycott, you should have the self-control to go without the product of the company you're boycotting. In any case, for many if not the vast majority, piracy is nothing more than an attempt to get something for nothing.

This is why it's so transparently pathetic when pirates try to justify what they do. The fact that they even feel the need to justify piracy at all is kind of troubling. If you're comfortable with your own choices and your personal reasons for those choices, you shouldn't need to explain them in detail to everyone. But instead of owning up to the fact that they're violating copyright law for personal gain, accepting that decision for what it is, and ignoring the haters, they desperately try to come up with reasons that piracy is either harmless or somehow beneficial to all parties involved. (Are they trying to convince me, or are they trying to convince themselves?) I'll admit that some of their arguments are plausible, even when the claims on which they base these arguments are completely unverifiable, but let's be honest. It's denial, plain and simple.

One of the most popular (and perhaps most bone-headed) justifications of piracy goes something like this: "But it's not stealing!" Since theft usually means taking something from someone else, while software piracy typically involves making a copy while leaving the original intact instead of taking it away, many argue that piracy is not the same as theft. Based on that definition of theft, this is absolutely true. After all, there's a reason we use a different word. But is everything that isn't "theft" automatically justified?

It's fine to point out that piracy isn't stealing if you're actually responding to claims that piracy and theft are one in the same, but I've had people tell me repeatedly that "it's not stealing" even when the concept of stealing hadn't been brought up in the discussion at all. It's as if people believe that "it's not stealing" is the end-all argument in favor of doing whatever you want regardless of context. Frankly, I don't care that piracy isn't theft. Does it really matter? If piracy is wrong, then quibbling over semantics doesn't make it less wrong. If piracy isn't wrong, then comparing it to a serious crime isn't helping your case.

I'd also like to point out that it doesn't matter whether the publisher loses a copy. In the age of digital distribution, the idea of counting copies of a product is meaningless. (In fact, the entire concept of theft, in the traditional sense, is equally meaningless in this context.) What the publisher loses due to piracy, in theory, is a potential sale.

This leads to the obvious "but I wasn't going to buy it anyway." The implication is that no potential sale is lost because the pirate never would have spent any money on the product even if piracy weren't an option. Fair enough, if it's true, but I suspect it rarely is. People who illegally download games want to play games, and I see no reason to assume that the average pirate wants to play games any less than the average customer. The only obvious difference is that the pirate isn't afraid to break the rules. The fact that someone downloads a game illegally to save money is no indication that this person would never spend money on games.

But since we'll never have reliable data on the percentage of pirates who would have been paying customers if piracy weren't an option, we can only guess about piracy's overall effect on sales. I have no doubt that a significant number of pirates would buy games if they had to, but there are other factors to consider.

Some would argue that piracy actually helps sales by giving more exposure to certain games. This isn't entirely unreasonable, but there's no real evidence for it. Accepting this viewpoint requires us to assume either that each pirate, on average, perhaps through word-of-mouth, effectively convinces more than one other person to buy the game, or that there are a whole lot of those conscientious pirates who illegally download a game to try it out and then buy a legitimate copy if they like it. I think either scenario is unlikely.

Those few who do adhere to the "try it before you buy it" philosophy, though, are okay in my book. I can't complain. If the owners of a game don't want people to pirate the full version of their game to use it as a demo, they should release a free demo. In fact, there's no excuse for not releasing a demo. Either the developers are lazy (which probably means the game is bad), or they're afraid that letting people play the game before they buy it will lead to a decrease in sales (which almost surely means the game is bad). Unfortunately, you don't need to make a good game to get rich. The video game industry is like any other business. The publishers don't want you to make an informed decision; they just want you to buy. That's why they try so hard to get us to pre-order their games even before a single review has been written.

