As we are finally getting a bit settled in (at least the living room is free of boxes now), I’ve started thinking about a new audio and video setup for the entire house.

One thing I’m missing about the apartment we moved out of is my sound system that covered the entire place — living room, bed room, kitchen, even bathroom. The whole thing was a DIY thing involving two amps, a partially broken speaker selector, lots of wiring and speakers everywhere. I could select what rooms I wanted music in, which was awesome, but it had its issues. One thing was that there was only one input, so if one of us watched a movie there was no way to listen to music in another room, another that… well, there was lots of wiring.

The house is a much larger space, and with it far longer wires to put up all over the place. I’m going to install a wired network that covers the place, but I’d rather not install any more wiring. Still, I’m going to want to send video signals from the digital TV box to the new TV in the bed room, which I might solve with a Slingbox PRO-HD and SlingCatcher, which seems like a cool combo with a bonus of access to my TV anywhere — if I can only figure out if it’ll work to remote control my box or not (my cable TV provider is probably Sweden’s most hated company not involved in public transport – com hem).

The audio setup is a different problem — I want a system which can play music from my media server in any room I’m in, can sync music in several rooms at once and which can also play audio from a separate input (like have the audio from a live music DVD on the PS3 on in several rooms at once). That last one seems to be tricky to pull off…

I’ve looked at several network media players, but most seem content at simply streaming media from a computer to a home entertainment system. Sonos S5 ZonePlayer seems like a popular geek choice, but sadly doesn’t do an external input (like my PS3).

The Logitech Squeezebox series seems to do (almost) what I want, but the component I’d need for the living room, a Squeezebox Transporter has some drawbacks. First of all, I can’t seem to figure out if it can stream its digital input out to other squeezeboxes — a make or break feature for me, but hardly mentioned out there on the ‘net. Second, the price tag! Holy crap, $1999? I’ll be upgrading my audio equipment, but I’m not really an audiophile of a class that needs that kind of equipment. It’d easily be the most expensive piece of equipment in the set.

I could even consider building my own system from scratch. It’d be kind of cool with a compact computer hidden away in each room, and a touch screen display system to interface with the thing. It’d probably end up cheaper than the Squeezebox option, but with a lot more work involved. Fun work, but frustrating at the moment as I don’t really have the time needed. If there’s a cheaper product out there which satisfies my three demands above, I’m a sale waiting to happen.

Do you know of any good network media player systems that fit the bill? Or do you have any experience with systems like that, good or bad? Please share any knowledge you have in the comments. I would also be happy to hear from anyone with experience of the Slingbox products.

The fear was that if this kept happening, the people creating works of art would tire of creating culture and seeing others profit while getting nothing for themselves (a reasonable assumption), so copyright was introduced, giving authors an unlimited right to association with their works and a limited economical exclusivity with regards to production and distribution. This would make sure middlemen would not be a problem in the production of culture.

Sadly, in this exclusivity now appears an effect that goes in the direct opposite direction related to the original intent. To explain what I mean, let’s discuss something of high cultural value — commercials. Leading up to the fifth season of The Deadliest Catch, Discovery Channel created a trailer. A music and sound design studio called Musikvergnuegen were hired to create a soundtrack for the trailer.

The trailer aired, and something somewhat unusual happened: People heard the music and rushed to the TV in order to see what it was about. On Musikvergnuegen’s blog, under a fairly short and simple post about the trailer, people started gathering in the comment fields with fantastic stories about how they reacted to the music.

Let me tell you my story of this song. I wasnt even in my house but i heard this music come through the surround sound so i darted inside to find out it was a commercial for my favorite show. But wut really mattered was this music. The celtic sailor feel and sorrow filled sound makes this one of the best pieces of music ive ever heard.

The blog post has more than 40 comments, with people asking that the song be released somewhere so they can buy it and listen to it. Several other blogs have called attention to the music and linked to the post on Musikvergnuegen’s blog.

The studio appreciate all the attention, but answer that sadly Discovery owns the rights to the soundtrack, and that  because of that they can’t sell it. Instead, they’ve mailed Discovery, and urge others to do the same. The only problem is that Discovery doesn’t reply.

