Tag: license

Mario on iOS, Nintendo copyright takedown

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Nintendo announced the first (authorized) appearance of Mario on iPhone a few days ago:

There’s much to be made of this.

Ten years ago, while the Wii was selling phenomenally well, there were some wild rumors about Nintendo and Apple teaming up to bring games to the Apple TV device. But, while tantalizing, these rumors never panned out, nor really made sense. While both companies were extremely successful on their own, they didn’t really seem to need each other, or have any reason to cooperate. Nintendo software licensees could have certainly helped put Apple TV in many more homes, but what could Apple have offered Nintendo, who weren’t having any trouble selling the Wii?

Fast forward to 2016, and the successor to the Wii, the Wii U, is widely regarded as a misstep for Nintendo, and now it appears maybe they do need some help. But rather than looking for it in the living room, where they are poised to launch their next-generation NX console in a few months, right now they are going straight for the pocket. Meanwhile, Apple’s huge hit from 2006, the iPhone, has been a juggernaut for much of these last ten years. And here is where Apple and Nintendo can help each other out.

It’s the first time in decades that Nintendo has put software out on a platform that it does not own. This could be seen as a concession that Nintendo is no longer dominant in gaming hardware, or simply an acknowledgment of the vitality of the mobile gaming market. While Nintendo have been hugely dominant in the handheld market since they released the Game Boy in 1989, smartphone and tablet devices have in the last decade created an even bigger market for games. With the massive success of Pokemon Go earlier this year, the writing was on the wall, and Nintendo making this move now only makes sense. In fact, it’s probably overdue.

Entitled Super Mario Run, it appears to be an endless runner type game rather than a typical 2D platformer. Due to the iPhone touch screen being the only controls, and a desire to make the game playable one-handed, this design addresses the constraints imposed by the user interface in about the only way that would work well.

More Nintendo Copyright Takedowns

Nintendo also made headlines this week by issuing takedown notices for a large number of unauthorized games that infringe upon Nintendo-owned trademarks, particularly Mario and Pokemon. It is not surprising at all that this should happen, but still disappointing for people who built or enjoyed those games. While many of these games may have been derivative and inferior games done in homage of, some were parodies or innovative or just fun, well done fan homages.

It’s too bad there doesn’t exist a legal framework in which fan-made games can co-exist peacefully with official releases by commercial studios, but licensing is only a solution if the IP-holder embraces it. Nintendo are within their rights to take these actions to protect their trademark and intellectual property rights, of course, and perhaps it is necessary for them to vigorously defend their trademarks or risk losing them entirely, but it’s nevertheless possible to set up a legal framework by which these unofficial games could be allowed. While it’s entirely ridiculous in my opinion for Nintendo to claim copyright and trademarks on speed run, Let’s Play, and review videos featuring their products, something like the Nintendo Creators Program would make a lot of sense for fan-produced games.

What might such a program look like? I would propose something like the following…

  1. The fangame creator would acknowledge that Nintendo created and owned whatever they owned.
  2. The fangame creator disclaims that Nintendo do not have any responsibility for content the fangame, and that the fangame is not an official Nintendo release.
  3. Any revenue derived from the fangame would need to be disclosed and shared with Nintendo.
  4. The fangame could be nixed by Nintendo (pulled from release) at their sole discretion at any time.

I very much doubt that a company like Nintendo would ever agree to such terms, but it’s too bad. Apart from perhaps Nintendo, everyone is worse off because of it.

The irony of this situation is that Nintendo can copyright and trademark its characters, but not the mechanics or genre of game. (Nor should it.) Someone can invent the infinite runner, and Nintendo can decide to do a Mario infinite runner game, and not owe anything to the inventor of the infinite runner game. So can anyone else. And Nintendo can make a running and jumping platform game, and anyone else can too, duplicating the Mario mechanics and rules system entirely if they should wish to, but simply can’t use the name Mario or the likeness of any of Nintendo’s graphical or audio assets.

XBox One: Why REAL ownership matters, and will always matter.

