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Coercive Monetization A coercive monetization model depends on the ability to “trick” a person into making a purchase with incomplete information, or by hiding that information such that while it is technically available, the brain of the consumer does not access that information. Hiding a purchase can be as simple as disguising the relationship between the action and the cost as I describe in my Systems of Control in F2P paper. Research has shown that putting even one intermediate currency between the consumer and real money, such as a “game gem” (premium currency), makes the consumer much less adept at assessing the value of the transaction. Additional intermediary objects, what I call “layering”, makes it even harder for the brain to accurately assess the situation, especially if there is some additional stress applied. This additional stress is often in the form of what Roger Dickey from Zynga calls “fun pain”. I describe this in my Two Contrasting Views of Monetization paper from 2011. This involves putting the consumer in a very uncomfortable or undesirable position in the game and then offering to remove this “pain” in return for spending money. This money is always layered in coercive monetization models, because if confronted with a “real” purchase the consumer would be less likely to fall for the trick. As discussed in my Monetizing Childrenpaper, the ability to weigh this short term “pain relief” vs. the long term opportunity costs of spending money is a brain activity shown by research to be handled in the pre-frontal cortex. This area of the brain typically completes its development at the age of 25. Thus consumers under the age of 25 will have increased vulnerability to fun pain and layering effects, with younger consumers increasingly vulnerable. While those older than 25 can fall for very well constructed coercive monetization models, especially if they are unfamiliar with them (first generation Facebook gamers), the target audience for these products is those under the age of 25. For this reason these products are almost always presented with cartoonish graphics and child-like characters. Note that while monetizing those under 18 runs the risk of charge backs, those between the age of 18 and 25 are still in the process of brain development and are considered legal adults. It seems unlikely that anyone in this age range, having been anointed with adulthood, is going to appeal to a credit card company for relief by saying they are still developmentally immature. Thus this group is a vulnerable population with no legal protection, making them the ideal target audience for these methods. Not coincidentally, this age range of consumer is also highly desired by credit card companies. The exception to the above child targeting would be products making heavy use of Supremacy Goods, which I will discuss near the end of this paper. These products target a wider age range of users that are vulnerable to such appeals. Premium Currencies To maximize the efficacy of a coercive monetization model, you must use a premium currency, ideally with the ability to purchase said currency in-app. Making the consumer exit the game to make a purchase gives the target's brain more time to figure out what you are up to, lowering your chances of a sale. If you can set up your game to allow “one button conversion”, such as in many iOS games, then obviously this is ideal. The same effect is seen in real world retail stores where people buying goods with cash tend to spend less than those buying with credit cards, due to the layering effect. Purchasing in-app premium currency also allows the use of discounting, such that premium currency can be sold for less per unit if it is purchased in bulk. Thus a user that is capable of doing basic math (handled in a different part of the brain that develops earlier) can feel the urge to “save money” by buying more. The younger the consumer, the more effective this technique is, assuming they are able to do the math. Thus you want to make the numbers on the purchase options very simple, and you can also put banners on bigger purchases telling the user how much more they will “save” on big purchases to assist very young or otherwise math-impaired customers. Having the user see their amount of premium currency in the interface is also much less anxiety generating, compared to seeing a real money balance. If real money was used (no successful game developer does this) then the consumer would see their money going down as they play and become apprehensive. This gives the consumer more opportunities to think and will reduce revenues. Skill Games vs. Money Games A game of skill is one where your ability to make sound decisions primarily determines your success. A money game is one where your ability to spend money is the primary determinant of your success. Consumers far prefer skill games to money games, for obvious reasons. A key skill in deploying a coercive monetization model is to disguise your money game as a skill game. King.com's Candy Crush Saga is designed masterfully in this regard. Early game play maps can be completed by almost anyone without spending money, and they slowly increase in difficulty. This presents a challenge to the skills of the player, making them feel good when they advance due to their abilities. Once the consumer has been marked as a spender (more on this later) the game difficulty ramps up massively, shifting the game from a skill game to a money game as progression becomes more dependent on the use of premium boosts than on player skills. If the shift from skill game to money game is done in a subtle enough manner, the brain of the consumer has a hard time realizing that the rules of the game have changed. If done artfully, the consumer will increasingly spend under the assumption that they are still playing a skill game and “just need a bit of help”. This ends up also being a form of discriminatory pricing as the costs just keep going up until the consumer realizes they are playing a money game. Reward Removal This is my favorite coercive monetization technique, because it is just so powerful. The technique involves giving the player some really huge reward, that makes them really happy, and then threatening to take it away if they do not spend. Research has shown that humans like getting rewards, but they hate losing what they already have much more than they value the same item as a reward. To be effective with this technique, you have to tell the player they have earned something, and then later tell them that they did not. The longer you allow the player to have the reward before you take it away, the more powerful is the effect. This technique is used masterfully in Puzzle and Dragons. In that game the play primarily centers around completing “dungeons”. To the consumer, a dungeon appears to be a skill challenge, and initially it is. Of course once the customer has had enough time to get comfortable with the idea that this is a skill game the difficulty goes way up and it becomes a money game. What is particularly effective here is that the player has to go through several waves of battles in a dungeon, with rewards given after each wave. The last wave is a “boss battle” where the difficulty becomes massive and if the player is in the recommended dungeon for them then they typically fail here. They are then told that all of the rewards from the previous waves are going to be lost, in addition to the stamina used to enter the dungeon (this can be 4 or more real hours of time worth of stamina). At this point the user must choose to either spend about $1 or lose their rewards, lose their stamina (which they could get back for another $1), and lose their progress. To the brain this is not just a loss of time. If I spend an hour writing a paper and then something happens and my writing gets erased, this is much more painful to me than the loss of an hour. The same type of achievement loss is in effect here. Note that in this model the player could be defeated multiple times in the boss battle and in getting to the boss battle, thus spending several dollars per dungeon. This technique alone is effective enough to make consumers of any developmental level spend. Just to be safe, PaD uses the same technique at the end of each dungeon again in the form of an inventory cap. The player is given a number of “eggs” as rewards, the contents of which have to be held in inventory. If your small inventory space is exceeded, again those eggs are taken from you unless you spend to increase your inventory space. Brilliant! Progress Gates Progress gates can be used to tell a consumer that they will need to spend some amount of money if they want to go further in the game. If done transparently, this is not coercive. For the purposes of this paper, the focus will just be on how this can be layered to trick the consumer into spending on something they may not have if they had been provided with complete information. Now let's break progress gates into “hard” and “soft” types. A hard gate is one where you cannot advance if you do not pay up. The central buildings in Zynga builder type games are a good example. All other buildings in a town/city/base are capped by the level of the central building, forcing a hard progress gate. What makes this coercive is that the player is not told that if they pay through that gate they will just be presented with another hard gate soon that will cost even more money. Thus the consumer may assume they are getting more pain relief for their money than they are. A soft gate is one where the player can get past the gate, eventually. Clash of Clans uses this type in making building times ever longer and allowing the user to spend to complete them. This is a method presumably borrowed from games made by Zynga, Kabam, Kixeye, and others since it is a common Facebook game convention. In order to improve the efficacy of the soft gate, these games also make it so that resource generation in-game increases faster than the player's ability to spend these resources (because building/spending takes so long). Thus these “earned” resources are lost (taken away) if real money is not spent. This is a method of combining reward removal with a soft gate to increase the pain level while at the same time layering, as the consumer may be gullible enough to assume these effects are coincidental or due to some strategic misstep they took earlier. Another novel way to use a progress gate is to make it look transparent, but to use it as the partition between the skill game and the money game. Candy Crush Saga employs this technique artfully. In that game there is a “river” that costs a very small amount of money to cross. The skill game comes before the river. A player may spend to cross the river, believing that the previous skill game was enjoyable (it was for me) and looking to pay to extend the skill game. No such guarantee is given of course, King just presents a river and does not tell you what is on the other side. The money game is on the other side, and as the first payment is always the hardest, those that cross the river are already prequalified as spenders. Thus the difficulty ramps up to punishing levels on the far side of the river, necessitating boosts for all but the most pain tolerant players. Soft and Hard Boosts The purpose of a money game is to promote Boost sales. Boosts that have an instant one-time effect are “soft” Boosts. Those that stick around either forever or until they are converted to something else are “hard” Boosts. The $1 “un-defeat” button in PaD is a soft Boost, as are all of the power-ups sold in Candy Crush Saga. The obvious advantage of soft boosts is that you can keep selling them as long as the player stays in the money game.