But piracy isn't some form of vigilante justice. Those who use their general dissatisfaction with the state of the industry to justify piracy seem to have this odd delusion that they're affecting things in a positive way. They claim they'll buy the games made by the developers who allegedly deserve their money and pirate everything else. The idea is to avoid rewarding bad behavior, which sounds nice. But pirating a game because it was made by a developer you hate isn't sending the right message. If they know people are pirating their game, it tells them two things. The first is that people want their game. The second is that they need to crack down on piracy so these people who want their game are forced to pay.

Even if piracy does have some positive net effect, it's still ridiculous to pretend that people engage in piracy for this reason. Piracy isn't about being a hero. It's about each individual doing what's best for himself, and any theoretical benefits are nothing more than an unintended side-effect which proves useful for desperate after-the-fact rationalization.

Steam Sales: The Golden Age is Over

This year's summer sale on Steam ended today. I didn't buy much, despite having $70 worth of gift cards to scratch off and some leftover credit from an older gift card which I never used up. I think it's fair to say I'm disappointed. This was my chance to go nuts, and I just couldn't force myself to do it. There just weren't enough games that seemed worth buying. Needless to say, I'll have to tell people not to get me Steam gift cards anymore. If they keep it up, I'll never be able to spend it all. It's going to take me a while to burn through all these Steam bucks, and it's not even a lot of money as far as video games are concerned. Some people spend $60 on a game without blinking.

However, I've grown too accustomed to my own "never pay more than $5 for a video game" rule. To be honest, I probably wouldn't have regretted using $35.99 of my precious gift-card money for the new Doom, which, despite being a supposedly great game, was discounted an impressive 40% (from $59.99) only six weeks after release. However, if it drops that fast, it's probably going to drop even more if I wait until the next sale, and I'm not really in a hurry to play a game in which the multiplayer mode is supposedly the worst part. In any case, even though I didn't take advantage of this particular deal, I wanted to mention Doom as an example of how this Steam sale was pretty okay. It wasn't all bad. However, Doom aside, it just didn't feel special.

Every year, there seems to be a general consensus that the biggest events on Valve's digital store — namely the big sales in winter (around Christmas) and in summer — aren't as "big" as they used to be. Every Steam sale in recent memory has been accompanied by exclamations of disappointment and claims that previous sales were better. I think it's party because these events have generated a bit too much hype over the years. When there's a certain amount of hype, it becomes impossible for reality to keep up. Moreover, with every passing Steam sale, there's another sale to which every future sale can be compared. We also have to be aware of the effects of nostalgia, and ask ourselves whether past Steam sales were actually better or whether we only think so because we have fond memories of enjoying them.

Stories of the good old days, clearly, should always be taken with a grain of salt. For the record, though, I do think there's some truth to them. "Steam sales used to be better" is a subjective statement, and assessing the "truth" of such a statement is difficult to do in any meaningful way, but there are some relevant objective facts which need examining, namely that Steam sales have undergone two major changes in the past few years.

I have no intention of limiting myself to total objectivity in everything that follows, but I think I can be objective enough to make a valid point. Personally, I'm not disappointed in this sale because I fell for the hype. I wasn't really hyped at all; my expectations, actually, were rather low. I'm not disappointed in this sale simply because of nostalgia, either. My disappointment with this particular sale is related to pricing; it can literally be quantified. What might be true is that I'm disappointed in this sale largely because I've already taken advantage of so many previous sales that, of all the games which could have been expected to see deep discounts this summer, I've already acquired most of the ones which interest me. If this is the case, however, it's unfortunate that so many of the remaining games which do interest me were discounted less in this sale than they have been in the past.

I had heard good things about Dark Messiah of Might & Magic, for example, and considered buying it last night. It was only $4.99, so it even fit within my "never spend more than $5 on a game" budget which shields me from any potential buyer's remorse when I don't have more than $70 in virtual money burning a hole in my Steam wallet. However, I always want to know I'm getting the best deal (or something close to it), even when the use of a gift card limits my options to a single store, so I looked up the game's price history on SteamDB. It turns out I would have been spending twice as much as the lowest price. The fact that such an old game was discounted a mere 50% should have been a clue; the 75% discounts are usually the ones which justify any Steam sale hype, and Dark Messiah of Might & Magic had several of them (putting the game at only $2.49) prior to this year.