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On ArsTechnica, today, I read the following in defense of XBox One:

“This is a big change, consumers don’t always love change, and there’s a lot of education we have to provide to make sure that people understand.”

…a lot of the way people have responded to Microsoft’s moves was “kind of as we expected.” But the implication … was that this temporary confusion and discomfort among the audience would be worth it as gamers and consumers adjust to a console world without game discs.

“We’re trying to do something pretty big in terms of moving the industry forward for console gaming into the digital world. We believe the digital world is the future, and we believe digital is better.”

[Microsoft] made a comparison to the world of home movie viewing, where inconvenient trips to Blockbuster Video have been replaced with Netflix streaming on practically any device instantly. On Xbox One, having all games exist as cloud-connected downloads enables new features like being able to access your entire library at a friend’s house with a single login, or loaning games to up to ten “family members” digitally and remotely.

Immediately, I want to point out that Netflix (and Hulu) didn’t replace owning a copy — my copy — of a movie. They replaced movie rental and scheduled broadcast television — with something better and that eliminated inconveniences.

With Netflix and Hulu, you don’t have to program a DVR, or go to a store, or deal with rental returns and late fees. And assuming you only want to watch a thing once or twice, and don’t care to own a copy of it for all time, it’s great.

But online streaming on-demand services cannot replace certain aspects of owning a copy. And those things are very important. Users of these services know already that what is available today may not be available tomorrow. If the copyright owner decides to stop licensing the programming through the service, it will not be available any longer on the service. But a physical copy that you own can always be played, whenever you want to, as long as you own it. So if you want to guarantee availability of something forever, you can only do so if you own your copy.

And the copy you own will remain the edition you bought forever — no 1984-style “memory hole” for the old edition when the producers decide to release a new cut as the canonical version. No forced upgrades pushed over the network, eliminating or changing some scene that some group found objectionable for some reason, and managed to successfully pressure the studio into changing.

Video productions are re-cut and re-edited all the time, and for the most part people don’t notice it, or care. But sometimes the changes can drastically change the meaning. In the 1990’s, singer Sinead O’Connor once made an appearance on Saturday Night Live,  during which she unleashed a storm of controversy by tearing up a photo of Pope John Paul II on live television. NBC and SNL immediately distanced themselves from the incident and claimed to have had nothing to do with it, apologized for the offense it may have caused Catholic viewers, and claimed that it was something that O’Connor did on her own without informing the producers of her plans. This act of protest was never rebroadcast, and to my knowledge cannot be seen in any format today. Today, apart from viewers memories of the incident, it may as well not have happened. Unless someone with a VCR happened to tape that episode and kept it, as I’m sure many may have done, it would be lost forever, imprisoned in NBC’s video archive, if it exists at all. O’Connor’s act was an act of political speech, and whether you agree with her message or not, she had a right to say what she wanted, in the way she wanted. Of course, NBC and SNL own the rights to the video of the event, and have the right to not to make it available if they want, or edit it in whatever way they choose. But it was also broadcast to millions of homes over the public airwaves, and those who witnessed it own their memories of the event. And, for those who have have their own copy, and because you can own and control your own copy, NBC is not able to suppress it completely, or to compel holders of copies to surrender or destroy them. If need be, it could be proved that the incident happened, and, although they haven’t gone so far as to deny that the incident never took place, they certainly don’t like to bring it up, and if NBC wanted to pretend that it never happened, people can contradict the official histories, not just with memories and eyewitness testimony, but with evidence. Owning your own copy can help save The Truth from the memory hole. It gives you the power to own a little bit of the The Truth, outside of your own skull.

If you’re not a political person, you’re probably thinking “Whoa, you’ve gone off the deep end. This is just entertainment we’re talking about. Movies, TV, and videogames. We’re not talking about the news, or matters of public record. Surely this isn’t important stuff, get a grip.” But games do get censored, or pulled from the marketplace, and this can effect people who already own them, if they give up control of the copy that they purchased to DRM. Moreover, wherever DRM technologies make inroads, it tends to result in their becoming more accepted and likely to be used elsewhere. If we accept DRM for television, movies, and games, the technologies are then already in place, and may be used by hard news and official government content providers. Even if they were only used for entertainment, this is our culture — do we really want it to be completely controlled by corporate copyright holders?