“Hard” Boosts include things like the random rare creatures that are sold in PaD for $5 each. Having these in your stable effectively lowers the difficulty of the game enough to allow you to get a little bit further with each purchase. A technique that is very popular in Asian games with hard Boosts (PaD included) is to allow hard Boosts to be “merged” to allow for even bigger hard Boosts. This makes the math involved in figuring out exactly how expensive a very high quality hard Boost will be, daunting. It may even be completely invisible to the consumer due to the various drop %s being hidden. Thus the best hard Boosts in these games typically cost thousands of dollars, a fact that is hidden to the user until they are already invested for at least a few hundred dollars. This puts the consumer in the difficult position of giving up and losing the equity already purchased, or going “all the way” and spending some unknown large amount to get the top Boost. Some of these techniques, sometimes called “kompu gacha”, are already facing regulation in Asia due to their excessive layering and lack of transparency. In money games that contain a social layer, this social layer is used as an added incentive to show off your “skills” to other players that may still not realize they are in a money game. This is the purpose of the mini-leaderboards in Candy Crush Saga, to make it look like you need to try harder to beat your more “skillful” friends. Even the “word-o-meter” in Words with Friends can be considered a soft Boost in a money game disguised as a skill game. This would, of course, depend on if you considered it to give an advantage. If it didn't then why are people buying it? Ante Games As described in detail in my How “Pay to Win” Workspaper, the key to these games is to start off with the appearance of a skill game and then shift to a multiplayer money game that I call an “Ante” game. The game could proceed as a skill game but never does since once one player spends enough money it becomes a money game. At some point players keep raising their antes, hoping that the other players will fold. The “winner” (and loser) is the player that puts in the largest ante. It is not unusual for winning antes to be over $5000, and some Asian game developers that make only ante games like IGG have “VIP” member sections that you have to spend $3000+ per year for the top level of membership. The target audience here tends to be non-hardcore competitive gamers who need the self esteem boost that comes with winning a skill game, and who for whatever reason never recognize the game as a money game. Some of my peers in the Asian gaming industry suggest that there this is merely a form of conspicuous consumption. I would love to see some age demographics for these “whales”. Last Thoughts The above mechanics are not meant to be exhaustive, but give a basic overview of key techniques used in coercive monetization model based games to defeat a customer's ability to make informed choices about the costs and values in these products. The more subtle the hand, and the more you can make your game appear to be skill based the more effective these products will monetize. Currently I would consider Puzzle and Dragons to be the state of the art. While it's gameplay mechanisms are simplistic, the depth of its reward mechanisms and its adherence to most of the best practices listed in my Supremacy Goods microeconomic model make it quite elegant. Its fantastic use of reward removal in particular is quite impressive. While it is possible to make commercially competitive games without using coercive methods, this is a lot more work. In the current market, especially with most adults and children not familiar with the nature of these products, the environment is still ripe for fast profits, and likely will continue to be so for a few more years. Note that while these methods can be very successful with young and inexperienced gamers, they find less success with older and more experienced gamers, and this population represents a group with potentially very large gaming budgets.
In a rush to cash in on the popularity of the first Pirates of the Caribbean film, publishers Bethesda and developers Akella released in 2003 a very strange game.
It wasn't really a Pirates of the Caribbean game. It had been in development as a sequel to Sea Dogs, a 2000 game that itself was basically a homage to Sid Meier's Pirates!. So despite adding a few characters specific to the film, and the obvious name change, the game actually had very little in common with Disney's blockbuster property.
What it did have, though, was promise. As I remember it, the game that shipped wasn't all that great, a pale imitation of Meier's classic, but the bones were there for something better, something potential modders quickly realised and set to work upon fixing.
And so the Pirates of the Caribbean: New Horizons project was born.
One of the longest-running mods in existence, the goal of the team was to transform the 2003 game into "as full an historical Age of Sail game experience as possible".
There's only so much they can do working within the confines of someone else's game, but what they've done is amazing.
You can check out the complete list of what's been changed, from graphics upgrades to major gameplay tweaks, at the project's site below.
Internet mega-corporation Google is purportedly developing an Android-based video game console, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal (via Joystiq).
Evidently, the console is being developed alongside an Android-based wristwatch, which I presume will tap into the 80s era nostalgia that's totally in vogue right now.
According to the report, the console and watch are being developed as a buffer against Apple, with one source claiming that Google has been keeping its all-seeing eye on the Ouya.
The cubic Kickstarted Android-based console apparently sold out at Gamestop and Amazon US upon its launch yesterday, according to Develop, but it appears to be back in stock now.
While the Xbox One and PS4 took a lion’s share of the limelight at E3, there was more to the event than the console launches and their Day One games lineups. While catching up with NVIDIA about SHIELD at E3 I also heard about some of their plans for PC gaming. Arch-rivals AMD also have plenty to say on that subject, and an AMD spokesperson took a few moments to fill me in on their perspective too.
AMD was quick to tell me that “AMD makes [the] technology that powers the X-Box One and the PlayStation 4, and we also make technology in our Radeon graphics that powers the Wii U. So we’re in all three of the new next-gen consoles.” In the case of the new Xbox and PlayStation, AMD provides the central APU (integrated CPU/GPU) engine, while the Wii U uses AMD graphics. Not surprisingly, this makes AMD console fans.
NVIDIA, meanwhile, don’t have a seat at the big consoles’ table. With Tegra aimed at the Android mobile market and their own SHIELD portable Android console, the company has their mobile strategy in place. But for high-end gaming, NVIDIA now only has the PC as a platform to target. This is an interesting turn of events, because it means NVIDIA, unlike AMD, now has more at stake in pushing PC gaming forward.
NVIDIA’s Jason Paul, director of product marketing, told me: “I think PC still going to be the premiere gaming platform. For game developers who want to deliver the richest, best experiences, they’re going to develop for PC. I think that’s going to keep PC very healthy through this new generation of consoles, and obviously PCs are going to continue to take off in terms of innovation.”