There were several other games which I would have bought if their price histories hadn't shown better deals in the past (leaving open the possibility of repeats in the future). The best examples I can remember (coincidentally each with a base price of $9.99) were those which, like Dark Messiah of Might & Magic, had been demoted from 75% discounts to 50% discounts at some point over the past couple of years: Lisa was $4.99 in this sale, but had been $2.49 during the most recent winter sale; Far Cry 2 was also $4.99 in this sale and in the most recent winter sale, but had been $2.49 during last year's summer sale and in several prior sales; Papers, Please was $4.99 this time but had been sold for less on numerous occasions, going down to $2.49 at least once.

In only one case, I overlooked the effective "increase" in price: Once upon a time (although SteamDB's price history doesn't seem to go back far enough to show it), Max Payne 3 had been $3.99. For some reason, I chose not to buy it on that occasion, and the price has gone only as low as $4.99 in every sale since then. I really wanted the game and I had doubts about the price ever hitting $3.99 again, so I bought it anyway. It's not a big deal, really, but the other games mentioned here were low enough on my wishlist that I could stand to forgo the purchases on principle.

Looking up the price history of every game on Steam in order to draw a scientific and unbiased conclusion about the quality of any given sale is too much work for a blog post, so I'm going to stop that here. Still, the last two major Steam sales — i.e., the one which just ended and the most recent winter sale — were different from previous sales in a far more obvious way: static discounts.

It used to be that every major Steam sale followed a fairly predictable pattern. While a large number of games would be discounted for the duration, a few games would be featured daily with greater discounts lasting only a day or two. At some point, these daily deals were supplemented with flash sales posted every eight hours, so we had those for a while too. These limited-time deals made it worthwhile to check the Steam store on every day of such an event, or multiple times per day after the addition of flash sales. In fact, doing so was practically necessary if you wanted to make sure you were getting the best deal on anything. It was under these circumstances that I posted this guide, which is totally useless now that daily deals and flash sales are no more. In my opinion, it's unlikely that Steam sales will return to the way they were before.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing for everyone. Although the sense of excitement is mostly gone for those who enjoyed checking the store every day for new deals, those with busy work schedules or unreliable internet access will find that the anxiety and frustration of missing these short-term discounts is gone as well. In many ways, the current model is better. Inexperienced shoppers (for whom I wrote the aforementioned guide) will no longer be tricked into buying a discounted game only to see the discount increase a few days later because they didn't know to wait for a daily deal. It's worth mentioning that Steam's refund policy could have helped to alleviate this problem as well, but I'm sure many appreciate the clarity anyway. Any deal you see on any given day of the sale is the best deal you'll get during that sale. Of course, as pointed out above, it might not be as good as the best deal Steam has ever offered.

And that's fine. It's normal for Steam discounts to fluctuate from year to year due to unseen forces beyond mortal comprehension. Nobody should expect every game to be at its absolute lowest price during every sale. Unfortunately, although I lack the hard data to back it up, I suspect that a game is now less likely to hit its rock-bottom price during a major Steam sale, thanks to the lack of short-term discounts.

A developer or publisher who was willing to sell a game at 75% off for 24 or 48 hours might be unwilling to sell that game at 75% off for a much longer period of time, like the 11 days of this most recent Steam sale. In choosing the discount for a promotion lasting more than a week, the developer or publisher might be willing to go only as far as 50% off. Dark Messiah of Might & Magic might be an example of this. The game hit $2.49 (75% off) for short periods of time on several occasions, but it hasn't gone below $4.99 (50% off) since Steam got rid of daily deals and flash sales.