Microsoft’s XBox One distribution offers to replace ownership of a physical copy with something worse. It might beat rentals, but it sucks compared to buying. It’s not the digital distribution and decoupling from physical media, it’s the DRM and the licensing vs. owning a copy.

There are pros and cons to decoupling software from physical media, but on the whole I am fine with owning my copy of a computer file, vs. owning a disc or ROM cartridge that came in a box. But de-coupling need not be accompanied by artificial limitations of use imposed by DRM and the need to authenticate a license to a copyrighted work. A license-to-access model is inferior to a model of owning a copy.

Learning from history

I have, in my personal game collection, consoles from Atari, Mattel, Coleco, Nintendo, Sega, Sony, and Microsoft. The oldest of these systems were built in the 1970’s. They are still fully playable, barring hardware failure.

Even back then, there were very early attempts at online play and distribution of games. They were ahead of their time, but from the earliest days the game industry tried to figure out ways to get people to subscribe to a service that would allow them to sell games directly to customers, replacing traditional retail distribution with digital download over a modem connection.

These services are long gone. Any games that were distributed exclusively via these means are exceedingly rare. If they exist at all, it’s only because someone who downloaded the game never erased it from their media (typically an audio cassette tape, or possibly a floppy disk), and because the game didn’t depend on the online service in order to run. This last bit is absolutely crucial. If these games could not be played if they depended on the continued existence of servers which were closed down by the vendor when they were no longer profitable, these games could not be played today.

“Well, who cares? Who cares about these old games?”

It turns out, a lot of people. Everyone who owns them, and would like to continue to be able to enjoy them. Anyone who wants to introduce their favorite games from their childhood to youngsters today. Collectors. Historians. Game designers.

“But popular games get re-packaged and re-sold with each generation!”

I suppose they do. Nothing wrong with that. It’s a good thing.

But what if your favorite game isn’t one of the few lucky popular games that gets chosen to live on? What if you want to play the games on the original hardware? What if you don’t want to have to re-buy games that you already own in order to play them again on your current-generation console?

“But you can’t go out to a retail outlet and buy a traditionally distributed game that isn’t being made anymore. So why should it matter that you can’t buy a digitally distributed game anymore?”

Because, the games that were sold while it was available are still available. They are tangible, transferrable, resellable goods, and as long as they remain physically intact, and someone in the world wants to enjoy them, there is a market for them. It might be garage sales and flea markets and eBay, but it’s possible to find and buy a videogame that was made in 1977. It might not be easy in some cases, but it’s possible, and it’s no more complicated than finding the game, plugging it in, and playing it.

I guess it may be starting to become more difficult now that old-fashioned NTSC CRT TVs are disappearing, along with their antequated analog signal input jacks, but the point is that there’s no need to negotiate the right to play the game with the copyright holder. If you have it, you can play it.

Digitally downloaded games could be just as transferrable — far more transferrable, in fact. Files are easy to share and copy. Compared to making a copy of a printed circuit board and ROM chip, it’s dead simple. The future should be making it easier to do things, not harder.

But if games have dependencies on network-based resources that the player does not control in order to function, this all changes. It seems likely that game companies will sell the client, but not the server. But when the company no longer sees value in maintaining the servers, and decides to take them down rather than sell them to someone who’d become a competitor, or release the source code so that the player community can host their own servers, that will be the end of that game.

The level of dependency may vary considerably, from simple license/subscription validation, to enabling multiplayer features, updates, and downloadable content, to online leaderboard and achievement data. From the gamer’s perspective, the possibilities are rich, but they all disappear when the servers go offline. Nothing can compel a company to release the server software as a product or as a freebie once they decide to end-of-life an obsolete title, but without the server side, the clients are potentially useless, and at the very least are diminished.

