TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘games’ Category

By Chris Meadows

If you’re interested in a used iPhone or iPod Touch for e-reading, you’ll soon have another option to buy it. Target is rolling out a trade-in program for mobile electronics such as iPhones, iPod Touchs, or other cell phones—or used video games. (As Engadget notes, its timing is remarkable considering the current controversy over used game sales.) In return, customers get Target gift cards that range from "a few dollars up to more than $200 per item depending on the product and its condition."

Target already has an online service through its website where customers can trade in DVDs or used electronics. As for the store trade-in centers, it has opened them at stores in northern California but plans to expand to 850 stores by the end of the year.

Between single-use codes and DLC, it’s hard to imagine that the used video game market has more than a few years left. I suppose Target and other big-box retailers starting to offer similar programs think they should get in on it while they still can.

By Chris Meadows

Video and computer games share a bit of an odd similarity to books and e-books. Like books, they can be an example of intellectual property encapsulated in an object, which can be bought and sold new or used—but like e-books, they can also be delivered purely digitally, and equipped with restrictive DRM.

And as with both, there’s some controversy surrounding the idea of used sales.

While many print book publishers look at the sale of used books and gnash their teeth, they are largely powerless to do anything about them. The First Sale Doctrine states that it’s perfectly legal for people to resell the media they buy, after all. Some publishers might make noises about forcing used book dealers to pay royalties on titles they resell, but it would take an act of Congress to mandate something like that, and it doesn’t look like it’s in the cards.

On the other hand, just as e-book publishers are able to connive their way around the Fair Use doctrine by putting DRM on their titles and making it illegal to break the DRM, video and computer game developers actually can make buying used titles less attractive—at least, titles that have an on-line play component, interoperability with other games, or some other function that the publishers can block.

All they have to do is include a single-use code with each new version of a game that won’t work for someone who buys it used, and in one fell swoop they remove a lot of the value inherent in the price savings on the used game. (Of course, this also blocks pirated versions of the game, but piracy would have happened anyway—it’s the used resale market that they’re squarely aiming at.)

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By Chris Meadows

In some of my previous posts, I have looked at the computer game industry (especially Valve, with its “Steam” digital distribution service and focus on customer service that can even turn pirates into paying customers) with an eye to the examples it sets for the e-book and publishing trades.

It turns out I’m not the only one who thinks like that. Paul Rhodes has posted on the Bookseller’s “FuturEBook” blog about the uses of new tablet and smartphone technology that he saw at the European “GamesCom” video game industry trade and consumer show. Rhodes notes that, perhaps surprisingly, game-industry enthusiasm for the iPad is on the cool side, but there is a fair amount of buzz around Android’s potential as a gaming platform.

The largest amount of buzz at the show had to do with motion-sensitive controls—Sony’s Move and Microsoft’s Kinect, which represent their attempts to catch up to Nintendo’s Wiimote controller. Rhodes thinks that this technology has potential for use with interactive book or storytelling experiences—and for that matter, there may not be so very much difference between that and a traditional “video game” anymore.

For the books publishing world, my overriding takeway was this – The games industry and ours are getting ever closer, despite the barrage of new technology. It’s no coincidence that the best big production games tend to be based on a decent narrative (even Warcraft needed a solid, believable world to set as its canvas), while the most successful casual titles mirror a lot of the virtues we are trying to instill into our apps and eBook experiences. It should be a no brainer, then, that our industry can help games with narrative and creative, whilst they can teach us a lot in how to best use technology to tell our stories.

For myself, I wonder at what point games and other storytelling media will get so close together that Roger Ebert (who infamously decried video games as not being “art”) will have trouble telling them apart.

By Chris Meadows

Reaching into the world of video games again for another point that could apply equally to e-books. (At least it’s not about Valve this time.)

Jeff Vogel is the developer behind a number of independent games (perhaps the equivalent of self-published e-books in the video game world) including the Avernum series and Nethergate: Resurrection. And, though he’s nervous about speaking up about it (because he relies on his games to feed his family, after all), he has blogged about three relatively rare cases where he’s more or less all right with people pirating his games.

Though the blog post is about Vogel’s video games, these points could apply equally to music, movies…or, indeed, e-books, if their creators felt the same way. (Though, of course, Vogel does not claim to speak for anyone but himself and his own games in his post.)

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By Chris Meadows

I do realize this is an e-book blog, not a video gaming blog, but digital media do share a lot of commonalities—and Valve just keeps doing things that prompt me to draw direct comparisons to things e-book stores and publishers should be doing, but aren’t.