The death of daily deals and flash sales is the second major change in Steam sales that occurred over the past few years. The first, explained in a previous post, was the death of giveaways and contests. The first three major Steam sales which I can remember were more than just sales: There were prizes to win, including lots of free games for a lucky few. In addition, badges were earned in part by unlocking special achievements in various games and by completing other simple community-related objectives. These things were meant to drive sales and build membership, of course, but people seemed to enjoy them.

After the 2011/2012 winter sale, the giveaways stopped, and so did the special in-game achievements. The next event did introduce flash sales (in which one of the games in each round was decided by a community vote), and still had community objectives as a way of earning badges. Starting with the 2013 summer sale, however, everything began to revolve around trading cards, which were henceforth required to earn each event's badge. During that sale, they were earned by casting votes for the community-chosen games in each day's flash sales. In this year's summer event (which lacked flash sales), you could earn these cards by clicking through your queue of recommended games each day. The one interesting sale in between was the 2015 summer sale, in which trading cards were earned by playing a so-called minigame, but it wasn't what I'd call fun. It was essentially a massively multiplayer Cookie Clicker, which didn't even work properly for much of the event due to Steam servers being predictably unprepared to handle the traffic load.

Anyone who thinks Steam trading cards are lame can still collect the free cards during each event and sell them on the market for Steam credit. It's hard to complain about free money. However, it's also hard to argue that the lack of free prizes makes recent Steam sales any more enjoyable for the community.

Although it might sound crazy, I do wonder if Valve is deliberately trying to kill the Steam sale hype. The giveaways were good for generating excitement, but Steam quickly became so well known for its sales that only the impatient or uninformed would ever buy a Steam game at full price. "Wait for the sale" became (and still is) the immediate response to anyone asking if a game on Steam is worth buying. Back when daily deals and flash sales were still a regular occurrence, the standard advice also included "wait for a daily deal or flash sale" (and perhaps buy the game on the last day of the sale if it never received either of these super discounts). Not only did Steam users learn not to buy games at full price; they also learned not to buy games at a discounted price until it was clear that the price wouldn't go any lower in the immediate future.

This is all perfectly rational, so it's not like Steam's customers did anything wrong. The situation might not have been great for business, though. Some developers have said they love Steam sales because it's when they get much of their revenue, but some might not appreciate the community's perception that the real price of a game is the "daily deal" price and that the game should be ignored at every other moment. The predictability of Steam sales is the problem; customers know they can get a game for 75% off if they wait, so those customers see no point in the game even being available at full price for the rest of the year.

Meanwhile, it wasn't an ideal situation for all consumers, either; I'm thinking mainly of the consumers who hadn't heard the advice about waiting for daily deals and flash sales. When a game is discounted for the duration of a several-day event only to be discounted even further for a shorter period of time within that event, the lesser discount can seem like a trick. If a game is going to be 75% off for a day, it's best to just leave it at that, instead of offering a 50% discount for several days prior. Recent Steam sales have obviously gone in the other direction, though, favoring long-term discounts. This allows for all kinds of bragging about the number of games on sale, even if this means some developers and publishers are less likely to push their prices as low as they would have done for daily deals and flash sales of years gone by.

As I mentioned above, I think it's unlikely that daily deals and flash sales will make a comeback, although it might happen if sales begin to suffer due to lack of interest and Valve decides they need to rebuild some of that hype. Likewise, I'm absolutely certain that giveaways and contests are long gone, never to return. However, even if it's true that the golden age of Steam sales is behind us, I can't really be too upset. It just means I was around for the best part of something which still, honestly, is pretty good.

I'm still disappointed, but I also know that I'm spoiled.

