Topic: WiiWare games should be released on disc. (Digital Distribution Discussion)

[Mop it up]

I'm not sure how much of that was directed at me (if any), but I don't think digital distribution is evil. I just don't want it to become the only form of distribution, though I don't see that happening at least for a while. It worked on PC because the PC gaming market was dead, but consoles are still thriving and don't need to switch to digital-only. Offering both options is the way to go.

you now have the option to pay $5 for it on a completely new piece of hardware without the hassle of finding a working NES or hooking a NES up to your TV to play it.

I also have the option of buying the original for $5, which is what I choose. It's only a hassle if you make it a hassle. I choose to make it fun.
I suppose I should be thanking the VC, because for many games which have been released on it, the price of the originals have gone down a little. Thanks VC!

[Morari]

I think that everyone just needs to take better care of their hardware. I still have two NES systems down in the basement, both work flawlessly. The same can be said about my three Genesis consoles (all three different versions at that!). This carries onto newer consoles as well, including my Playstation, Saturn, and both Dreamcasts. Now to be fair, the one Dreamcast was actually hooked up and being played on occasion until recently, but all of the others have been sitting haphazardly in my basement for years and years. Every now and then I'll get one out, hook it up, and play the **** out of the games for a few weeks before putting it back away. Hell, even my Atari is still working!

And don't even get me started on all of those DOS games that I continue to partake in.

[Deguello]

I'm not so keen on Digital Distribution myself, mainly because it will add a further ethical and possibly financial argument in the favor of piracy.

If I may don the cape of free market crap...  The act of buying a disc with a game on it is the exchange of money for a physical product.  The product is a thing that you can hold in our hand and prove your ownership of it.

Digital Distribution is different.  Digital Distribution is the act of giving money for the service of having bits of data installed onto my disk.  This service will likely be charged the same (or possibly slightly lesser) money as a physical product, as the savings will most likely not be passed to us (Case in point, Burnout Paradise.  $50 Digital Download, $19 Disc)  But since it is now a service, there will be a wealth of people who will spring up to perform this service ranging from online retail distributors like Amazon, or people who will do this service absolutely free of charge.  The idea behind software piracy as a crime is that pirates buy a product, copy the contents, and either distribute on the internet or print them out for backup or possibly illegal selling.  But take out the actual product in this equation, and what's left?  Two competing "service providers," one who will charge MSRP and one whose price is most likely zero.

That's the financial reason for "piracy" in the Digital Distribution age. The ethical one is that when these entertainment things are no longer on actual physical products, what is there to pirate?  The law is going to have a fun time of it catching up to technology.

And by no means am I supporting or condoning piracy, but the arguments and justifications will certainly be a lot stronger for it if we kick out physical media completely.

[Spak-Spang]

WiiWare has left a sour taste in my mouth to digital distribution.

I could see a single company deciding to package several of their WiiWare games onto a single disc, but it would have to be a publisher with several games available, and I just don't see who that would be at this point. 

[Smash_Brother]

I'm not sure how much of that was directed at me (if any), but I don't think digital distribution is evil

It was from a general scan of the thread, really. I mentioned that Steam users could resell their games because Ian had mentioned not being able to do so while DD has clearly made allowances for this as well.

I also have the option of buying the original for $5, which is what I choose. It's only a hassle if you make it a hassle. I choose to make it fun.

I don't see how this can't be a hassle, honestly.

1. Every additional piece of hardware that I need to connect to my TV adds more clutter and wires. It's highly impractical to have an NES, SNES, Genesis and TurboGrafix hooked up if I want to play any games from those consoles, especially considering none of them had wireless controllers or cords that could reach to where ever I want to be in my living room.

2. TVs don't have that many inputs, anyway. I already have a switchbox full from the Wii, PS3, 360 and Dreamcast. I'd have to daisy-chain another one in to get any more consoles in there.

3. Save states on VC games are just awesome. Being able to hit the menu button and come back to the game later at the same point is a godsend.