Our sister blog Gamertell, which is a video gaming blog, has the details. Over the last two weeks, Valve’s game distribution platform Steam’s anti-cheating system mistakenly banned about 12,000 Steam accounts from playing Modern Warfare 2, for cheating. Steam’s system is simplistic, usually accurate, and there is no appeal—the only way to start playing a game on policed multiplayer servers again after being banned is usually to buy a whole new copy of the game.

After the controversy erupted, Valve founder Gabe Newell stepped forward to explain and apologize for the technical error. Not only were the 12,000 ban victims reinstated, but each of them was gifted with two copies of Valve’s $29.99 Left 4 Dead 2 zombie shooter—one to keep, one to give away—to make up for it.

Not only did Newell apologize and fix the mistake, but he gave out nearly three quarters of a million dollar’s worth of game product to make it right. Now that’s customer service!

Of course, just as with the Doctors Without Borders DriveThruRPG Haiti e-book fundraiser, Newell could afford to do this because (as with e-books) there are no marginal production costs for digital downloads—he didn’t have to pay the pressing and packaging costs for 24,000 copies of a game. But it’s still foregoing the profits from those copies, which would be about $360,000 if profit is considered to equal 1/2 retail price. Probably more in the case of these games due to that lack of marginal cost.

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By Chris Meadows

Under normal circumstances, it would take something pretty special for me to recommend more than one app in a particular category for the iPad. Does anyone really need more than one CBR reader when Comic Zeal does the job so well, for instance? Or more than one Twitter app, or RSS reader, etc.? (E-book readers are, of course, a special case, given that so many of them only read their own DRM-laden formats.)

So when it comes to PDF readers, why would someone want anything other than the inexpensive, powerful, and fairly easy-to-use GoodReader? Actually, there is a pretty good reason, that ties into a major reason someone would want to read PDFs on the iPad in the first place: gaming.

See, if you’re going to run a pencil-and-paper RPG session off of your iPad, storing your rulebooks on the device so you no longer have to carry all that weight around, you’ve got the problem that you’re still either going to have to carry a heavy dice bag, or else drop out of the PDF reader app (no iPad multitasking yet, remember?) to launch a die-roller such as Mach Dice. And while players can probably get by with not having access to both book and dice at the same time, it could make game-mastering rather awkward.

And that’s where DiceBook comes in. DiceBook is a simple PDF reader, perhaps not quite as powerful as GoodReader—but with the notable bonus feature of incorporating a die roller into the program. It’s such a simple idea, it’s surprising nobody has thought of it yet—and DiceBook pulls it off pretty well.

The $1.99 iPad-only app has been approved by Apple but is not live yet at the time of this posting. Update: It is now available from the Apple store. I got a promo code for a free review copy from its author, David Dunham, and have been looking it over. And to be honest, I think I agree with my friend Bruce Baugh that for ordinary day-to-day PDF viewing, it may be the best iPad reader yet.

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By Chris Meadows

In a related note to the previous story, Engadget points to an NPD report cited by Joystiq on the computer game market noting that nearly half of all computer games sold in 2009 were downloaded via digital distribution networks (21.3 million) rather than bought in boxes from retail outlets (23.5 million). Steam topped the list of top five digital retailers, followed by Direct2Drive and Blizzard.com.

In this, the computer game industry joins the music, movie, and of course book industries as digitally-delivered content begins to displace that which is sold or rented more traditionally.

However, new GameStop CEO Paul Raines is not nervous about the prospects for brick-and-mortar GameStop stores, even as he moves GameStop toward becoming a digital game e-tailer via its website as well:

We are looking at other successful multi-channel stories like Netflix. The technology is clear — what’s not clear is the chronology. We are getting a good picture of how to balance digital and physical content. We have studied Netflix a lot, and most of their users still absorb physical content rather than streaming. Now we are looking to see how gaming compares. We are focusing on consumer acceptance. The world won’t be all digital tomorrow, even though that’s what people are claiming. In this business, users still want physical content.

Computer games are moving a lot faster toward digital delivery than e-books, which still represent a tiny percentage of all books sold. However, computer games have always been played on the computer—they do not represent a shift away from a traditional, non-computery way of doing things as e-books do. It makes sense that the change would move faster, since it is not by any means as pronounced—no matter how you get a computer game, you still play it the same way.

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By Chris Meadows

Recently, Valve took a page from stores that release free e-books, such as Baen or Amazon: it released a complete game, and all necessary development materials for the game, entirely free through its Steam digital distribution system.