Furthermore, servers can be used to killswitch the client, or to force unwanted upgrades. What if you liked the 1.0 version of your favorite game, but hated what they did with 1.1? If you can’t roll back, if you can’t decline an upgrade, there’s not much you can do. Game companies that serve the player’s interests well should design their upgrade systems to allow the player to play the game in an earlier version mode if they desire. And server code should be made available (whether for free or as a product) once the parent company decides it’s time to shut things down, so that players can continue to have full access to the complete experience indefinitely, as long as there’s a community who wants it. Of course, security concerns will mean that any code running on a network node will need to be patched, so it would be best if the source code is available to enable patches to be made.

Obviously, many of those requirements for libre software are too much for most game companies in their current thinking. “Allow our obsolete products to continue to be sold so that we have to continue to compete with ourselves? Release our server source code, are they mad?” While it’s difficult to imagine many companies doing anything like this in today’s market, these are the sort of things that gamers need as consumers, and the culture needs from the vantage point of the historian. Some companies, notably Id Software, have opensourced their older game engines, so it’s not unthinkable that the same could also happen with server technologies, though there are certainly many obstacles, such as software patents, and the fact that many game design studios license third party engines.

Still, even if it’s a highly unlikely ideal, it’s important as a point of comparison, to know just how much you “own” the things that you “buy”, and a target for the consumer to strive to push the market toward. Consumers do have power when they act collectively. It is only for us to realize this, and seize the power that is within our grasp.

Game Maker beta license expiration cuts off access to tools

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This past weekend was the Game Maker Community Jam, a 72-hr game development competition sponsored by Yoyogames. I didn’t participate in this one, unfortunately, due to my license for Game Maker Studio being revoked. Here’s what happened:

Back in January, I participated in Global Game Jam, at which I obtained a free, time-limited license for Game Maker: HTML5, then in beta Due to bugs that I encountered with Game Maker HTML5, I had to start over twice after my project became corrupted, for reasons still unknown but hopefully long since fixed by Yoyogames. I ended up completing my project that weekend with my old standby, Game Maker 8.0 Professional. I just barely got it done, but had to sacrifice a lot of sleep and many features that I’d hoped to include as a result of the time/work lost due to the project corruption bug.

A few months later, in April, Yoyogames released Game Maker: Studio beta, which I downloaded, and I began using it. I played with the Studio beta a bit during Ludum Dare 23, but quickly realized that a 48-hr competition is no time to be discovering a new version of a tool, so again I fell back to a stable release, this time Game Maker 8.1. After LD23, I began porting my project, Bactarium, to Studio, refining it along the way.

Some time later, Game Maker Studio concluded its beta testing, and released 1.0. My beta license stopped working, so I had to buy Studio. Yoyogames had made an offer with their Global Game Jam that participants who tried out the HTML5 beta, which they had offered to GGJ participants for free, would be able to get 50% off when it was finally released. So, when I went to their web site to purchase my license, I was expecting to have to pay something. However, when I entered my old HTML5 license, the store allowed me to download the core Studio 1.0, as well as the HTML5 add-on license, for free.

Apparently this was in error, but at the time I had no way to know this, no way to claim the 50% discount that I should have been entitled to. I assumed that Yoyogames was being really gracious to people who participated in the HTML5 and Studio beta program — maybe I was getting two discounts and they stacked? In any case, I would have been willing to pay for the product if the site had been set up to take my money, but it wasn’t, and it didn’t require me to pay anything. The HTML5 license I received at GGJ apparently entitled me to download the GM:Studio 1.0 core, plus the HTML5 module, all for free. I was of course thrilled.

So I downloaded Studio 1.0 and used it, working on bringing Bactarium into Studio so that I could port it to Mac OS X and HTML5, and worked on a few other tech demos as well to familiarize myself with the new features. Things have worked fine up until last week, when I went to download and install the latest update. After installing, when Studio launched it told me that no license was detected and I needed to enter it. Figuring the license data had gotten blown away by the upgrade for some reason, I went through the license recovery process and re-entered my license key. However, Studio refused to accept my key.