I understand some of the nostalgia factor, but really, having one console that can play all of these games is a godsend for both cost and convenience.

[UltimatePartyBear]

That's the financial reason for "piracy" in the Digital Distribution age. The ethical one is that when these entertainment things are no longer on actual physical products, what is there to pirate?  The law is going to have a fun time of it catching up to technology.

What is there to pirate?  What kind of question is this?  Copyright law is already crystal clear on the subject.  You either have the right to distribute copies or you don't.  You can only have that right if you're the content creator or a contractually licensed agent of the content creator.  Everyone else: Pirates!

How could digital distribution possibly confuse that issue?  As I already said, the work is not the disc.  We have always been talking about work that has no physical manifestation.  The disc is just a crutch to make the work sellable in a market that only knows how to deal in physical goods.  Piracy isn't copying the disc.  It's copying the content of the disc.  Take away the disc, and piracy is simply copying the content. 

[Deguello]

It's copying the content of the disc.  Take away the disc, and piracy is simply copying the content. 

Which would be pretty hard to prove in court.  I mean say you steal my bike, and it is found in your garage.  I can say, "Look, there is my bike.  It is right there."  Ephemeral content is hard to prove the theft of.  Say you steal me Bilingual Iconography-Kinetic Emulator and a copy is found on your computer.  How in the hell do I prove you stole it from me?  Like I said, there's nothing to pirate.

[Smash_Brother]

Which would be pretty hard to prove in court.  I mean say you steal my bike, and it is found in your garage.  I can say, "Look, there is my bike.  It is right there."  Ephemeral content is hard to prove the theft of.  Say you steal me Bilingual Iconography-Kinetic Emulator and a copy is found on your computer.  How in the hell do I prove you stole it from me?  Like I said, there's nothing to pirate.

I think you're using the wrong example here.

A bike is a physical object that cannot be "replicated", and what you're describing here is "theft", not piracy.

Piracy is making illegal copies of something that can be "copied" and either using it yourself or selling it for cash.

You can pirate anything that can be in digital format, including movies, music and software. If you have a copy of the software and you didn't pay for it, you've pirated it. It's that simple.

Software can be pirated regardless of how it's distributed.

[UltimatePartyBear]

Like I said, there's nothing to pirate.

Maybe you really mean there's no physical evidence of piracy, because the act happened regardless of whether you're found guilty in court.  Still, if digital distribution is the only distribution, then there are going to be limited legal channels for acquiring the software, and proving whether or not you used one would be trivial.  In the real world, where there are still a bazillion places to buy a disc with cash, I fail to see how not being able to prosecute Joe User would matter any more than it already does.

I can't really go any further without derailing this even more.

[Smash_Brother]

Yeah, both iTunes and the Wii Shop Channel have a list of everything you've purchased and could verify whether or not you own something, same with Steam.

[NinGurl69 *huggles]

Dear Industry,

To make Digital Distro work, please lower the prices of... EVERYTHING.

Otherwise, get fucked.

Signed,

The Consumer

[Deguello]

There's also the issue of competition, too.

Say Sony does what they say they are going to do makes the next PSP or whatever a digital distribution only device.  That would limit their potential customer base to those who buy the PSPs and take them online, and even the 360 has like 10 or so million units out there that don't connect to the internet.  Second, it would completely cede the Wal-marts and Gamestops to the competition.  Imagine walking into a Walmart and seeing that they sell PSP2s but no games for them, or worse, empty game boxes with little slips of paper that tell you to connect to the internet, sign up for PSN, and use the code to receive a game as fast as your internet connection will provide (assuming it is up and running at the moment.) 