Dear Game Developers: Walking Isn't Fun

Recently, I've been trying a bit harder to work through my oversized backlog of unfinished and unplayed games, which is mostly the result of too many impulsive purchases of irresistibly inexpensive bundles. They never put more than the tiniest dent in my wallet but now threaten to take a substantial chunk of my time left on Earth if ever I am to say I've played them all. My admittedly questionable strategy thus far has been guaranteed quantity over probable quality: rather than trying to play the best games first, I've been trying to knock out a lot of short games to make the perceived size of the list itself a bit less intimidating. This means I'm finally trying a lot of the games which I never would have thought to purchase if they hadn't come bundled with more attractive games. Sometimes, these small-scale indie games turn out to be hidden gems (which, if you were wondering, is why I play them at all). Other times, I'm not so lucky.

Last weekend, I spent about two hours playing through Pneuma: Breath of Life — which is better described as a tech demo than a game, just barely avoids classification as a "walking simulator" with the inclusion of a few mechanically interesting but ultimately far-too-easy puzzles, and tries (and fails) to be deep and meaningful in an obnoxiously unoriginal way. To be fair, I feel that the game would have been entirely bearable if not for the protagonist's incessant pseudo-philosophical jabbering and generally unfunny commentary. Alas, however, I played with the speakers turned on.

This weekend, I got to the end of Neverending Nightmares, which has a great visual style and a nice soundtrack, but suffers from an insufficient density of actual, meaningful, engaging gameplay. There are some monsters to avoid and a few items to find, but most rooms hold nothing at all of interest except for the opportunity to watch the slow-moving protagonist drag his feet from one door to the next. Maybe all this emptiness was meant to build suspense and anticipation for the scary parts, but it doesn't quite do that. It just becomes boring. I'd absolutely love a game with the aesthetics of Neverending Nightmares and the gameplay mechanics of Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts, but no such thing exists as far as I know.

I sometimes consider myself to be a connoisseur of unpopular and forgotten games — those which are not quite bad, but arguably mediocre, rough around the edges and unrefined, charming in a way that the "Game of the Year" will never be, and more memorable than yet another highly-polished but necessarily generic blockbuster marketed to the widest possible audience. Although I do enjoy the more mainstream games, which have certainly earned their place at the top, I also appreciate attempts at innovation and originality even when the final product is flawed. Rather than demanding perfection in games, I simply want to see things I've never seen before.

So I guess I consider myself to be a somewhat open-minded individual when it comes to video games. I am, however, rapidly becoming less tolerant of games in which far too much time is spent simply moving from point A to point B. And don't even get me started on games which consist entirely of moving from point A to point B. It's not original; no boundaries are being shattered; it's not 2007 anymore and you're not Jason Rohrer creating Passage. So stop it.

Don't get me wrong; I love what independent developers have done for the game industry, in general. But at some point, developers and consumers of independent games began to believe not only that video games can/should/must be "art" (an opinion with which I do not wholly disagree) but also that video games can/should/must become "art" by being less interactive (which, I think, is ridiculous). The deliberate abandonment of challenge and consequent loss of any engaging gameplay, in favor of light "exploration" (too often of a mostly linear path) and passive "experience" (of moving through the virtual environment of an interactive story), has become far too normal in indie "game" development.

Although I do acknowledge the value of something like Dear Esther (with the stipulation that such products should not be marketed as games at all), I also believe that an interactive experience which requires constant input from the player should be more engaging than Dear Esther is. The player should never be forced to spend more than a minute simply moving from one place to another, with no obstacles or challenges in between. If obstacles or challenges are not desired, then the requirement of constant input from the player is a nuisance. I used to believe that Dear Esther could actually be a good "game" if there were some puzzles to solve along the way, but "Dear Esther with puzzles" is exactly what games like Mind: Path to Thalamus and Pneuma: Breath of Life try to be, and they're not quite effective. Mind: Path to Thalamus at least has some decent puzzles and less of the pointless point-A-to-point-B non-gameplay, but you'll still spend too much time wishing you could walk faster while the narrator philosophizes.