I opened a ticket with Yoyogames helpdesk, and promptly received a response within 24 hours, informing me that my license key was no longer valid, as the HTML5 license that I had from Global Game Jam had expired. OK, I can accept that, no big deal. The communication from Yoyogames helpdesk further explained that they would be sending out coupon codes within about a week to people who participated in the beta, so they could get their discount. So, basically, I could choose to wait up to a week for the coupon code, or pay full price now. I would have thought that the old license key itself would have been the discount code, but oh well. I’m electing to wait.

Waiting put me out of participating in the GMC Jam this weekend. Oh, I suppose I could have worked in 8.1 again, but by the time I received the notification from the Yoyogames helpdesk, I’d lost enough time that it didn’t seem like a good idea to try to throw something together. I had other things to do this weekend, so I did them. No regrets about any of it, but it would have been better if the logistics had worked out a little better. I don’t mind the license expiring, since I’d expected it to anyway, and I don’t mind paying for my license, but not being able to purchase with the discount because Yoyogames didn’t think to distribute the discount codes prior to expiring the beta licenses is a bit disappointing.

So, today’s Monday. I still have not received my coupon code, but as they had said it would be happening sometime in the next week, I’ll try to be patient and wait for it to come by Friday, hopefully. I’m really hoping it’ll come through soon.

Darker Implications

One concern I now have is that, in reading up on the way Game Maker currently works, apparently you need to connect to Yoyogames server at least monthly to re-validate your license. This anti-piracy measure goes a bit too far in my opinion, and potentially hurts legitimate users. Copy protection crackers will always find ways to defeat such measures, while legitimate users will always be at risk of having their license killed in error, thereby denying them access to software on their own hard drive, that they paid for.

I can understand why Yoyogames feels they need to control licenses with a phone-home system tied to a remote killswitch, however the potential exists for legitimate users to be left in the cold if Yoyogames decides to kill an old version in order to force everyone to upgrade to their latest. If Yoyogames ever decided to stop supporting this version of Game Maker, or discontinue Game Maker entirely, or go out of business, all the paid-for licenses of the product potentially go bye bye.

It’s one thing to stop supporting an old version of a product, quite another to shut down license servers, effectively killing off the old version so that users are forced to upgrade. To be clear, I’ve seen no indication from Yoyogames that they plan to ever do this to their customers, only that they now have the mechanism available to them that allows them to do so. I sincerely hope that they never do this, as the backlash from the community would be substantial.

I would hope that as a last measure that they’d release some patch that permanently unlocks all licenses so as to prevent this from happening, and if they don’t then I’m sure the cracker community likely will, although this would technically violate the EULA as well as laws such as the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.

Update

It’s Thursday, and I’ve woken up to find the coupon code from Yoyogames waiting for me in my inbox. They’ve changed things up a bit from the original offer, and it’s about the same although I think it works out better from a certain standpoint.

Originally, participants in Global Game Jam were going to get Game Maker HTML5 1.0 (when it was released) for 50% off the originally announced price of $199. Yoyogames was selling beta licenses for half off, so essentially GGJ12 participants were getting access to the beta for free, and paying the same price for the finished product that the beta testers were paying anyway. This was nice because A) you didn’t actually have to pay anything for a beta, and B) you could try before you buy for a few months.

Somewhere along the line, Yoyogames changed their mind about their products and pricing. Game Maker HTML5 1.0 was never released; instead, it was folded into Game Maker Studio, becoming an optional $99 add-on.

As a result, the original deal no longer made any sense. So instead, Yoyogames has substituted Studio. With the coupon, you get the $99 Studio core for free; and if you want the HTML5 module, you pay full price for it.

Comparing to the old deal, this is better in two ways:

  1. You get Studio, which can build to Windows and OS X for free, and you can stop there if you want to.
  2. For the same cost as the original deal, you can buy the HTML5 module and have three build targets instead of two.

My old complaint still stands, that they should have issued the coupons and given developers a week or two to use thembeforedisabling the temporary licenses. On the other hand, apparently those licenses were only supposed to have been good for two months, and I think I got about 6 or 7 months out of mine, and I’m definitely not complaining about that. All in all, a week’s worth of inconvenience is still a week’s worth of inconvenience, but I’m glad that in the end, they’ve given developers who worked with the beta something worthwhile.