The Perils of Online Gaming

The first, and most obvious problem I have with digital-distribution based gaming, is its impermanence. According to "Steam Calculator", my Steam account is worth around £270, at time of writing. My library is relatively small as Steam libraries go. But the provision of all of these games depends on Valve being around to provide the Steam servers. And the fact is, Valve will not be around forever. Sooner or later, they will disappear. Perhaps they’ll go bankrupt, perhaps society will collapse, and video-games will be the least of our worries, but the fact is, Valve will not always be around. And when they’re gone, so are all your games. Even if you own a physical copy of Half-Life 2, it still needs to connect to the Internet once for validation. Of course, the issue of impermanence is one which is most acute in MMO games. Consider the game Tabula Rasa. By all accounts a particularly mediocre sci-fi MMO by Ultima creator Richard Garriot. People sank time and money into playing it, and when it closed two years ago, that was gone. Those people will never be able to play that game again. You can still play Super Mario Bros. thirty years on, but you can’t play a game from 2007. What of World of Warcraft? Its 12m players won’t be around forever - at some point Blizzard will decide that the game is no longer profitable, and one of the most influential games of the last ten years will be pulled from history.

Of course, the motivation for this article was the PSN hack/downtime, which also raises the issue of security. When you play, for example, a PS2 game, that game is contained entirely within your console and memory card. Any data you enter won’t be leaving the memory card. No-one else can see it. When you’re uploading things to the cloud, the protection of that information lies with others. Others who may not be so security-minded. And even if they are, the more people who have access to the area in which your data is stored, the higher the likelihood of someone accessing it. The PSN data breach has shown the woefully underprepared systems of even some of the world’s largest transnational corporations. No-one ever lost their credit-card details over Final Fantasy VII. Of course, another issue with this is the stability of a system. As Sony has shown, if a data breach is large enough, it can impact service. MMO players will doubtless be used to security patches and the associated downtime (watch the streets for internet zombies when World of Warcraft goes down). Systems such as Ubisoft’s much-maligned DRM which required a constant Internet connection, even for a single-player game, could well be a chilling picture of things to come. When Ubisoft’s servers went down, your game was unplayable. While the company eventually abandoned the system, services absolutely rely on a constant data connection. When you pay £40 for a video game, you expect to be able to play it whenever you want.

Another argument is one which really depends on your point of view, how passionate you are about rights, and whether or not you run Linux (and personally, I run Windows). When you play or buy a game from the Internet, you don’t own that game. You effectively sign away your rights in the Steam subscriber agreement, or the World of Warcraft EULA. As a recent case (which later turned out to be a misunderstanding) showed, corporations have little care for their users. After insulting Dragon Age 2 on the BioWare (the game’s developers) forums, a user was banned not only from the forums, but from playing the game itself. In a system where the games are centralised and regulated, this is all too easy. At a more mundane level, consider the recent release of Portal 2. Generally, people accept that the PC version is the “true” one, yet because of restrictions on Steam, Xbox 360 users had already finished the game by the time it unlocked on the computers of PC gamers. Despite having purchased and downloaded the game (or even bought it in physical form and had it delivered early), PC users were restricted by Steam’s DRM from playing the game they’d handed over money for until an arbitrary point. Of course, this isn’t anything specific to gaming, but it ties in with the previous points about impermanence, and how little consumers actually matter.

Not that any of this actually will be a deterrent, since ultimately we’re happy to trade in our rights for convenience. At the end of the day between going to town and paying £40 in GAME , or getting it for £2.50 in the Steam sales and be playing it without leaving your room, the latter is more enticing. And if you’ve not got a very good computer, the HD, high quality gaming provided by OnLive can certainly seem enticing, with all its drawbacks. The world is tending towards the Internet, but it’s worth bearing in mind that what you’re playing today, may not be there in a year’s time.

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