So, here’s a middleman blocking the flow of culture between the author and the consumers, stopping the people from getting the culture they desire. Recognize this problem? This saga ends on a slightly upwards note, as Musikvergnuegen takes matters into their own hands and add the music to their demo reel, which means it’s now possible to stream it from their web site.

Another example of the same kind of cultural blockage is how music giant Universal let its lawyers loose a few weeks ago to prevent the performance of a theater play at the City Theater in Stockholm. Not, as you may have thought, because they hadn’t paid for it, but because Universal wanted even more money for it, claiming the music was a central theme in the play. However, it turns out the author of the songs in question, Paul Simon, doesn’t agree with the middleman that the play should not be performed.

Abandoned Goods

A similar development has been in effect when it comes to computer games for a long time (and here it’s even more clear). The whole concept “Abandonware” exists to denote older games which are no longer on the market. There are websites that specialize in catering to people feeling nostalgic about games. As with many other kinds of culture, there are a whole lot of people who long for the good old days — the older games have a higher level of quality, they claim. Others still just want the ability to play “the classics” — just like there are classic books and movies there are classic games… the difference is that you can’t get the classic games anymore.

The fact that games can’t be bought doesn’t mean the copyright on them has expired, however. The rights to various games and game intellectual properties are bought and sold between different companies and often you’ll find the rights to games far away from the people who originally created the games after a studio closed its doors.

The fact that they’re no longer selling the games doesn’t prevent companies from having a go at web sites providing Abandonware. Sometimes, whole web sites are the targets of attempted shutdowns by lawyer, at other times, only certain games are targeted and removed. But the games themselves are not sold, so the people who wanted to play them are left empty-handed.

Sometimes, people get so desperate for their old, lost games that they even gather up the people needed to form a team and go through the enormous effort of creating a remake of their classic game of choice, only to be shut down by the rights holder.

There has been a long debate about this in gaming circles, sometimes with thunderous accusations from big games companies. People who download abandonware are called pirates, and blamed for some form of loss of income, even more absurd than the normal kind of calculations.

The Upper Hand of the Middle Man

In addition to all the problems outlined above, the cost for both creation and distribution has brought back something a situation which is very similar to the world before the introduction of copyright: middlemen dictate the conditions they like and grab large parts of the pie, since the authors are so completely dependent on the chain of distribution. In these negotiations, one side has sharp lawyers with years of experience of writing contracts, fine print and cost vs revenue calculations. On the other side are inexperienced, often young talented authors with no experience of writing or even reading contracts.

The imbalance becomes extremely obvious in the average record contract. In normal venture capital business, investors come in with capital, taking a risk with that money in exchange for a slice of profit if the gamble plays out (highly simplified). This state of affairs is a quite reasonable starting point. Looking at the music industry, their standard contract is very different from this — it is more like a loan than an investment… but a loan that turns into an investment once repaid.

Let me explain. The musician or band gets money for recording an album, creating a video and other needed things. The album is released, and all the profits go directly into the record label’s pockets until the entire loan has been repaid. Only then does the artist get a first dollar for his or her hard work. At a glance, this seems incredibly skewed, and it’s just as skewed as it seems. If things had ended there, it would have been outrageous but somewhat real, but that’s not where it ends. In addition to these expenses, there needs to be marketing for the artist. Reasonable proposition if you want to sell the album, but the marketing money also comes out of the “loan” to the artist. Only it’s the label that controls the marketing spend.

So the standard contract is a shared partnership where all the risk is held by one part. In a normal start-up business, this situation would be interpreted as the artist talent and work having no value  at all (and thus should have no part of the income). Add to that the fact that the labels have binding contracts for the artists, but are free to pick and choose how they want to act themselves, and we’ve ended up incredibly far from the original intention of copyright. Let me explain further with two examples:

The New York-based band October Project created some beautiful (but hard to classify) songs during the 90s. They released two albums that were quite successful. Then, without a warning or official explanation, the record label terminated the contract, which killed the band. Two of the band’s founding members went on to start the “November Project”, a band which collected all the money they needed for their recordings themselves, directly from the fans on the Internet. On the homepage for the band, founder Emil Adler urged the fans not to buy the October Project records — “Not a single penny goes to the band”, he wrote. Not a penny, even though one of the albums had hit top-50 in the US.