As for games like Neverending Nightmares, I can only assume that developers sometimes run out of ideas and try to beef up the playtime with lots of nothing in between the good parts. This is an awful idea. If your game has 20 minutes of fun, make it a 20-minute game and set the price accordingly. Don't add a bunch of empty rooms and force the player to walk through them. Don't make the game overly repetitive and decrease the player's movement speed. Increased playtime is worth nothing if the extra time spent isn't any fun.

Game Journalist Attempts to Play Game

Yesterday, notoriously awful "gaming" website Polygon posted the first thirty minutes of the new Doom game's single-player mode on YouTube. There's no indication of who was playing, but it's pretty safe to assume it was indeed a Polygon employee, not just because it came from their YouTube account but because it's likely that the incompetent goons who write for Polygon are exactly this bad at video games:


I don't really need to make fun of this video. It speaks for itself. I don't need to spend any more than this one sentence expressing my mixed feelings of dismay and amusement that there might actually be a real person in the world who is so bad at a video game and yet so sure that the footage is good enough to share with the world, because I know everyone else feels the same.

But even now that I've accepted and learned to live with the fact that someone most likely got paid to record this video, there are so many other secondary and tertiary reasons to be upset:

"Lockdown in effect." Maybe it's just that this is the beginning of the game and the player is assumed to be in need of some tutorial lessons in a controlled environment. Maybe this "lockdown" sequence is a recurring event in a game which turns out to be what I fear most: a series of mandatory fights in a linear series of rooms, with only the occasional open area or branching path. Either way, it's just too "modern gaming" for a product whose destiny, I thought, was to pander to the nostalgic fans of an older Doom which featured less hand-holding and allowed more freedom to explore.

Tiny little cut scenes. I've known about it since the first trailer for the game, but it still bothers me. New gun? Tiny cut scene. New item? Tiny cut scene. Push the magic "look how awesomely I can kill this bad guy" button next to an enemy whose suddenly glowing body is supposedly an indication that he's about to die? Tiny cut scene. Drop from a great height? Tiny cut scene. It breaks the flow of what might otherwise have been a nice run-and-gun game worthy of being called Doom. But hey, what do I know? I'm just some old guy who remembers the '90s.

This bad video makes the game look bad (graphics aside, of course). That's probably why I'm nit-picking about minor aspects of the game instead of appreciating what it does right, like blood and guts.

This video is probably bait. Really, could anyone be this proudly awful at a game? It was probably done for attention. Surely the video has gotten more views for being awful than it would have gotten for being half-decent. And here I am contributing to that.

These people get paid to write video games news and reviews. I'm mad about this whether the video is serious or not. If they intentionally made the video so bad with the hope that their stupidity would go viral, I don't trust them to report on video games. If they are really this bad at video games, I don't trust them to review video games.

Polygon still exists. It's terrible.

People still play first-person shooters with controllers. I certainly don't mean to imply that the use of a controller instead of a mouse is the sole or primary reason for such spectacularly awful performance. However, even such a woefully inept and inexperienced player could have produced a more bearable and less embarrassing video with the use of a mouse, and even the best player's aiming is jerky and unnatural with a controller. The video is hard to watch for reasons that have nothing to do with skill. Every video of a first-person shooter being played with thumbsticks gives me motion sickness. "A mouse makes the game too easy" is always the first retort from people who think they need to defend their favorite toy from my opinions, but in any decent shooter, placing the reticle on a target is more of a basic requisite skill than a meaningful challenge, so there's no excuse for making it artificially hard by aiming with a device which is bad for aiming. Even video game developers know this, which is why console shooters have aim assistance. They don't want you to suck at aiming, but controllers are so awful that the game designers need to help you to not suck at aiming. Every good first-person shooter is better with a mouse and keyboard. Every player who is good with a controller can be better with a mouse and keyboard. No one can refute this with a straight face.

I'm tired and angry now. I can't even finish writing this.