AMD are justifiably proud of their console hat-trick, but it doesn’t mean they don’t care about the PC. After all, the next generation of consoles can now easily game at 1080P, but many PC gamers have been playing exclusively at that resolution for half a decade or more, and are ready to move on to better things.
As I’m standing in the AMD booth, AMD’s spokesperson points across the aisle to a Sharp 32 inch 4K [3840x2160 resolution] display: “Something like that can be plugged into a PC today. You can do 4K gaming right now with the games that are out there now. So on the PC continues to lead and really define the leading edge of gaming. So I don’t think it’s going anywhere; in fact I think it’s actually grown quite a bit because [for] the consoles that have been out there…it’s been a long console cycle.”
As AMD and NVIDIA make high-end GPUs for which a single 1080P display is no longer a challenge, for gamers looking for the next big thing, the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One might not be as compelling as Sony and Microsoft hope.
Paul said “…New consoles come out, and they catch up a little in performance, but then they get stale over a while and the PC sort of goes through a Renaissance. PC’s been really strong over the last few years as the consoles have aged. Consoles will close that gap a little bit. But one of the things that’s different about this generation is generally the consoles will catch up to the PC in terms of performance. With this next generation, at least what’s been released so far in terms of specs, it doesn’t look like they’re going to close the gap with PC this time.”
AMD concurs. AMD’s spokesperson told me: “A lot more people have been taking a look at the PC and saying ‘Oh wait, I can get better graphics over here. Oh wait, my experience over here can be different’ like with AMD’s [multi-monitor technology] Eyefinity…. Gaming with a mouse and a keyboard is very different from gaming with a control on a sofa.”
Or as Clay Causin, a senior software engineer at NVIDIA, puts it: “Personal opinion: Consoles they have a place. if you need something basic, you don’t care how your game looks, alright, I guess it works for you. PC gaming is…bigger and better. Consoles are a downgrade.”
There’s plenty of demand, in other words, for the kind of high-end PC gaming parts both companies produce. Boutique PC rig builders will sell you machines for many thousands of dollars if you want, but that doesn’t mean gamers have to break the bank, unless of course they want to.
AMD’s spokesperson said, “You can totally build a gaming PC for $1000 or even $600-$700…. It all depends on what type of performance you are looking at and what you want to do with the product. Although the primary purpose of a user building their own PC might be to game it’s still a computer. It still does everything a computer can do, you can do multimedia steaming, you can do file crunching, you can build and create things, you can use it for work or play.
“It all depends on what you want to do and how big you want to go.”
Just how big? AMD’s spokesperson mentions a Maingear machine that’s using the company’s latest Radeon HD 7990 and Eyefinity to drive five 65-inch video TVs simultaneously. Rather like one of those TV cooking shows where the chef is standing in a kitchen bigger than your house, “It’s fun and a little obnoxious…showing people what kind of cutting-edge technology you can do in big bold ways.”
So, at the end of the day, how important is PC gaming? As Causin puts it: “Well, it pays all of our checks.” You can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and here at Forbes.
The U.S. government may not print Bitcoin, or regulate it, but apparently the feds can still seize it.
Earlier this week, the federal Drug Enforcement Agency reported that it had seized 11.02 bitcoins—roughly $814—from a South Carolina man attempting to buy illegal substances with the world's leading digital currency. It's the first known seizure of Bitcoin by the U.S. government, signaling just how seriously the feds take Bitcoin and the online black markets it fuels.
A report from the DEA notes that the money was netted in April. Little detail is provided about the seizure, which appears on the third-to-the-last page of a 128-page document. Its not even clear what substance the suspect was trying to buy. But for Bitcoin experts, the particulars of this case are less important than the apparent fact that the U.S. government is performing sting operations on Bitcoin sites.
"The DEA appears to have been the first agency to seize actual Bitcoins from an individual with this seizure," wrote Brian Cohen and Adam B. Levine on the blog Let's Talk Bitcoin. "Exactly how the Bitcoin was seized is not known as of this writing."
How the funds were seized is still technically a mystery, but the authors of the Let's Talk Bitcoin piece and others have their theories. The prevailing wisdom is that a Bitcoin seizure could have occurred one of two ways. Since there is no evidence that Bitcoin itself was compromised, a DEA agent would have either had to take control of a computer with an unencrypted wallet and transfer the amount to a DEA controlled wallet, or they would have had to set up a "honeypot" sting on the popular Silk Road Internet black market, where Bitcoin is regularly used to purchase contraband. In that case, the alleged criminal would have unknowingly transferred the Bitcoins to the DEA himself.
These are still just theories on the part of Bitcoin enthusiasts, who wait to see how the official proceedings will play out. What is clear though is that federal interest in Bitcoin continues to grow.
As Bitcoin's value has grown, the U.S. government has begun to more heavily scrutinize the anonymous, unregulated cryptocurrency. Last month, the Department of Homeland Security seized one of the U.S. bank accounts of Mt. Gox, the world's leading Bitcoin exchange. The seizure was the result of Mt. Gox's failure to comply with anti-money laundering laws.
Zeno Clash publisher Atlus is at risk of sale or restructure following today's announcement that parent company Index has filed for civil rehabilitation proceedings as it faces bankruptcy.
According to a report from CNET, Index owes debts of ¥24.5 billion — roughly $224 million — and the company's president Ochiai Yoshimi has hinted at his resignation.
Index Corporation states that its previous attempt to acquire businesses targeted at both domestic and international interests did not work as planned, while overseas acquisitions was particularly unsuccessful in creating the necessary increase in revenue to justify the purchase.
We have contacted Atlus for comment and will update the post when more information is available.
Below is the text of a talk I delivered Monday at the 2013 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference in Boston. Republican Congressman Darrell Issa, Icelandic member of Parliament Birgitta Jónsdóttir and I spoke on the theme of “Insiders/Outsiders: what is the right approach to change.”
Unlike many of the people in this room, I’m not an academic or a public policy expert and so I won’t be bringing you statistics or analysis or theories today. I run a big website. I’m also a journalist. If we consider ourselves to be in a war for the free and open internet, I am here to tell you some stories from the trenches.
Wikipedia is pretty much the consummate insider-outsider: the #5 most-popular site in the entire world, read by a half a billion people every month, yet written by utterly ordinary people with no special power or authority at all. If they have credentials, they park them at the door.
Wikipedia is a tremendous success story. It launched in 2001 and took off very quickly: by 2006 it had surpassed all the other news and information sites in terms of popularity. Today it’s a behemoth. And people love to point to it as an example of everything great about the internet. There’s only one problem with that. Wikipedia is pretty much alone. It’s NOT the general rule: it’s the exception that proves the rule.
Wikipedia is operated by a non-profit. In Silicon Valley, people often find that astonishing – they ask me why Jimmy Wales “left so much money on the table,” and whether he regrets doing it. (Answer: no.) Sometimes people ask me why we don’t just put ads on the site, and whether we are against advertising, against for-profit companies, against capitalism.
We say no. Our view is that the internet should have balance, much like the offline world. A city has restaurants and shops and banks as well as schools and libraries and parks. Wikipedia is like a park. It’s a public space, accessible and used by everybody.
But where are the other parks?
Wikipedia is the only donor-supported site in the top 50
Wikipedia and Mozilla are the only two nonprofits in the top 25(*)
The average person spends practically all their time online on the sites of for-profit companies, the vast majority of them American. (Caveat: mainland China.)