Another band, Splashdown from Massachusetts, looked to have a bright future. They signed a contract with a child label for Capitol records and released an EP, which quickly sold out. The band made a song on the soundtrack for the movie Titan AE, and expectations were high. They recorded a new album, “Blueshift”. Once done, the label decides not to release the album. After a long fight with the label and because of the fear that Capitol would own any future songs, the band chose to call it quits.

Authors giving up on creating new culture because of middleman behavior was exactly what copyright laws was supposed to prevent in the first place! Something is wrong here. Instead of acting as a guarantee for the flow of culture into society, the effect is a draining of culture.

It’s Broken, Fix It!

There are already political forces in parts of the world that are growing stronger campaigning for a reformed copyright. In Europe, the Swedish Pirate Party has won a seat in the European Parliament. The German counterpart looks to be going strong in the coming elections for the national parliament. Support for both parties is extremely high among young voters.

Taken to its edge, you really could wonder about why the rights to works of art should be something that can be bought and sold at all. There seem to be plenty of problems that would go away if an author could never sell the actual right to their works.

There seems to be some very simple things to do though. Digital distribution has brought down costs of distribution by several orders of magnitude. This somewhat breaks the hold the middlemen have over the market, but there is still something of a monopolized market. Things are starting to change, but what is needed is a much more direct approach, fans meeting artists, players meeting developers directly. This has already started happening more and more in the computer games industry, and I believe we’ll see much more of it from musicians in the future.

Another thing with the Internet is that there is never any really good reason to stop selling something. Put all vintage titles you own the rights to online for a small fee. Even a fee of $5 or even $1 per game means a horde of people would buy them, and it would make you a whole lot of more money than any amount of lawyers sent hunting abandonware sites. Oh, and while you’re at it, skip the DRM. The new market is on the consumers’ terms, and with a direct connection to fans comes the responsibility of treating them like customers, rather than potential thieves.

That is very different with games. A sizable portion of everyone who plays a game, especially multiplayer-enabled games, will put a huge amount of time into that game. That’s awesome, but those people are not in a majority. The majority of people who buy a game wont even finish the singleplayer campaign. For these people, the game was too long. This is something like the dark secret of game design, and its a reason that makes constructing games a bit sad — no matter how much love you put into your story, it’s unlikely that most people will see its conclusion.

You would never guess that this was the case, looking at game reviews. Reviews regularly complain about games being too short. This has happened to a range of great games lately — from Portal to Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune and Mirror’s Edge — all games that I enjoyed a lot. What conclusions can we draw from this?

Well, first of all, if you are the kind of person who rarely completes games (like the average gamer out there apparently), game reviews aren’t taking your interests into account. I’m assuming here that being able to finish a game is more enjoyable than abandoning it along the way.

Second, we’re creating ever-longer games that cater to a portion of the gamer community who will not buy games that are too short, which means that at the same time we’re making sure that a majority of players will play even smaller part of the game. That’s quite a problem from where I see it — a small part of players are allowed to dictate how games are made, which actually lowers quality for the majority.

In addition to this problem, more time in games tends to mean more repetition. Content creation for modern games is incredibly expensive, which means that longer play means more play time made from the same content. Maybe that means more of the same kind of objectives (ever play Assassin’s Creed?). My own experience is that I’d much rather play through Uncharted on its Hard difficulty setting than play through a longer, but more repetitive game.

The result of this is a kind of scarcity of actual content in games. The longer we make any given game, the more diluted the experience becomes. We get more of the same enemies in the same locations, and more locations made up out of the same building blocks.

You can see this quite easily if you compare the soundtracks of different media. Movie music is a movie-length musical score which has changing music to the events in the movie, usually with common themes for parts of movies but with the music still shifting to each individual moment.

