.. with digital distribution – interesting times are upon us and right now I feel like I am being seduced into accepting this method of media delivery, all the while with an uncomfortable niggle that all is not well.

Almost all media I consume is now available to me via download/streaming/wanky DRM online account and there are obvious advantages to this – from near instant availability to …hmmmm we will come back to that.

First I should say this post is going to largely ignore the whole piracy / Bittorrent thing for the most part – It has relevance, certainly in the accelerated arrival (and poorly-thought through setup of many services) but I really want to get a grasp on why the whole thing feels so wrong for buying media.

Ok lets start with music – many digital services from 7digital to the behemoth of evil that is itunes – most music available 24 hrs a day for delivery to you music player in < 3 minutes per album – bloody marvellous technology – miracle of the times and if I had had this when trying to record tracks off radio 1 to tape about 15 years ago I would have been eternally grateful. Yes alot of the music I impulse buy is now done by a quick poll of the various DRM free services for best price. However, I have been conditioned to WANT the CD – who knows why? – After all I recently spent the best part of a week’s evenings ripping my entire musical history to m4a, I should hate the damn things. Is it the artwork or just that tangible piece of plastic that gives you the comfort of ownership? Add to this the inconsistent pricing – Amazon will quite happily let me purchase a CD, deliver it to me with packaging and invoice for half the price they will sell me some bandwidth and it shows why we are not all buying this way.
Really the music services have been driven by ‘that thing I said I wasn’t going to mention’ and are just reaching the point where at least people fresh to buying music will see it as pretty reasonable if they haven’t known better.

So now we come to the media types that have so far being relatively insulated against ‘the thing I said I wasn’t going to mention’ – films/TV and games mainly I guess. We are just starting to see widespread availability of download and streaming services for these – films/tv especially and yet I have never used one of them. Sony and Microsoft are both using their latest hardware to offer services and licensing agreements with the large producers. However, they have not really learnt from the arduous process of discovery the music guys went thru. Now at this point I will again say I like to have something to hold – I have a deep enduring love for cinema and from an early age it was incredibly important for me to own Raiders of the Lost Ark and I still get that comfort from being able to take that and watch it on a whim (So important that I still find myself defending Kingdom of the crystal NotAMcguffin to jeering friends). Where was I? – ah yes the VoD / streaming /drm’d downloads.. Yes, So we are supposed to buy something with no hope of resale/
that takes bloody ages to download since there hasnt been sufficient investment in BB infrastructure (ooo there’s next week’s post maybe)/
that we can only watch on one device and that we may lose if the piece of under tested rushed n00tech gets “(insert doom like colour here) (insert appropriate geometric shape here) of death”/
that again will likely cost more than it does for a striking postie to get off the picket lines and lob the disk thru my letter box.

I don’t think so Mr Jobsgates…

Ignoring ‘ the thing that I said I wasnt going to mention’ I will not likely be purchasing films via this method for some time – and have some sympathy for those poor bastards who make TV programs – trying to convince people to pay for something they have been conditioned to be free – file under ‘challenge marketing’

OK so now to games which is really what I wanted to talk about anyway -

We are taught that games are a high value item that we should treasure (I was groomed to this from when games used to come in HUGE boxes and had manuals larger than the computer they were played on). They have always been encumbered with hefty DRM and have to some degree had the longest period where they were liable to ‘that thing I said I wasn’t going to mention’

So I have happily paid for lots of software over the years and have many impressive boxes- however in the last year or so some things I have wanted wont come with the box but can only be delivered digitally and even more with a 50/50 split – digital distribution may well allow some products to be released that would not have made it through traditional channels and that is a good thing for sure. However, that is really just mimicking the old public domain structure.

Where the big publishers are going is more along corporate lines – maximizing margin and control of their IP – they don’t like giving a % to retailers and they don’t like you being able to sell or lend out the IP you purchased. Now we are purchasing a download and license to run. Steam has generally found the right balance between DRM and use and things like EA’s download manager are taking note. But what happens when one of these services dies or the company is bought and the new owner decides to re-evaluate their relationships with users? There is no answer – we could lose the software and without a box filed away for posterity we don’t have the ability to get back what should rightfully be ours.

This situation is even more relevant for games that are hosted or played predominantly online – World Of Warcraft has millions of players and an ever increasing content footprint. No-one worries about what will happen when the inevitable happens and people move on (but just look at the growing list of WoW’s casualties like Tabula Rasa – we are already losing games to the server closures of poor profitability). This should make people uncomfortable but we wont see that until there is a high profile failure in this area.

There are archiving activities under way from the earliest games being reinvented as a browser based entity

www.zxspectrum.net

to recoding of games to work on current hardware at Good Old Games

http://www.gog.com/en/frontpage/

Even such efforts as the Tomb Raider Anniversary or Lucasarts’ recent Monkey Island titles which re imagined the original in a modern engine

It would be nice to see a solution to this – unlikely as it may be, a digital library funded by the industry where titles /abandonware were kept running or accessible. Without this we may well lose and entire generation of games.

We take great care to ensure that books are preserved for future generations and for good reason. What must not happen is for our digital heritage to be lost when their preservation is no longer profitable and that is why I will now and always want plethora of brightly coloured boxes gathering dust on a shelf near me…

Lombear