This worries me. The internet is evolving into a private-sector space that is primarily accountable to corporate shareholders rather than citizens. It’s constantly trying to sell you stuff. It does whatever it wants with your personal information. And as it begins to be regulated or to regulate itself, it often happens in a clumsy and harmful way, hurting the internet’s ability to function for the benefit of the public. That for example was the story of SOPA.
My first war story happened soon after I joined the Wikimedia Foundation. It’s about censorship in the United Kingdom.
The internet industry is, of course, generally hoping to remain unregulated. In the UK a coalition of ISPs have formed an association called the Internet Watch Foundation, which is essentially a group of retired police officers, paid by the ISPs to investigate complaints of child pornography online. In 2008, that group got a complaint about an image on Wikipedia of an album cover from 1976(**) – an album called “Virgin Killer”, by a German heavy metal band called the Scorpions. The album cover image is a young girl, nude, which has been treated with an effect that makes it look like she’s looking at you through a pane of glass that has been shattered by a bullet. It’s deliberately provocative – it’s heavy metal.
The Internet Watch Foundation decided this was child porn, and attempted to block it from the view of UK internet users. In doing that, they accidentally made it impossible for anybody to edit Wikipedia from inside the UK.
People went nuts. There was a lot of press coverage, both inside the UK and internationally. The Wikimedia Foundation spoke to the press, and individual Wikipedia editors in the UK spoke to the press and blogged and tweeted and so on. And after a few days the IWF reversed its decision.
Two interesting things:
When they reversed their decision, they explicitly said that they still believed the image was child porn, but that the public outcry was too much for them. They backed down because they couldn’t win a PR war against fans of the number five website in the world. If we had been Joe’s Album Art History Wiki, it’s clear the decision would not have been reversed.
Importantly and invisibly, while this story was playing out, and was being written about by journalists internationally, at the Wikimedia Foundation we noticed Amazon had quietly pulled the Virgin Killer album from its site. It still sold a version of the album that had a different cover, but it no longer sold the version with the image that was being challenged. Amazon didn’t call us to ask what was going on, or to offer us help. They didn’t even silently watch and wait. They pulled the album off their shelves — not just in the UK but worldwide.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Amazon. I spend a significant portion of my disposable income at Amazon every year, and I am grateful that it’s made my life easier and given me choices I didn’t have before it existed. Amazon is fantastic. But it’s also true that Amazon’s job is not to protect the public interest – it’s to advance the interests of Amazon.
Another story.
In 2011, there was a Wikipedia conference in Mumbai at which Jimmy Wales spoke as well as our Board member Bishakha Datta, and a few of our staff. To our considerable surprise, a popular Indian political party picketed outside our conference and demanded that the police arrest us. They were doing that because the map of India displayed on Wikipedia shows the country’s borders as per the United Nations – with the borders with China and Pakistan “disputed” – and not as per the map defined by the government of India. It is only legal, in India, to publish a map showing India’s borders as they are defined and understood by the government of India.
As you can imagine, the protest made us exceedingly anxious. We knew that although India is a democracy with a commitment to free speech, that commitment is variable and laws and community standards inside India are somewhat volatile. And so we retained a bunch of lawyers. We spent weeks researching the legal and PR issues. Where we could, we took a variety of small non-controversial steps to protect ourselves. And ultimately we got lucky, and the issue seemed to fizzle out.
What we did not do was change the map of India displayed on Wikipedia. Partly because we can’t – that’s a Wikipedia community decision – but also because we shouldn’t. It’s perfectly reasonable to publish a map of India with the UN borders.
What was interesting here, as we researched our position, was what everybody else does. It seems that inside India, every major player except Wikipedia displays the map of India with the borders as defined by the Indian government. If you’re in India, that’s what Google shows you. When the Economist magazine prints a map of India, I was told by our lawyer, the version of the magazine they sell inside India shows a map different from the version in the magazine they sell elsewhere.(***)
It’s also worth noting that the Wikimedia Foundation has a legal team and a PR team, and Wikipedia is a popular site, much-loved by its readers. Not everyone has those resources. Of those that do, most are private and for-profit. Again, some of those players are doing great things. But on the whole, over time, they will put profits before public service. That’s their job and their obligation.
Governments, in my experience, aren’t helping. Mostly they’re just befuddled, but even if they knew what to do, there’s no reason to believe they’d do it. Too often they’re corporate captives. We saw it with SOPA. Today they listen too much to the entertainment industry – the copyright owners. Tomorrow, maybe they’ll be listening too much to giant technology companies. Either way, the voices of ordinary people will only rarely be heard, and I have difficulty believing that more or better civic engagement will fix that anytime soon. I agree with Larry Lessig: structural problems – fundraising, gerrymandering – have made for a powerful incumbency with skewed incentives.
And so, as a soldier in the trenches, my message to this conference is caution and concern.
Aside from Wikipedia, there is no large, popular space being carved out for the public good. There are a billion tiny experiments, some of them great. But we should be honest: we are not gaining ground. Our schools, our libraries, our parks – they are very, very small and they may or may not sustain. We certainly have no information-sharing participatory Garden of Eden, the promise of the internet that we all originally believed in. Though we are not lost, we are losing.
I say this because it’s easy to come together for a conference like this and get excited about awesome experiments and interesting breakthroughs. It’s worth doing! We want to celebrate success! But if you’ve read Tim Wu‘s Master Switch, if you’re reading Robert McChesney‘s Digital Disconnect, you know that the insiders are winning. We are not.
The internet needs serious help if it is to remain free and open, a powerful contributor to the public good. That’s what I’m hoping you’ll discuss over the course of this conference. How to create an ecosystem of parks and libraries and schools online … that supports participation, dialogue, sharing.
Thank you. (*Turns out I was wrong about this. Mozilla is #60 globally according to comScore Media Metrix, the industry standard for web audience measurement. Therefore, I should actually have said Wikipedia, at #5, is the *only* non-profit in the top 25.) (**When I delivered the talk I said 2009 and 1979. I’d been misremembering: it was 2008 and 1976.) (***Since delivering this talk, Tilman Bayer at the Wikimedia Foundation pointed me towards this BBC article, in which the Economist accuses the Indian government of hostile censorship after it forced the magazine to place a blank white sticker over a map of Kashmir in the 30,000 copies of the May 2011 Economist that were distributed in India.)
Todd Hollenshead departs Doom studio to pursue "other personal interests."
id Software president and former CEO Todd Hollenshead has left the Doom studio after 17 years with the company, publisher Bethesda has confirmed.
"After many years with the studio, Todd Hollenshead decided to leave id Software to pursue other personal interests," Bethesda said in a statement.
"While Todd was not part of the development teams, he was an integral part of id Software's success as the business head of the studio, and we wish him the very best in his future endeavors."
Hollenshead joined id Software in 1996 as CEO, before taking on the role of president in 2009.
The most recent new release from id Software was 2011's Rage. The studio is currently working on Doom 4, which has been rebooted.
Just two years ago, during another typically sunny morning in Los Angeles, ex-EA boss John Riccitiello walked on stage at the Nokia Theatre to announce an “unprecedented relationship” with Nintendo.