How much variation is there in game music? Sometimes, game music is a movie-length (yes) musical score, played straight or randomly to a game (usually 4 times longer than a movie). Sometimes it’s a song-length musical score played to each level. Sometimes it’s “dynamic music” which usually means tying musical start/fade triggers to action. I commented on game music before in Give Me Some Emotion, Maestro, where I suggested a more involved form of dynamic music for games with composers as first-class game developers, but that doesn’t go all the way — we also simply need an appropriate amount of music to cover the length of a game.

More enemies to kill in the same way, more of the same concrete blocks to make up new parts of levels, more of the same music and sounds, more of the same experience. These things all lead to the current playing experience you get from games, which tends to be a repetitive flat-emotion slaughter even if you look at non-shooter games. Yet making more content for the games would make them more expensive.

I think games as a medium need to focus better. Yes, shorter games would probably be good in the long run. There are some people who would wish that movies be 10 hours long as well — but those aren’t the main segment of customers for movies. In the end, bringing quality of games up needs more variation — in environments, in challenges, and in emotions. Then maybe the average consumer would actually have the pleasure of finishing the games they buy.

I don’t mean there can’t be long games here either. People obviously liked the The Lord of the Rings movies, despite their long run time. But those movies are still beautifully crafted all the way through, and do not lack the focus you would get from doing the same thing to other movies. It also has something to do with an insanely large budget.

For singleplayer games, the question then becomes how to satisfy the people who want longer play times? I sure don’t have that answer, and any comments are definitely appreciated.

“Dear Mr. Record Label Executive, let me tell you something. You should listen to me, because I can tell you why it’s all wrong now. I can tell you how it all went wrong, when it went wrong and what effect it has on the world today. I am the messenger of the future.”

“Who are you?” said Mr. Record Label Executive, clearly not used to being in this position. “And how did you get into my office?”

“That is of no importance,” the man answered. “You can call me Lime, if you need something in the way of a name. What is important is my message. Your problem is that the youth refuse to buy your records. They download them, file share them, and refuse to pay. Correct?”

Confused, Mr. Record Label Executive nodded.

“People have been asking for paid download services for a decade, yet you were too afraid to let them have it — afraid they would just file share the downloaded music — so you gave them nothing.”

“Ah, but we created…“, Mr. R. L. E. started.

“Nothing of sufficient quality“, the enigmatic Lime cut him off. “You gave them nothing that could match what they sought. So they kept downloading, they kept file sharing. For free, because that was the only available way.

“It went on for a long time like this. Kids grew up, who’d never bought a CD in their life. They too started file sharing. For free, illegally.”

By now, the man in the luxury leather armchair was leaning forwards over his large mahogany desk, nodding.

Lime impatiently paced the room. “You see, there’s a new generation out there, who’s always downloaded music for free, because there were never any legal paid download services out there to download from. Don’t you see what you’ve created? A whole generation who’s never paid a dime for music, who has been taught that music is free, without value. You taught them.”

“Now wait a minute! How can they think they can just steal the music artists have put so much effort into?” Mr R L E protested.

“They’re not stealing anything. You never gave them options, so they all learned that music was free. You taught a whole generation that music and other entertainment had no value. That is when it all went wrong!” He paused to look at the stricken man before continuing, “as you hunt them now for what they feel is natural and right, all they feel towards you is disgust, fear and anger for your greed. Imagine, all those millions of potential customers out there who are now lost to you because you didn’t take the chance of selling them what they wanted, out of the fear of what might happen if you did.

“Now they’re a million very angry people instead, who want only to see your empire crumble.”

Mr R. L. E stared at him aghast as the realization dawned. They looked at each others in silence for a while.

“I see that you understand,” the mysterious man finally said and headed for the door. “Millions of angry people,” he repeated. As he closed it behind him, he added, “and now you’ve given them martyrs.”

The three guys from the pirate bay, and their internet co-location and bandwidth provider were sentenced to one year in prison and a total of 30 million SEK of damages today. Whatever you think about the pirate bay, the sentencing of their internet provider is nothing short of incompetency from the Swedish court.

But let’s put that aside for a moment.

