Commander and Conquer 4 No DRM no worries.

Electronic Arts has announced that Commander and Conquer 4 will require that players have an active internet connection in order to play the game.  They have confirmed that this applies both to multiplayer and singleplayer gameplay.

This is a sure blow to laptop gamers who sometimes find themselves away from a hardline or wifi hub.  Though I’d like to point out that EA has stated that dial-up will allow you to play the game.  I find this a bit funny as you can probably count the number of gamers with dial-up on one hand.  There just arn’t that many.

According to an interview, a designer for the game,  Samuel Bass, stated that “as a nice side effect, since C&C4 requires players to be online all the time in order to prevent cheating, we’ll be shipping without any form of DRM.”

This is an interesting statement.  While I believe that he meant what he said that there is no DRM in the traditional form (ie software) the simple fact that you require the player to have an active internet connection in order to play the game means that that in itself is a form of DRM.  I can say that because I am relatively certain that the game will check, at startup (at least), whether or not your CD key is valid.  I do not believe there would be a point in having an active internet connection otherwise.

So I think that while Commander and Conquer 4 will not ship with a piece of DRM, like FADE that will slowly delete the game if it detects that you have a pirated copy, it still has a DRM system in place in the requirement that the player must have an active internet connection to play the game.

Interview article: http://game-preview.tungtram.com/2009/07/pc-command-conquer-4-q-exclusive-first.html

Evony and comment spam

I came across a short article on gamepolitics.com today and it spoke about Evony’s use of comment spam to advertise their game.

Now the first question one might ask is:  what the heck is Evony?  You’ve probably seen a million and one adds for the thing but maybe haven’t clicked on one to find out.

Well Evony is a web browser based MMORTS game similar to the 1997 Age of Empires game in both graphical quality and game play.  Players start off with a small town and must upgrade their productivity, army, and technology buildings in order to progress.  Players can also conquer other areas which give bonuses to resource production.

Now back to the gamepolitics.com article.  Apparently there has been a recent string of comment spam events where users will post spam advertising the game.  I was intrigued as to why a legitimate business would resort to a method usually employed by less than legitimate sites/services.  I decided to dig further into this and I found out that the makers of Evony have created “iEvony” a sort of test server that most MMOs have where players can get a sneak peak at new content and features.  The only difference between iEvony and most MMO test servers is that iEvony is invite only:  you need a code from the developers to get access to iEvony.

I then decided to see if the makers of Evony have had anything to say about this.  Low and behold there is a posting from yesterday morning about this very issue:

“07-12-2009, 08:41 AM

Dear Players,

We have been excited at the success of iEvony, but we have also come across an unintended side effect of the iEvony system. Some players have abusively and unethically engaged in spamming practices on a variety of websites with the intent of boosting their credits. This practice affects site traffic and makes headaches and extra work for moderators on a variety of websites. It reflects poorly not only on these users, but also on Evony as a whole.

For this reason, we will absolutely not tolerate such spamming practices. Players who engage in spam practices (posting multiple threads from multiple accounts on the same site, attempting to get forum users to follow a link) will be aggressively pursued and sanctioned. Penalties may include: being stripped of ALL earned Credits and any Coins or items they were exchanged for; having your iEvony account permanently disabled; being temporarily or permanently banned from Evony.”

I’m a little unsure about how posting links would benefit players, but the posting suggests that somehow if you link to a certain site your in-game character will benefit.  The gamepolitics.com article was apparently under the impression that it was Evony staff doing the spamming.  But according to the Evony team it is in fact players of the game who are doing the spamming.

This would make sense to me – with a credit system in place that is based on internet traffic.  What is unclear though is why the developers would institute that sort system in the first place.  It seems as if the spam issue is an obvious consequence of that sort of system.

I myself haven’t tried to play Evony (I have gotten addicted to browser based games before and it began to interfere with my work ethic so I stay away from them) but I hope this sort of thing doesn’t impact Evony which appears to be a good game.

Update:  Please see the first comment for more information, but there appears to be much more going on than meets the eye.

Look out its an Asteroid!

Well, we’ve seen quite a few movies over the last decade that have been based on video games, from Doom, Resident Evil, to Silent Hill.

But look out!  Now Universal Studios has announced that it will bring you a movie based on the arcade classic Asteroids!

That’s quite an admission and may not bode well for the future of Hollywood.

Though there is a big difference between making a movie about Doom and making a movie about Asteroids; Doom has a plot – such as it was – and characters.  Asteroids has neither a plot nor characters.  It was simply a game where you are a spaceship flying around blowing up chunks of interstellar debris.  On the one hand moviegoer/gamers can’t complain that Hollywood botched the story (see Aliens Vs Predator – which would have been a better movie if they’d followed the storyline from the AVP2 video game).  It also leaves the scriptwriters with a nearly blank slate.  All they have to do to satisfy the Asteroids requirement is to set the movie in space and have asteroids.  Lots of asteroids.

With all the remakes of old classics like the Taking of Pelham 123 or Inglorious Bastards (a sure ripoff of the Dirty Dozen movie) and now with Asteroids – The Movie I have come to the conclusion that Hollywood is like a Red Giant about to go supernova.  It has exhausted nearly all of its usable fuel (original creativity) and is about to go nova.

We can only wait and see but with the failure of Doom and the last two Resident Evil movies I cannot help but be pesimistic.