It was June 2011 and the Wii was closing in on its 90 millionth console sold. With the world ready for new hardware, Nintendo seemed poised to make lightning strike twice. The Japanese company had a new touchscreen controller and, finally, an HD-capable console, and with PlayStation 4 and Xbox One seemingly still far away, Wii U was, briefly, the cool new kid in town.
“Over the years I've made appearances at E3 with console partners, but never before for Nintendo,” Riccitiello began. “What brings us together today is a breakthrough in our relationship based on a stunning breakthrough in technology. What Nintendo's new console delivers speaks directly to the players of EA Sports and EA Games.”
Riccitiello gave examples of EA's vision. A new Madden title could have instantly-available stats via the GamePad, he suggested, or a fresh Battlefield game would be able to use DICE's meaty Frostbite engine and the Wii U's graphical power. Other benefits of the system would include easy-to-access online multiplayer and the ability to provide a constant stream of game-extending DLC.
It's easy to see why the prospect had EA drooling. Nintendo had a huge existing Wii userbase and a new console ready to be filled with the publisher's slate of games. And it would strike first with fresh hardware at the tail end of a long - too-long - console generation.
Fast forward a year later to the Wii U's launch in Nov 2012, and far slower console sales than expected. EA released a FIFA and a Madden game (the former with fewer features than on other platforms and the latter only in North America). It also provided delayed ports of Mass Effect 3 and Need for Speed: Most Wanted (with existing DLC included on-disc, and later expansions simply missing).
Nintendo's online systems were better than the Wii's, but the console's included hard drive sizes and shaky eShop download speed meant most publishers ignored DLC altogether. And then, just six months into Wii U's life, EA revealed that it no longer had any Wii U games in development. The “unprecedented partnership” had come to an abrupt end. In total, EA made four Wii U games.
“[Need for Speed: Most Wanted] was the last one we did,” Patrick Soderlund, boss of EA Games Labels, told Eurogamer during an interview conducted at E3. “Right now I don't have any other games in development for the Wii U. We are, frankly, hard at work with what we have in front of us and with the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One. We're focusing on those for now and getting that right.
“When you have new technology like these two platforms represent and you have game teams focused on it, you can only do so much. And even though we have a lot of people we have decided for now... and I can only speak for my label... that we focus on the previous platforms, PS3 and Xbox 360, as well as PC, Xbox One and PS4.
“For now.”
It's hard to believe that a company the size of EA could lack for resources, but this year's financial results saw EA fall short of its own targets. It was for this reason that Riccitiello quit, the company triggered even more lay-offs and announced the cancellation of several under-performing franchises. It's not that EA didn't have the resources, then, but that it no longer had the resources spare for a lower-priority console.
When you run a business - and we all run businesses - you have to make decisions that are good for the consumers, and the people who work inside this company and good for our shareholders.
Patrick Soderlund, boss of EA Games Labels
As the final part of a story-driven trilogy with no previous entries on a Nintendo console - and released six months after other versions - was Mass Effect 3 ever going to sell on Wii U?
"My guess is that EA saw poor share on the Wii and Nintendo promised to help it gain greater share on the Wii U, and EA hadn't seen enough progress to give it confidence that it should continue support," explained Michael Pachter, famed video game analyst and managing director of equity research at Wedbush Securities.
"Add to that the fact that EA missed its financial targets last year, and went through a comprehensive review of spending that didn't generate a return," Pachter continued. "It is highly likely that in this review, it determined that it was not profitable on incremental R&D spending for Wii U, and it couldn't see the poor-selling console turning the corner in the next year or two."
EA's Soderlund confirmed to Eurogamer that the decision to abandon Wii U - at least for the time being - was business-orientated, with the simple fact that Nintendo hadn't sold enough consoles to blame.
"When you run a business - and we all run businesses - you have to make decisions that are good for the consumers, and the people who work inside this company and good for our shareholders," Soderlund explained. "We put our eggs in the basket where we think they'll matter the most. I understand some people will be disappointed by that."
"Our job as game creators and executives is to be where the gamers are. Frankly, it's as simple as that."
But EA is still supporting many other consoles. For FIFA 14, EA Sports will launch the mega-selling football franchise on the original Wii but not Wii U. It will launch for PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One, on mobile, on 3DS, on PSP, on Vita and even for the decade-old discontinued PlayStation 2 but not Wii U. It's the first time a FIFA game has failed to launch on a Nintendo platform in over a decade, and rekindles memories of EA's decision to drop support of Sega's much-loved but ill-fated Dreamcast console.
Listen, we went out in strong support of the Nintendo Wii U.
Andrew Wilson, boss of EA Sports
The last time a new FIFA game skipped Nintendo's current hardware was in the pre-GameCube era.
"Listen, we went out in strong support of the Nintendo Wii U, and we actually built a number of games as a company including FIFA for the Wii U," EA Sports boss Andrew Wilson told Eurogamer when we asked why there would be no FIFA 14 on the platform.
"For us, in all honesty, the take-up there around sports gaming on that platform wasn't where it needed to be in order for the continued support of FIFA on that platform at this time. The reality was it wasn't there. We have to build and invest in games for the broad gamer base so we can ensure we deliver the best possible games."
But it's hardly surprising that Wii U owners - even those who are FIFA fans - avoided last year's title. It included fewer features than its PS3 and Xbox 360 counterparts, such as the First Touch system and the FIFA Street skill system. At the time, EA told Eurogamer that the disparity between versions was the fault of it having been busy building up a Wii U-specific FIFA framework to use in future entries - versions which now may never see light of day.
“Listen, I think we built a really solid game," Wilson said at E3 in the game's defence. "We were very happy with the game. We did the best to take advantage of the capabilities and the features of the Nintendo Wii U. Fun is a subjective thing. But what I can say is we put everything we could into making that the best possible game with the tools we had at hand."
Both Wilson and Soderlund suggested that EA's current stance on Wii U is not necessarily set in stone - the publisher could potentially return at some point in the future, but only if Nintendo turns around the fortunes of its struggling console.
"Nintendo's a fantastic partner to us," Wilson said. "We've had a long relationship with them. We certainly never count them out. I know they are working diligently to grow their install base and grow their install base of sports gamers, which by default will grow their install base of FIFA gamers. And as that happens we may be given cause to re-evaluate where we go and what we focus on."
We talk to EA all the time. In the end this is simple business.
Reggie Fils-Aime, Nintendo of America boss
Nintendo will return to its most iconic franchises for this year's holiday line-up - Mario, Zelda and Donkey Kong.
Nintendo declined to comment on the loss of EA's support when contacted by Eurogamer, but executives have mentioned it in interviews and even said they understand the decision.
At E3 in June, Nintendo of America boss Reggie Fils-Aime told Polygon it was up to Nintendo to increase the Wii U's install base, not EA. “We talk to EA all the time,” he said. “In the end this is simple business. First party needs to drive a large diverse install base for publishers to create content to take advantage of that install base.
“That is what we are looking to do, you know for any publisher what they want to say to themselves is that we have game X and we are confident that we can sell game X not only to pay off the investment but to make a profit on that game.”
It's clear that right now, EA does not feel it can make a profit on Wii U.
---
It's difficult to determine exactly how long it took for cracks in the EA-Nintendo relationship to appear, but the fact that EA never announced any further games for Wii U beyond its initial quota suggested that it may have already become more cautious of its chances by the console's disappointing launch.