Let’s just look at the costs and benefits. These guys now have to pay 30M SEK for their sins of building a search engine. Let’s put that into perspective, shall we? 30M SEK is (with today’s exchange rate) €2,680,246. Contrast this with the spendings of the industry: 75M Pounds is what the record industry spends each year hunting pirates, apparently (only the record industry… who knows what the international movie associations’ and games associations’ and writers’ associations are spending…). With today’s exchange rate, that’s €81,466,099.

That means it’d require 30 such spectacularly unpopular court cases against major file sharing sites won just to win back the costs spent on hunting pirates. Really, who is it that thinks this is a good idea?

In other news, if you’re going to pirate a game, please do it off the ‘net and where it wont hurt the companies that tries to support it for the people who buy games. If you pirate a game and then try to get support for it, you’re a real asshole.

It changed not because the trial is less political than expected (or less spectacular, indeed), but because of the involvement of the industry I work in, and because of the way it’s being conducted in our names. It’s become increasingly clear to me that not only the outcome of this trial but also its very existence affects me, regardless of my choices. To explain my view on it, let me begin with some background.

The games industry has had its own battle against piracy, very separate from the other parts of the entertainment industry (Music and Movies) — our very nature is that we’re an interactive media, which differentiates us from them. The grander the interaction, the harder it becomes to do any meaningful piracy, to the extreme of online-only games and MMOs, where piracy of the game client is almost to be considered helpful.

With the emergence of the Internet, the games industry quickly picked up on the budding culture of participation that was thriving with the new possibilities — “user-generated content” as it’s so nicely called nowadays started appearing as level editors and levels for Doom, mods for Battlefield 1942 and Half Life. At first, the unexpected creativity shocked everyone, but then it was all embraced by the game studios and eventually turned into the massive support systems for user-generated content that today exist in games like LittleBigPlanet and the Trackmania games series (awesome games by the way).

Today, there’s basically two problems for the industry (well, winning the “simplification of the year” award here, but anyway): piracy for PC titles, and used game sales for Console titles. Yet if you listen to the internal dialogue in the industry (at least my part of it), the talk about what to do about this is not about punishment, it’s about new business models, and about providing more value for owners of original game copies, like giving away free stuff. I can guarantee that you’ll see more of that in the future.

Contrast this with the Music and Movie industries, who have been happily strolling along with the “shove it down their throat” business model until now. With a tight grasp of the market, distributors have been able to pocket most of the money, sending only spare change to the people doing the actual creative work.

With that background, I find it extremely strange how there are computer games in the list for the trial. It gets even weirder, in that World of Warcraft is one of them. So, one of the games that’s the very poster child for the new business models I mentioned above, that give away their game client on free trial discs, is a part of a lawsuit against a piracy site? Wait, what?

Why does this happen? Simply put: because the studio is one step removed from the publisher, and the publisher is one step from these umbrella lobby organizations. The end result is that the people doing these lawsuits are pretty much lost when it comes to the material they’re representing — they have absolutely nothing to do with its creation. The middle man is behind lawsuits, because the middle man is being cut out in the new world with a new economy, and more of the money is starting to flow directly to games studios, directly to musicians.

The behavior of the industry lawyers in the court has been nothing short of disgusting. With no actual case, they’ve spent the entire sessions trying to discredit the professors who have taken the witness stand, acting like an IFPI lawyer was qualified to pass judgment on who’s fit to be a professor and who’s not. They’re so eager to hide facts that don’t fit into their outdated view of the world that they don’t even realize that not only is it an insult to the Professor in question, it’s also an insult to the entire academic world and everyone who’s had a hand in reviewing and publishing his papers.

I’m proud that I’m part of the sector of the industry that is trying to move with the times rather than ride the lawsuits all the way to the end. I’d like to be able to say that I’m proud that my studio’s products aren’t on the list for that lawsuit — but sadly I think it’s just a question of random selection.

In the end, even if we aren’t associated directly with the lawsuit, we’re funding these organizations and we’re indirectly connected to it by our very profession, and treating people that way is nothing short of a marketing disaster. With the amount of money we spend getting games out there, not having the process sabotaged by a public backlash should be priority.