Or look over at the DS2 case and see a shelf stocked full of games that you can plug in and play within seconds.  It would look, to the average consumer, that the PSP2 is some sort of failed machine that nobody makes games for.  Now imagine this with the big consoles.  Imagine Sony and MS going completely DigitDistro and only physically shipping their consoles.  That would make the entire game store look like some sort of Nintendo paradise.  The physical market is not one to throw away so easily, and unless they start pulling down Wii Fit's revenue numbers (Highest ever for a single videogame, 17 million+ $89 = Holy Frijoles, imagine the profit), I'd say Digital distribution remains a place for classic titles and new ideas, but not a means of building an entire industry's retail around.

[Ian Sane]

Deg's point about piracy has made me think of something.  Yeah WiiWare and iTunes and such keep track of what you've bought so it would make it easy to say if you obtained something legally or not.  But why would a select few stores be the only options?  In the real world I go to any store and buy a physical product and I assume that they legally obtained it to sell it to me.  I have no evidence that Wal-Mart didn't steal a truckload of goods and then sold them to me.  I assume quite fairly that they didn't but I can't say for certain.  But because of serial numbers it would easy to catch a store that was doing that.  Same with pirated goods.  I buy a clear knock-off at a store and I have easy evidence of it.

So in the future let's say we have various websites selling digital goods.  How do I know this website is really allowed to sell that song or that movie or that videogame?  Because there is no physical good they can just obtain a copy and sell it.  It could be indistinguishable from the real thing to me.

Okay a way around that is to only have a handful of stores.  But then we have monopolies.  There's no competition.  WiiWare has no competition.  I can price check at stores to find the best price for a game, particularly if it's been out for a while.  Different stores might have it marked down.  I have some power as a consumer.  There is no alternative for WiiWare.  Now right now WiiWare does still have to compete with physical games so there isn't quite a monopoly there.  But in a digital only world?

We could have a future where only a small amount of "stores" exist and that gives them considerably more power than any corporation has today.  This is entertainment which is optional so we're not talking about charging $1000 a game here.  But if the option is "pay what we want" or no music, video or videogames they can charge as much as they feel they could possibly get away with.  There is an amount that is borderline gouging but still is low enough that in the absense of entertainment people will pay.

You run the risk of phony "stores" selling pirated goods with the general public not being able to tell for sure what stores are legit and what aren't.  You can bypass the risk by restricting the stores but then that removes competition.

[KDR_11k]

Generally going download only with mass-market games is only really viable once other media have done the same. There's already a large number of people using music downloads, if this expands enough to make the disc sales irrelevant it should be feasible to sell games online too as people are already used to looking for stuff online.

So in the future let's say we have various websites selling digital goods.  How do I know this website is really allowed to sell that song or that movie or that videogame?

If it's not allowed to it'll quickly get sued unless it's some small operation that flies under the radar, a store that remains in bsiness for any real period of time won't engage in something as blatantly sueable as copyright infringement, especially of goods that have multi-billion dollar companies with matching legal teams behind them. And I think we all know what to expect from small stores in Hong Kong that sell games at 10% of their MSRP, digital or not...

Okay a way around that is to only have a handful of stores.  But then we have monopolies.  There's no competition.  WiiWare has no competition.

That's because WiiWare is an extension of the console monopoly. Consoles are generally about lock-in. The PC has several competing download services that offer different pricedrops, different takes on DRM, etc. If you don't want a monopoly don't get a console.

But if the option is "pay what we want" or no music, video or videogames they can charge as much as they feel they could possibly get away with.

The impression I get is that they're already doing that and implicitly colluding with each other to keep the MSRPs consistent between different publishers. While stores sometimes go below the publisher's price it's fairly rare and most sales happen pretty much near the current MSRP.

[Stratos]

In response to illegal D/L sites like Ian mentioned, there is one Russian based site that sells MP3s at a dirt cheap price (like $0.10/MB) because they are all pirated. I think you could be punished by your government in some countries if you are caught D/Ling fro them and a lot of other countries are fighting to have them taken down but Russia won't force them out of business.

I think word of mouth and a little research will protect you from D/Ling from these places. How do you know that iTunes, Steam or Amazon MP3 are legit? Word of mouth, news and reviews. That Russian site? It sounded fishy and the prices were too good to be true so I looked them up on Google and Wikipedia and got a fuller story regarding them.