It's likely that platform decisions for EA's spring 2013 blockbusters Dead Space 3 and Army of Two: The Devil's Cartel were made before Wii U was a known quantity. Yet the developer of another spring EA game, Crysis 3 studio Crytek, suggested a Wii U port would have been possible - EA was just uninterested.
As an independent company that deals with EA solely for its Crysis series, Crytek has been more open with its comments about Wii U than the EA mothership. As early as April 2012 - 10 months after the EA-Nintendo relationship was announced - a Crytek employee was heard to say that there was a "fat chance" of Crysis 3 appearing on Wii U. Subsequent clarification made it clear that Crytek itself had been working on an Wii U version, but that it "had to die" due to a lack of interest from EA.
I'd love to see it [Crysis 3] on Wii U, but what I love to see and what gets done at the end of the day are two different things.
Cevat Yerli, Crytek boss
EA backed Mass Effect 3, but not Crysis 3.
"I'd love to see it [Crysis 3] on Wii U, but what I love to see and what gets done at the end of the day are two different things," Crytek boss Cevat Yerli explained in January this year, before the game launched. "If that business decision doesn't make sense, or seems to not make sense for them, it's... not possible for us to make it. We can't publish ourselves, and that's the bottom line."
It's hard to hear that EA actively shunned a Wii U version of Crytek's shooter and not see it as some kind of barometer for the company's waning interest. It's also not difficult to imagine the kind of discussions that went on in EA's Redmond boardroom in the months that followed Riccitiello's E3 2011 speech, as the company pondered less-than-stellar Wii U sales predictions while Sony and Microsoft representatives dropped off the latest dev builds of Orbis and Durango.
With none of EA's major spring slate headed to Wii U and just the delayed port of Need for Speed: Most Wanted still left on the horizon, the unprecedented relationship was very much on the rocks. EA cemented the break-up with its next announcement: that its upcoming major wave of games would run on DICE's Frostbite 3 engine, which it claimed was not Wii U-compatible. The framework will be used in 15 upcoming titles, including Battlefield 4, Need for Speed: Rivals, Mass Effect 4, Dragon Age: Inquisition, Mirror's Edge and its unannounced Star Wars games. Wii U will miss out on them all.
By way of explanation, DICE technical director Johan Andersson claimed via Twitter that "FB3 has never been running on Wii U. We did some tests with not too promising results with FB2 and chose not to go down that path." Would EA now have the same technical problems with Frostbite on Wii U had the console been selling like hot cakes? Or was EA simply eyeing a less-than-spectacular return on Wii U releases? "It's both," Patrick Bach, executive producer of Battlefield at DICE told Eurogamer.
If the Wii U was immensely popular we would probably put more focus into seeing how we could mitigate this.
Patrick Bach, Battlefield executive producer
DICE's new Mirror's Edge won't release on Wii U.
"If the Wii U was immensely popular we would probably put more focus into seeing how we could mitigate this, because it is a technical problem," Bach said. "It is a technical problem at its core because the Frostbite engine is not designed to run on that hardware, and the hardware is quite different from the next-gen consoles and the previous gen consoles."
But the Wii U is at least as powerful as current generation consoles and Frostbite 3 is designed to be scalable - we'll see current-gen versions of Battlefield 4, for example. With Frostbite 2 appearing to work on Wii U fine, does the argument about having technical difficulties really still stand up?
"From our perspective it's not as powerful as it should be to be able to run a Battlefield game," Bach responded. "Straight out of the box, as in Frostbite 3, it doesn't run that well on the Wii U, which means it takes a lot of time and energy from us that would then take from something else.
"So, we made the decision to say, no, let's not take away the focus from the PlayStations and the Xboxes and the PCs to do this. At the end of the day it's about focus and priorities. If we could press a button to move it over to Wii U, of course we could make a Wii U SKU, but it would take some substantial time to do it. I know some fans get very upset when we say that, but it's true. There's a reason why not all games are on the Wii U platform."
And again, should Nintendo turn around Wii U's fortunes, DICE is open to returning to the platform, Bach concluded.
"Absolutely. Of course. There's no reason why we couldn't focus down and make a Nintendo GameBoy version of it as well. It's all about where you put your focus and how you scale things. Where do you scale down? Where do you put your team efforts?
"We need to do what is right for the franchise and what feels right in our gut. If you have to scale your game down in the wrong places too much, then you lose some of the core values of what your game stands for. It's complicated. It's more complicated than people would like it to be. I would love for us to be able to be on Samsung TVs as well, but we have to draw the line somewhere."
We need to do what is right for the franchise and what feels right in our gut.
Patrick Bach
A Samsung TV. Unlikely to be running Battlefield 4 anytime soon, unless you plug your console in first.
EA is responding to the platforms it thinks it will turn a profit on, then, but as Soderlund said, you would expect nothing less from any other business. Ubisoft, while remaining as one of the Wii U's strongest third-party supporters, has still reorganised its 2013 Wii U slate with the same mentality. It attracted the ire of countless Nintendo fans for ditching Rayman Legends' Wii U exclusivity. Yet it did so to make sure that Legends would be available for a wide audience after analysing Wii U launch sales.
"This is not just an EA issue," agreed Piers Harding-Rolls, senior analyst and games boss at UK-based IHS Screen Digest. "Most publishers will be looking for Nintendo to generate platform momentum before committing significant investment at this stage. We expect Wii U sales to pick up in line with the release of big hitting titles and increased marketing support. But overall we expect Nintendo to lose significant market share this generation compared to last gen."
And it might be some time before Nintendo is able to build up a strong enough Wii U userbase that publishers are happy with the risk, Harding-Rolls concluded.
"Nintendo's short term plan is to generate momentum through first party games and to then stimulate increased third party investment. This still means, however, that we are unlikely to see significant third party releases until the end of 2014."
"My bet is that once Wii U gets a respectable installed base (say 15-20 million units), EA will look at supporting it again, as it might be able to sell sufficient units of its big games to turn a profit," Pachter added, explaining that even mainstream EA releases can find it hard to penetrate Nintendo's userbase. "It is unlikely that FIFA on Wii U would penetrate many more than 10 per cent of the installed base, and it might not justify the incremental cost to make the game for only 500,000 units sold."
Until then, though, Wii U owners will have to make do, on the whole, with Nintendo-made games. Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has said that his company can re-establish third-party support, but its focus is fixed squarely on fueling console sales through its heavy-hitting brands: Mario, Donkey Kong and Zelda.
Our focus is, first of all, to regain the momentum of the Wii U towards the end of this year, and then we'll try to establish successful third-party Wii U software titles.
Satoru Iwata, Nintendo company president
Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze will be the second outing for DK this year.
“Our focus is, first of all, to regain the momentum of the Wii U towards the end of this year, and then we'll try to establish successful third-party Wii U software titles,” Iwata told IGN at E3. “I believe in the importance of third-party support for Nintendo platforms. I'm very willing to change the current situation.”
According to Harding-Rolls, Nintendo is better equipped than its competitors in the console game space to suffer from a lack of third-party support. “Although missing mainstream favourites such as FIFA or Madden and enthusiast titles such as Battlefield is a blow, Nintendo's portfolio of games IP is so strong that the lack of third-party support is less of a PR issue to Nintendo than it would be to Sony or Microsoft,” he said.