My conclusion is that it’s time to sever the connections and publicly distance ourselves from anything even remotely to do with suing our customers, and go back to working together with the gamers out there on the net. We have nothing to win in court, and nothing to lose in the market.

The mountain of flowers sent to professor Roger Wallis and his wife by (and paid for by) people following the trial on the net shows how deeply people care (and are obviously willing to pay for things they care about). I’d rather recruit this unprecedented movement of creative energy than die slowly of starvation like the likes of IFPI are going to. After all, there’s only so many years you can spend 75 Million Pounds on jailing your customers — if you somehow don’t run out of money I’ll guarantee you’ll run out of customers.

If you’re interested in the trial, check out the Wired article series or follow #spectrial on twitter.

Some of these are painfully apparent in my computer setup. I run dual-screen setups both at home (2560×1024) and at work (3200×1200), and I manage both with the excellent shareware application DisplayFusion. It has the unfortunate effect of being so good that I use it once, then forget about it for at least 3 months. Finding good backgrounds is easy on DeviantArt, though, and I’ve always had a soft spot for auto-rotating desktop backgrounds. Well, turns out DisplayFusion can do that in its registered (or “Pro”) version.

It has the rather sour licensing terms of “one computer only” however, so I’d need to buy two licenses. I find that rather greedy, to be honest — I never use both computers at once (they’re both stationaries, one at home and one at work), and while I certainly find the application worth the money, I don’t fancy paying for the same thing twice, for the same reason I don’t think people should be restricted to installing Spore on 3 computers, as long as they’re only playing on one at a time.

If you’re a small developer trying to make money off shareware applications, I’d advice you to not try to put MS/EA-style restrictive licenses on them. There’s just no point, and while EA may be able to take the hit of being despised by every forum flameboy around, you can’t. The likely effect is that you lose sales rather than gain additional ones. Result in this case: I’m looking for another good dual-monitor wallpaper application to buy instead.

Another app I’ve used for a long time is Minilyrics. I’m an absolute music junkie, tend to be listening to various kinds of music more or less constantly. I’ve always been interested in lyrics viewing addons, but fell completely in love when I found Minilyrics. The difference is the amount of config you can do with Minilyrics.

Most lyrics viewers scroll down text in a window — Minilyrics defaults to this as well. This takes up a chunk of screen space, and as I mentioned I like to have my music on a bit more often than always, or a bit more often than that. But with Minilyrics I can set it to scroll horizontally, and place the app as a small strip just about anywhere. At work I basically always run Visual Studio maximized on my primary monitor, so I’ve ended up with a setup with Minilyrics layered transparently on top of the title bar.

Minilyrics on top of visual studio's title bar

I love that setup — it keeps the lyrics where there’s always an unused bit of screen space, and it’s always easy to check out whatever those words that just floated by in the headphones were, without taking focus away from what I’m doing. It doesn’t look like much on a still image like that, but seeing the words scroll by is awesome.

At home I don’t have the luxury of a single app always running in maximized mode though. I’ve grappled with that for a while, and ultimately came up with my current setup, which has Minilyrics running at the bottom of my second monitor, in a reserved space (so I have a lyrics bar on my second monitor, just like you’ll have the task bar on your primary monitor).

Minilyrics at the bottom of my second screen

I haven’t been able to find any applications that properly put up a bar like that on a second monitor, so I ended up writing a very small application only for the purpose of reserving that space with a transparent window. It took me a while to figure that one out — most application I’ve seen with the capability to dock in like that with the edge of a screen calls it “docking” — Microsoft terminology calls it “Application Desktop Toolbar” (thanks, Stack Overflow folks). Once I knew what to search for to get the information I needed, writing the app was quick and painless.

Anyway Minilyrics had some very annoying bugs, but I still kept using it. And the latest version has fixed nearly everything that annoyed me — so it was well worth the money.

To end the whole theme of music: I guess anyone who can identify both songs has a suitably wicked musical taste to be compatible with mine.

What shareware do you use?

The “radiohead experiment” was a failure. Read this article: http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=1883 Basically most people freeloaded and paid either nothing or next to nothing for the music. Radiohead still made some money out of it, but way less than they could have via normal commercial channels.