I got on their site and it felt like walking into a garage filled with bootlegs. You can tell so long as you keep from being blind and ignorant.

[TJ Spyke]

That's because WiiWare is an extension of the console monopoly. Consoles are generally about lock-in. The PC has several competing download services that offer different pricedrops, different takes on DRM, etc. If you don't want a monopoly don't get a console.
s. While stores sometimes go below the publisher's price it's fairly rare and most sales happen pretty much near the current MSRP.

Consoles have no monopoly in Europe. The console manufacturers are not legally allowed to stop a company from releasing games on their systems their. That is why a company like Phoenix Games exists and why they have released hundreds of PS2 games that border on copyright infringement (mainly with Disney). It's because Sony legally can't stop them from releasing games on the PS2/PS3/PSP in Europe.

[Stratos]

That's because WiiWare is an extension of the console monopoly. Consoles are generally about lock-in. The PC has several competing download services that offer different pricedrops, different takes on DRM, etc. If you don't want a monopoly don't get a console.
s. While stores sometimes go below the publisher's price it's fairly rare and most sales happen pretty much near the current MSRP.

Consoles have no monopoly in Europe. The console manufacturers are not legally allowed to stop a company from releasing games on their systems their. That is why a company like Phoenix Games exists and why they have released hundreds of PS2 games that border on copyright infringement (mainly with Disney). It's because Sony legally can't stop them from releasing games on the PS2/PS3/PSP in Europe.

Really? That seems...strange. How did your government come to that conclusion?

[Mop it up]

1. Every additional piece of hardware that I need to connect to my TV adds more clutter and wires.
2. TVs don't have that many inputs, anyway. I already have a switchbox full from the Wii, PS3, 360 and Dreamcast.
3. Save states on VC games are just awesome.

1. Personal preference. I like to have my television surrounded by systems, it makes it much more gamey.
2. Personal problem. I have seven systems connected to my television without using a switchbox.
3. People are lazy. Personally I hate convenience, it just makes everyone lazy and impatient. If humans were truly intelligent beings, they'd invent machines which do things less effectively.

[TJ Spyke]

That's because WiiWare is an extension of the console monopoly. Consoles are generally about lock-in. The PC has several competing download services that offer different pricedrops, different takes on DRM, etc. If you don't want a monopoly don't get a console.
s. While stores sometimes go below the publisher's price it's fairly rare and most sales happen pretty much near the current MSRP.

Consoles have no monopoly in Europe. The console manufacturers are not legally allowed to stop a company from releasing games on their systems their. That is why a company like Phoenix Games exists and why they have released hundreds of PS2 games that border on copyright infringement (mainly with Disney). It's because Sony legally can't stop them from releasing games on the PS2/PS3/PSP in Europe.

Really? That seems...strange. How did your government come to that conclusion?

I don't live in Europe (I live in the United States, New York to be exact), and I don't exactly know why the European Union has such strict laws. It's the same stupid reason Microsoft keeps getting sued just for including Windows and Windows Media Player with PC's (never mind that users can just remove these if they want, and that they don't HAVE to use Internet Explorer). They seem to think it's wrong for a company to control what is released on their system.

[Morari]

That's the financial reason for "piracy" in the Digital Distribution age. The ethical one is that when these entertainment things are no longer on actual physical products, what is there to pirate?  The law is going to have a fun time of it catching up to technology.

What is there to pirate?  What kind of question is this?  Copyright law is already crystal clear on the subject.  You either have the right to distribute copies or you don't.  You can only have that right if you're the content creator or a contractually licensed agent of the content creator.  Everyone else: Pirates!

How could digital distribution possibly confuse that issue?  As I already said, the work is not the disc.  We have always been talking about work that has no physical manifestation.  The disc is just a crutch to make the work sellable in a market that only knows how to deal in physical goods.  Piracy isn't copying the disc.  It's copying the content of the disc.  Take away the disc, and piracy is simply copying the content. 

