Electronic Arts shakes up the gaming world with Origin Access, but is it any good? Dan Griliopoulos finds out
How should you get hold of a game? Depending on its age, there might be a hundred ways to get it—from simple torrent or newsgroup piracy (which we don’t advocate), to buying a digital download on Steam or GOG, to hunting out a rare physical-world shop and buying it from an actual human being, to forming a crack team of pro-gamers to break into the developer’s offices on the day of release, play it extensively on location, then bug out before morning (which doesn’t count as piracy, we’re fairly sure—just a whole lot of other crimes).
Or you could rent it. This month, EA announced that Origin Access is coming to PC, following the successful run of EA Access on the Xbox 360 and Xbox One. Rental is a strange fish among games—it has a long history on the more commercially minded, copy-protected consoles, but has never really worked with PC games. Yet now several firms are offering game rental and streaming services, most of which are monthly packages like EA’s.
But there are still huge problems with renting games these days. Digital products are no guarantee of long-term access—neither the owners of subscriptions to the defunct OnLive streaming service or products bought on the changed Direct2Drive digital download service can access their games anymore, unlike players who bought physical copies of the same games. Many of the game streaming services that were on PC have closed, and their replacements are solely targeting smart TVs —a commercial decision we can’t quite understand.
There are also some problems with purely physical copies. Owners of 2004’s Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines (like ourselves) will find that the physical game they own is now unplayable because of unpatched bugs—without the Steam version, we couldn’t play it at all. Indeed, in the last few years, most physical copies of PC games have turned into marketing devices, not actually containing any code, which means their supposed advantages vanish. Instead, they’re just designed to sit on shelves, to replace books as the wallpaper of our lives.
Buying games
Buying a game seems simple enough. You go into your local game store (if it still exists), or go online to whichever retailer you normally use (let’s face it, it’s probably going to be Amazon), and just order it. When the game gets to your home, it’s straightforwardly there for you to play. If you buy a digital version, as we mentioned above, there are a few more problems. If you buy it from a digital storefront service—such as Direct2Drive, Steam, or Uplay—that later closes, you’re normally screwed. Some services, such as Good Old Games, let players download the entire game and associated manuals, with no DRM, to protect against this kind of thing. Indeed, GOG generally is where you’re best placed to go for futureproofing, because it strives to keep its library of (mostly ancient) titles as compatible as possible.
Despite that, Steam is where you’re most likely to buy your games. We’ve covered the problems and boons of Steam many times before, but as a platform for buying games to play, it’s difficult to be too critical. With a few clicks and with verified payment systems, you can get a game downloading immediately. If you don’t play it, you can arrange a refund equally quickly. (And most games you get through competing services, such as the Humble Bundle, tend to be Steam keys anyway.)
Even the physical versions have problems. These days, they almost always need an Internet connection for the inevitable day one patch. Many physical boxes don’t even go that far—they hold no disc except for a Steam key, or if they do, it’s the code for a downloader, not the full game.
Collector’s editions are nothing new, while at the same time being an innovation. The digital copies allow fans, for a small premium, to get improved versions of their games—often with exclusive content that makes the game easier (health potions or armor, for example) or more fun. The physical copies come with all sorts of goodies, from a slightly shinier box to fully functioning night-vision goggles with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Prestige Edition, or a rubber facehugger with Alien Vs. Predator Hunter Edition. (Be warned, though, if you’re buying these, that they’re considered as collectibles. As soon as you open the packaging, the resale value plummets.)
Remember also that by buying a physical copy, you’re giving a lot less money to the developer. To get into one of these shops, a developer needs a publisher. The shop itself takes a cut—and they can’t increase the price to do that, because they’re competing with online purchases. The distributor takes a cut, too, for the cost of shipping. A publisher takes a large chunk of the game’s remaining revenue for packaging and marketing, and passes along a small amount to the developer. Where Steam takes 30 percent, a developer would be lucky to end up with 10 percent of a physical sale.