Pachter's assessment is more to the point: “The lack of third-party support makes the Wii U more of a dedicated Nintendo software player than any device prior.
“That makes it like Apple TV.”
It would be great for Wii U owners if all third-parties supported the console with a wide variety of games, of course, but the blame for the current lack of interest in the platform by publishers correlates directly with the blame for the current lack of interest in the platform by the public. Nintendo has yet to convince a large enough slice of the population to buy a Wii U, which in turn is keeping publishers cautious about lending it their support.
It remains to be seen whether EA will rejoin the Wii U at some point, but in the short term at least, the battle lines for this Christmas' crucial sales season are already drawn up. Nintendo has big hopes of its own, of course: Super Mario 3D World, in my own opinion the best multiplayer Mario platformer ever made, an HD remake of fan-favourite Zelda: The Wind Waker, plus Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze, Sonic games from Sega and a smattering of AAA support from Ubisoft. But, without EA, there is no doubt that Wii U will face its difficult second Christmas more isolated than its first, and now alongside two huge new platforms hungry for your attention.
Yesterday I questioned whether Microsoft's decision to change its Xbox One DRM plans addressed the underlying issues that got the company into trouble in the first place, but on the whole I was happy to see the proposed policies rolled back, and left hoping that Microsoft will use this as an opportunity to find a better balance between the art and business sides of gaming.
Not everyone was pleased with the company's decision, though. Here are a few of the most popular arguments in favour of the original Xbox One policies, along with some of my thoughts on why they are flawed.
I remember when all this was fields.
"Xbox One would have solved the problem of buying a game on disc and then not being able to store it digitally or download it from the cloud."
The situation that we have now - and will have on Xbox One - is certainly inelegant, but I don't think the answer is to sacrifice what little sense of ownership is left to us. What I would like to see is a solution that shows an appropriate amount of respect to the creator, distributor and customer.
Compared to the original Xbox One ideal, the movie industry (somewhat incredibly - they would cut you up for firewood if it meant a better margin) has the less draconian Triple-Play, where you pay a premium to buy a film on Blu-ray, DVD and digital at the same time. This isn't perfect either, but it feels like a step in the right direction, and it is also offered as an option rather than a one-size-fits-all solution. "Publishers could charge less for games."
This claim seems to hinge on the idea that publishers will suddenly receive a cut of the resale market and therefore won't have to squeeze us. This is extremely optimistic. I think publishers will charge us exactly as much as we will pay, so if we continue to buy games at £40 then publishers will pocket the new money they get from a digital resale market and charge us £40 for new stuff all the same. That's just how business works, really - a few smaller companies with strong morals and ethics may pass on savings, but otherwise surely the notion of trickle-down economics has been thoroughly discredited?
Actually, the cost of gaming will probably continue to go up - maybe not in terms of the initial outlay, but over the lifespan of a game we enjoy, the cost of necessary micro-transactions, boosters and subscription elements will mean we pay more per release. Meanwhile, sales of traditional triple-A games could even get worse if the existing resale market is threatened, because a lot of consumers factor resale value into their purchase decision and would find the alternative unappealing. "You could make more money from your trade-ins."
We don't know exactly how the used game market - or 'used licence' market, if you like - was supposed to work, so it's hard to pre-judge its impact, but it seems extremely optimistic to think you would be able to simply sell your licence back to Microsoft for the equivalent of a partial refund. Any second-hand salesman has to be able to say 'no' to someone proposing a trade-in deal, or else they can end up with loads of stock they will never shift.
It's more likely that the digital used game market on Xbox One would have resembled an auction house, in which case the convenience to people using it would also increase competition among individual second-hand sellers, which would actually drive prices down. Meanwhile, publishers would make out well by skimming a percentage of whatever you did get for your licence off the top.
As for the bricks-and-mortar resale market, I can't imagine how it would have worked, but GameStop's existing attitude to consumers hadn't exactly filled me with optimism.
We're already paying more for our favourite games over their lifespans and this trend will continue.
"Everyone used to hate Steam, but everyone loves it now. Xbox One could have been the same."
Steam is a closed system like Xbox Live, but the crucial point is that it has to compete with other systems, like GOG, Amazon, Origin, U-Play and various others. These competitive market forces are one of the key reasons that the price of new PC games is driven lower than its console equivalent.
Meanwhile, there is only limited digital competition within the console space. Some digital games are multi-format, but as Microsoft's management of Xbox Live Arcade demonstrates, it will do its best to keep things exclusive so that it is not subject to these competitive market forces.
As for super-cheap sales of old games on Steam, they happen because those games stand more chance of making any money that way. Otherwise they are just catalogue items that users barely notice. The same thing also happens to a limited extent with Xbox Live summer sales, and Xbox One's attitude to pricing would probably just resemble that. "Sharing games with your 10-person family plan would have been so much better than the total lack of digital sharing we have now."
Obviously this ignores the fact that we still have the option to buy many of our games on disc, where no such restrictions apply.
If you modify the claim to apply to digital stuff only, then yes, it's true that a 10-person sharing plan would be superior to what we have now - assuming it meant sharing the whole game for free across multiple devices owned by the same family. So what's stopping them introducing that anyway? Physical media should be able to co-exist with this system, which is why we could still see it in the future, assuming Microsoft actually thinks it was a good idea and it wasn't just an olive branch conceived after the original PR battering. "The 24-hour online check-in was a necessary evil because it allows games to run entirely off the hard disk and be shared digitally."
It's hard to unpick this one without knowing the specifics of how it all worked, but it's worth noting that making installation obligatory was Microsoft's decision in the first place, and if we are going back to the way things work on Xbox 360 then perhaps it won't be necessary.
As with many of the Xbox One's positions on DRM, the 24-hour check-in was convenient for Microsoft's business objectives, but it clearly wasn't that important to games. The ease with which these elements have been scrapped, and the very small number of things Microsoft has had to sacrifice in order to hit its November date with a full software line-up, just goes to show just how unnecessary it all was.
Competition drives the prices on Steam down.
"DRM makes stuff more affordable."
I'm afraid I think this is a case of mistaking correlation for causality. Competition makes stuff more affordable. "Now all we have is Xbox 360 2.0. How is this progress?"
It isn't progress. But change doesn't automatically represent progress either.
The thing that is genuinely sad about the rollback of Xbox One's policies is that it has drawn even more attention to the absence at E3 of any startling new creative thinking from the people using it to make games. But we shouldn't forget that the promise of innovation in Xbox One - made by the likes of Phil Harrison during the system's original unveiling - was the triumvirate of cloud computation, being able to rely on Kinect 2.0 in every box, and the promise of using multiple devices at once. None of these things relies on any of the measures Microsoft has taken out of the Xbox One this week, so there is no reason that Xbox One games should be any less imaginative and exotic than they were going to be in the first place.
As for whether those things were going to result in better games anyway? Well, we shall have to wait and see. It's not long now until November, so we'll know soon enough.
Via theconversation.com: Using nanotechnology, researchers have developed a technique to increase the data storage capacity of a DVD from a measly 4.7GB to 1,000TB. Nature Communications We live in a world where digital information is exploding. Some 90% of the world’s data was generated in the past two years. The obvious question is: how can we store it all?