Copyright law is anything but crystal clear and that's a large part of the problem. Due to all of these companies, it would be illegal for me to circumnavigate their anti-piracy measures in order to play the game years and years from now once it has stopped working legitimately. And that's just a quick example. The very fact that copyright infringement carries a harsher penalty than walking into the store and stealing a physical copy of a game goes to show just how much corporations have messed up our laws.

[NWR_insanolord]

. Personally I hate convenience, it just makes everyone lazy and impatient. If humans were truly intelligent beings, they'd invent machines which do things less effectively.

That just may be the craziest thing I've ever read, and that's coming from someone who spends a lot of tim reading things on the internet.

[Mop it up]

. Personally I hate convenience, it just makes everyone lazy and impatient. If humans were truly intelligent beings, they'd invent machines which do things less effectively.

That just may be the craziest thing I've ever read, and that's coming from someone who spends a lot of tim reading things on the internet.

Thank you, I try.
Think about it though: the faster and easier things become, the higher people's expectations will become. Pretty soon, people will be so impatient that they'll want everything to happen instantly and effortlessly. Impatience is stressful, and stress = unhappiness.

[KDR_11k]

Consoles have no monopoly in Europe. The console manufacturers are not legally allowed to stop a company from releasing games on their systems their. That is why a company like Phoenix Games exists and why they have released hundreds of PS2 games that border on copyright infringement (mainly with Disney). It's because Sony legally can't stop them from releasing games on the PS2/PS3/PSP in Europe.

Are you sure Phoenix Games is unlicensed? The box arts shown on their website clearly have the regular logos on them which would be trademark infringement. To me it looks more like SCEE doesn't have SCEA's anti-shovelware policies.

I don't live in Europe (I live in the United States, New York to be exact), and I don't exactly know why the European Union has such strict laws. It's the same stupid reason Microsoft keeps getting sued just for including Windows and Windows Media Player with PC's (never mind that users can just remove these if they want, and that they don't HAVE to use Internet Explorer). They seem to think it's wrong for a company to control what is released on their system.

AFAIK the US actually sued MS for that too, the US courts just gave them a "punishment" that was a total joke. The issue is that MS is an OS monopoly and used that to gain a monopoly position in the media player and web browser markets too. Yes, users can decide to pick something else but that takes effort over simply staying with the default and most people simply don't know that IE is a total pile of garbage that has been holding the internet back for years. It takes an informed choice to go with the competition, it merely requires lazyness to stay with MS. Thus MS has an automatic advantage by being able to dictate the default option using their OS monopoly. Antitrust laws ban that practice in the US and EU.

Thank you, I try.
Think about it though: the faster and easier things become, the higher people's expectations will become. Pretty soon, people will be so impatient that they'll want everything to happen instantly and effortlessly. Impatience is stressful, and stress = unhappiness.

You liked Fahrenheit 451 then?

[Mop it up]

You liked Fahrenheit 451 then?

I don't know what that is.

[UltimatePartyBear]

Copyright law is anything but crystal clear and that's a large part of the problem.

I said crystal clear on the subject.  It is clear that you can infringe even when you're dealing with purely digital works.  It is clear that only the owner of a copyright can legally make or authorize copies.  It can be unclear who actually owns a copyright, but that's a matter of untangling contracts, not copyright law.

Due to all of these companies, it would be illegal for me to circumnavigate their anti-piracy measures in order to play the game years and years from now once it has stopped working legitimately.

I don't think we can get into that issue without overstepping the rules.  Let's not get another thread locked.  That's Stogi's job.

The very fact that copyright infringement carries a harsher penalty than walking into the store and stealing a physical copy of a game goes to show just how much corporations have messed up our laws.

Messed up isn't the same as unclear.  It sounds like you understand the law just fine, but you don't like it.  That's a separate issue (and once again, outside the rules of this forum).