Alien Swarm, from the development team hired to work on Left 4 Dead and Portal 2, does for the Ridley Scott/James Cameron bug-hunt genre what Left 4 Dead did for George Romero and zombies. Players take on the role of one of four space marines investigating a colony overrun with slimy alien creatures.

It is a complete, if short game—not a demo, and not a “freemium” game (like Dungeons and Dragons Online, which I mentioned in April) where you get the basic game for free but can buy cool weapons and powers for cash. It was programmed by the development team in its spare time (it’s an adaptation of an earlier Unreal mod by the same name), but the amount of polish is impressive and shows no signs of its hobbyist origins.

What does Valve get out of this? Unlike with Baen’s free e-books, there’s no “give the digital version away for free to sell a print copy” in this giveaway. There is no “print copy” of Alien Swarm, and even if they did sell it on a disc in a box it would just end up being installed through Steam anyway. And it is unlikely they will be selling later games in the series—even if they did, since they gave away the development tools, too, there is going to be enough free content generated that nobody would ever need to buy them.

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By Chris Meadows

The Wall Street Journal reports that Japanese wireless carrier NTT DoCoMo has said it is in talks with video game console manufacturers about adding 3G connectivity to future generations of handheld consoles.

Though NTT DoCoMo declined to identify which companies it was talking to, there are really not that many possibilities. The handheld console market is effectively split between Nintendo’s Gameboy DS (and soon, 3DS) and Sony’s PlayStation Portable. Neither of these companies would comment, either, however.

Both the DS and PSP use WiFi, and Nintendo has said its 3DS will include advanced connectivity features. Nintendo’s President has previously expressed interest in the Kindle’s method of bundling free 3G connectivity with its devices rather than requiring a monthly fee.

If a game console came out with that kind of 3G connect-anywhere-for-free ability, not only might it do for gaming what the Kindle has done for e-books, but it might also provide mobile Internet access to kids who might otherwise have a hard time getting it.

And, perhaps most interestingly to TeleReaders:

Meanwhile, Sony is developing a portable device that shares characteristics of hand-held game machines, e-book readers and netbook computers, according to people familiar with the matter. Some Sony e-book readers already come with 3G connections but it isn’t clear if a new wireless gadget will use carrier networks.

Characteristics of game machines, e-book readers, and netbook computers? Sounds like an iPad to me.

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By Chris Meadows

Given that only yesterday I wrote about how Valve is converting pirates into paying customers with its computer game distribution system Steam, it seems to be good timing to note that an e-book on the sociological and cultural significance of video gaming can now be read for free on-line.

This Gaming Life by Jim Rossignol is a collection of essays looking at different aspects of the gaming experience. It is posted online at the University of Michigan Library’s website in HTML format, under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works license. (While it does not seem to be available in any downloadable precompiled e-book format, there is nothing preventing someone from saving all the HTML files to disk and compiling his own.)

While I have not read all the way through the book myself, the first essay is interesting and it has gotten good reviews from BoingBoing and Wired. It is also available via Amazon.com.

(Found via BoingBoing.)

By Chris Meadows

I’ve previously reported on computer game studio/distributor Valve’s take on fighting piracy by providing better customer service with its Steam distribution platform, and pointed out that e-book publishers and stores could stand to learn a great deal from what Valve is doing and the success it is having.

Here is another example. TechCrunch published an anonymous letter from a reader talking about how Steam changed him from a video game pirate to a legitimate consumer—and did so in spite of the DRM restrictions on many of the games sold through Steam.

The reader confesses that a large part of why he pirated games was that he was lazy—he didn’t like having to go to a retail store to buy the game, then knowing that he had to keep track of the physical artifact (the DVD and CD-key) associated with that game for the rest of his life or lose the ability to play it on new hardware.

I already established I’m lazy. Steam understands that’s the norm for most gamers. That’s why Steam makes it so damn easy to buy games. There are top sellers lists, coming soon lists, demo lists, and best of all, legit sales and free-play weekends. I have spent over $50 during Steam’s summer sale on old random games just because it’s so easy and novel. (Today, July 5th, is the last day, btw) There are so many different ways for me to easily buy a game on Steam that’s detrimental to my checking account. Once I click the purchase button, Steam gives me the option to start the install process right away and I know that I will be able to install this game on any computer in the future thanks to the library mode. That’s big.

From personal experience, I can verify that. Over the course of the summer sale, I bought…geez, what didn’t I buy? Left 4 Dead. Left 4 Dead 2. BioShock 2. Beat Hazard. Thief. Mass Effect 2. I’m sure I’m leaving some out. Almost all of them at ridiculously low prices.

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