This is a very interesting point, and the article is a good read, yet there are a few things to note here if you want to interprete it as a “failure”…

What we know from their data is that about 2 out of 5 people who downloaded the album paid for it. In the model they tried, people were invited to determine what price they thought was reasonable, so different prices were paid by different people. So the assertion that HomerJ makes is that they made less money from this than they would have from normal sales.

Before drawing any conclusions from this, let’s do the math: With an average of 40% of everyone paying $6, the number needed who would actually buy the album at normal download cost ($8) is 30% for a break even. Now there was a whole lot of attention in the media about this, so it’s pretty certain that a fair few people downloaded it just out of curiosity… that’s the whole point, isn’t it? And if a few of these people liked it, and paid for it, that would otherwise not have bought the album. Also, some of the people who paid less for the album may not have bought it at all, while the people who paid more would of course only have paid $8 for it.

So in order to declare this experiment a success or failure, you have to take into account all the above factors in order to determine whether the amount of people who would also have bought the album for $8 if it had not been available for free download is more than 30% of those that downloaded it. The answer is in no way obvious, so I’m not going to claim to know it… but claiming it as a failure only on the basis of that study is a leap of faith, rather than a logical deduction.

Essentially, this comes down to something I’ve written about before as well: it’s time to overcome the primal reaction of feeling let down by someone “taking my stuff” — what matters is not how many percent of all people freeload, but how much income there was as an end result.

HomerJ also commented:

I can ignore a study when it says that it is based on surveys. I don’t need to disprove it because the underlying methodology is known to be too faulty and biased for usage. Of course pirates don’t particularly care, they’re happy to use anything to support their freeloading.

Ah, of course… anyone who thinks this way only does so to support their freeloading, to justify their piracy. It may suffocate the discussion, but really does it ever win anyone over, or convince anyone? Intimidation is unlikely to get you customers.

It’s a discussion where one side inevitably calls the other side names — which really is quite a curious fenomenon. I’m happy to discuss the facts, research, ideas and to hear arguments… but I’m not happy to be called a criminal whos only motivation is to justify my own criminal behaviour (which it’s taken for granted that I have), when talking about broader ideological issues. I may not agree with someone, but calling them a thief or criminal because of their opinion isn’t likely to help either of us.

It’s a somewhat slippery slope of debating that shows in all parts of copyright and piracy debates… some opinions are simply considered illegal even to express, or at the very least the only reason to have said opinions is that you’re a criminal. I find that highly dangerous even in the broader sense that it threatens the very democratic foundations we build our nations on… In the words of Voltaire, “I do not agree with your opinion, but I would fight to the death for your right to express it“.

And as noted, I already make my living from copyrighted works, in a business hit extremely hard by piracy.

So, earlier this week the news hit of a dutch study performed by the researchers at TNO on behalf of the Dutch government, showing among other things that people that do illegal file sharing in general buy more entertainment media than those who don’t. A good summary of it is available over at MarketingVOX. A similar study was been done before by the Canadian government and concluded that there was a positive effect from the illegal downloading of music.

Looking at sales, the album that sold the most on downloads last year was Nine Inch Nails’ Ghosts, even though it was given away for free. And recently, Monthy Python sales on Amazon spiked by 23,000% as all of their material became available for free on youtube.

So there are two interesting questions that come out of this research… first of all, the big music businesses aren’t stupid when it comes to making money, usually, so how come they’re ignoring this research? And second, why is the PC games sector being killed by piracy if this is true — shouldn’t it apply to games as well? Or was all of that just a big lie?

The answer to the first question is rather obvious: The big music companies aren’t the ones making money. Their business model is based off a tightly controlled music sector where big hits like Britney Spears are produced over and over by a very small set of producers. They’ve been able to select who gets to release an album for a long time now, and they’ve taken most of the profits from the sales themselves.

Now, in contrast, smaller bands and artists are profiting. The money from Ghosts took a much more direct route from consumers to Trent Reznor, and none of it ever landed in the pockets of EMI or Sony. New talents are emerging through other routes than the record labels. Not strange these companies are trying to stop the flood, but rest asured that the result will only be drenched music industry lawyers. Musicians are freeing themselves from the clutches of big business, and profiting from it.