In Nature Communications today, we, along with Richard Evans from CSIRO, show how we developed a new technique to enable the data capacity of a single DVD to increase from 4.7 gigabytes up to one petabyte (1,000 terabytes). This is equivalent of 10.6 years of compressed high-definition video or 50,000 full high-definition movies.
So how did we manage to achieve such a huge boost in data storage? First, we need to understand how data is stored on optical discs such as CDs and DVDs.
The basics of digital storage
Although optical discs are used to carry software, films, games, and private data, and have great advantages over other recording media in terms of cost, longevity and reliability, their low data storage capacity is their major limiting factor. Adam Foster | Codefor The operation of optical data storage is rather simple. When you burn a CD, for example, the information is transformed to strings of binary digits (0s and 1s, also called bits). Each bit is then laser “burned” into the disc, using a single beam of light, in the form of dots.
The storage capacity of optical discs is mainly limited by the physical dimensions of the dots. But as there’s a limit to the size of the disc as well as the size of the dots, many current methods of data storage, such as DVDs and Blu-ray discs, continue to have low level storage density.
To get around this, we had to look at light’s fundamental laws.
Circumnavigating Abbe’s limit
Ernst Abbe. Wikimedia Commons In 1873, German physicist Ernst Abbe published a law that limits the width of light beams.
On the basis of this law, the diameter of a spot of light, obtained by focusing a light beam through a lens, cannot be smaller than half its wavelength – around 500 nanometres (500 billionths of a metre) for visible light.
And while this law plays a huge role in modern optical microscopy, it also sets up a barrier for any efforts from researchers to produce extremely small dots – in the nanometre region – to use as binary bits.
In our study, we showed how to break this fundamental limit by using a two-light-beam method, with different colours, for recording onto discs instead of the conventional single-light-beam method.
Both beams must abide by Abbe’s law, so they cannot produce smaller dots individually. But we gave the two beams different functions: Nature Communications
The first beam (red, in the figure right) has a round shape, and is used to activate the recording. We called it the writing beam
The second beam – the purple donut-shape – plays an anti-recording function, inhibiting the function of the writing beam
The two beams were then overlapped. As the second beam cancelled out the first in its donut ring, the recording process was tightly confined to the centre of the writing beam.
This new technique produces an effective focal spot of nine nanometres – or one ten thousandth the diameter of a human hair.
The technique, in practical terms
Our work will greatly impact the development of super-compact devices as well as nanoscience and nanotechnology research.
The exceptional penetration feature of light beams allow for 3D recording or fabrication, which can dramatically increase the data storage – the number of dots – on a single optical device.
The technique is also cost-effective and portable, as only conventional optical and laser elements are used, and allows for the development of optical data storage with long life and low energy consumption, which could be an ideal platform for a Big Data centre.
As the rate of information generated worldwide continues to accelerate, the aim of more storage capacity in compact devices will continue. Our breakthrough has put that target within our reach.
A new campaign has been launched by anti-slavery organization Walk Free that aims to persuade Nintendo to tighten up its supply chain and avoid the use of 'conflict minerals' mined by slave labor.
Walk Free has launched a video lampooning Nintendo characters Mario and Luigi, which states that Nintendo has yet to respond to a forceful campaign to join an electronics industry audit program for conflict-free mineral supplies. The video points out that minerals sourced from some suppliers come from slavery operations in conflict regions, including the Democratic Republic of Congo, where miners are often forced to work at gunpoint.
Walk Free's website states that the campaign aims to tell Nintendo that "slavery is not a game." It adds, "We've sent 430,558 emails calling on Nintendo to take concrete steps to ensure slave-mined conflict minerals are not in its gaming consoles, and we have heard nothing back."
Electronics devices like games consoles make use of minerals such as tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold, often sourced from conflict zones. "Government troops and militias fight for control of the mines," states Walk Free. "They often terrorize communities using forced labour, debt bondage, sexual slavery, the use of children by armed groups, and other forms of child slavery. Child slaves are often used for the worst types of labour such as diggers at the mine sites, or porters assisting in the transport of conflict minerals."
A protest day is being planned to coincide with Nintendo's Annual General Meeting on June 27. Supporters are being encouraged to cosplay and demonstrate outside retail outlets selling Nintendo consoles. Anyone who signs up receives a downloadable kit explaining protest plans.
Nintendo has previously stated to Polygon that it provides "specific directions to our production partners regarding socially responsible procurement practices," based on "relevant laws, international standards and guidelines that focus on protecting human rights, ensuring workplace safety, promoting corporate ethics, and safeguarding the environment."
Walk Free counters that this is not enough. It points out that many companies, including Intel, Apple, Sony and Microsoft, have signed up for full audits of their supply chains to root out minerals sourced from slave-mines. Its literature states, "Nintendo ranked dead last among 24 major consumer electronics companies on efforts to examine and end the use of conflict minerals. Nintendo has yet to join the electronics industry audit program for conflict-free smelters nor has it required its suppliers to use only conflict-free smelters, the bare minimum requirement for taking action on conflict minerals."
Polygon has contacted Nintendo for comment.
"After many years with the studio, Todd Hollenshead decided to leave id Software to pursue other personal interests," Bethesda said in a statement. 
"My guess is that EA saw poor share on the Wii and Nintendo promised to help it gain greater share on the Wii U, and EA hadn't seen enough progress to give it confidence that it should continue support," explained Michael Pachter, famed video game analyst and managing director of equity research at Wedbush Securities.
"Listen, we went out in strong support of the Nintendo Wii U, and we actually built a number of games as a company including FIFA for the Wii U," EA Sports boss Andrew Wilson told Eurogamer when we asked why there would be no FIFA 14 on the platform.
Nintendo declined to comment on the loss of EA's support when contacted by Eurogamer, but executives have mentioned it in interviews and even said they understand the decision.
"I'd love to see it [Crysis 3] on Wii U, but what I love to see and what gets done at the end of the day are two different things," Crytek boss Cevat Yerli explained in January this year, before the game launched. "If that business decision doesn't make sense, or seems to not make sense for them, it's... not possible for us to make it. We can't publish ourselves, and that's the bottom line." 
"If the Wii U was immensely popular we would probably put more focus into seeing how we could mitigate this, because it is a technical problem," Bach said. "It is a technical problem at its core because the Frostbite engine is not designed to run on that hardware, and the hardware is quite different from the next-gen consoles and the previous gen consoles."
EA is responding to the platforms it thinks it will turn a profit on, then, but as Soderlund said, you would expect nothing less from any other business. Ubisoft, while remaining as one of the Wii U's strongest third-party supporters, has still reorganised its 2013 Wii U slate with the same mentality. It attracted the ire of countless Nintendo fans for ditching Rayman Legends' Wii U exclusivity. Yet it did so to make sure that Legends would be available for a wide audience after analysing Wii U launch sales. 
“Our focus is, first of all, to regain the momentum of the Wii U towards the end of this year, and then we'll try to establish successful third-party Wii U software titles,” Iwata told IGN at E3. “I believe in the importance of third-party support for Nintendo platforms. I'm very willing to change the current situation.”
"Xbox One would have solved the problem of buying a game on disc and then not being able to store it digitally or download it from the cloud." 
"Everyone used to hate Steam, but everyone loves it now. Xbox One could have been the same." 
"DRM makes stuff more affordable." 