The second question is more tricky. Are we wrong? Do the people who pirate actually buy more games? No, obviously not as a general case, because we’re losing money on selling PC games, and the industry as a whole is moving away from it. So what’s the difference?

I think one key thing to consider here is the cost of games. The currently high cost of games is a large enough barrier that I’ll think twice about buying something. If I hear a song and fall in love with it, the cost of a download or a CD is low enough that I might buy it impulsively just from that entertainment value. In contrast, I’ve looked at buying Call of Duty this month, thought about it and decided not to on the basis of cost — and yet most of the people we expect to buy our games probably have less money to spend.

Why do games cost so much? With Steam and other digital distribution channels there’s no need to make a DVD, print a manual, make a box and ship it across the world… so the download should be cheaper, right? Of course it should, but enough people still buy games at retailers like GameStop and Game to let them bully the industry. Whenever a company wants to sell a game’s download version cheaper, the retailers step in and say “No, if you do that we wont sell your game” (“so people have a choice” — wait, what?). The sooner you stop buying games at retailers, the sooner we can break this evil lock-in and lower the price of games.

But I don’t think that’s all to it. I think at least part of the issue has to do with replay value. If I download an album from a torrent site, I’ll listen to it for a while, start loving it, and buy it because I’ll still play the album hundreds of times after I bought it. With some games, there’s next to no replay value. The point of “love for game starts” is very close to the point of “game ends”, and thus there’s a very short period in which there’s a high incentive for the player to go and buy the game.

The online portion of games counter this. Comparing the play time of a singleplayer game to a combined SP/MP or a pure multiplayer game, there’s a huge increase in replay value. Sadly, that does nothing to save the singleplayer experience, so the only reasonable way forward is to bring down the cost of games.

Especially as downloads fix another major problem in the process: that games aren’t available to some people at release.

So what’s the conclusion to all of this? Simple: buy your games online, help break the retailers’ stranglehold on the games industry.

Skilled movie makers quickly understood the power music has in conveying and guiding emotions. Watching any movie would be rather flat and boring if you didn’t have the powerful background music to the fights, the dramatic music to the partings and the eerie music building up to something grand. The best movies with the most powerful music have composers be a part of the movie-making process, tailoring the score to the pictures shown, matching and enhancing the drama of the scenes.

Games developers don’t seem to have understood. Music is usually an afterthought, and even when it’s an integral part of the identity of a product, it’s still something that’s a separate entity from the game itself. Even the games with much heralded “dynamic music” generally only have a simple “fade in music when action starts” or “fade between two soundtracks when action level changes”.

I applaud the effort of identifying the action and making the music somewhat respond to that, but the music itself is still a separate entity from the game. The games I’ve seen the most with dynamic music have been strategy games, which is something of a genre that otherwise struggles with emotional content, since it’s by nature far removed from the actual humans or creatures involved. Zelda: The Wind Waker is supposedly good with it, but I actually haven’t played it due to lack of hardware.

I think this is one big reason that games are seen as lacking the emotional power of movies. In its current form, game music conveys not much else than “excitement” and “non-excitement” corresponding directly to “action” and “calm”, causing a rather flat level of emotion. We lack the various degrees of joy, sadness, fear, buildup, triumph and disaster.

Some would claim that this is because we focus so heavily on war as a subject… but anyone who says so clearly hasn’t seen Band of Brothers.

I believe we need invite the musicians and composers in. It’s time for composers to become first-class citizens of the gaming world, to adapt the concept of music to the games just like soundtracks are an adaptation of music to movies. Games are not linear, and as such the music can’t be linear either, and that requires us to take on composers not only to write a soundtrack or theme to the game as if it was a movie, but to work in development of actual in-game music, taking shape as the game takes shape.

It’s up to us as game developers to identify the mood of the game — but we need to get composers on-board to actually make musical pieces that fit that mood. The first truly emotional, triumphant computer game battle victory can only happen once that is in place.