Not that it matters, as most games sold this way are from the big publishers, who wholly own their developers, which means the creative individuals might get a bonus at most—if the game sells and/or scores well. Most indie games never become physical games, so it’s not a big worry for them.
Abandonware
Of course, for some older games, you don’t even need to buy them. The law on abandonware is clear; it is pretty straightforwardly illegal to download games that are unsupported but still owned by a viable company. However, if the company no longer exists, and no company has bought the rights, it’s fine to download. Similarly, if a company or creator has made their game available for free (like EA’s On The House program, for its older titles) or as shareware, you can download that legally, as long as it’s still available for free—if they take it down, you’ve missed your chance.
Sites such as Abandonia.com and Home of the Underdogs walk this thin line between legality by uploading the original code for many older games, and simply taking them down if they receive any legal notifications. Abandonia has been doing this for over 16 years now. HOTU has games dating from 1979’s mediocre Computer Quarterback and Mychess, all the way up to 2005’s excellent Mount & Blade and The Ur-Quan Masters, while Abandonia has the original 1978 Space Invaders and 1977 adventure games, up to 2004’s Maniac Mansion Deluxe.
It’s notable that both the Library of Congress and the Internet Archive (http://archive.org) have sought to preserve older games and vintage software. The Internet Archive has uniquely received an exclusion from the US DMCA, which allows it to bypass copy protection for this purpose. Though these games are not available to download, you can play many of them on the Archive’s website at http://tinyurl.com/kngkj4w.
Direct to dev
Another good tip for indie games you’re looking forward to, such as Manifold Garden or Fantastic Contraption, is to crowdfund them. The lower tiers tend to sell the game ahead of time at a very high discount—so high, it probably won’t reach it again until a Steam sale or Humble Bundle several years down the line. Obviously, some kickstarts fail, but the saving you make on every kickstarted game outweighs that gamble, in our humble opinion.
Or you could just go straight to the developer’s website, where modern indies often give discounts if you buy earlier in the development process. For example, Return of the Obra Dinn is the next game from Lucas Pope, the highly talented and reliable creator of Papers, Please. Obra Dinn will almost certainly be brilliant, and Pope is offering an early developer version of it for free. Cogmind, by contrast, though it looks like a fascinating science-fiction roguelike, is from a developer we’ve not heard of—and it’s offering the alpha of the game for $30. We’re happy to wait for the latter, while we’ll happily play the former—but that’s down to our appetite for gambling and limited free time, which might differ from yours.
Physical rental
Physical rental used to be a big market, from cornershop chains such as Blockbuster, who had copied the model from the old TV rental model. For a tenth of the game’s cost, you could rent it for enough time to complete it, then return it. It made economic sense for the chain—which could make the value of the game back and more—and for the consumer, who paid much less for a new game. It was a disaster for the game’s company, though, which would lose multiple sales on every rented game.
This even affected certain game companies’ behavior, especially in conjunction with sales lost to piracy. They had to come up with tactics that meant that players could only use a physical game once, or would lose out. For example, EA’s Dragon Age game came with a one-use code for a downloadable character—a golem—that had a unique quest chain. This soon became standard industry practice, so much so that no one today even blinks at bundled DLC on the first day of a game’s release. It also allowed the companies to start selling differentiated digital versions of their games, enabling them to charge more money to a game’s superfans—something we’ll come back to later.
However, physical rental has pretty much died. For example, Lovefilm (now Amazon Prime Video) dropped its physical rental system in many territories back in 2013. In the United States, the much larger population helped these firms to continue thriving, but even so, they’ve been in trouble. Blockbuster has gone from 9,000 stores in 2004 to 1,700 stores in 2011, down to 50 franchise stores in the most obscure corners of America. By contrast, the online physical rental stores such as GameFly supply physical games for almost all consoles, from $16 for one game a month, to $37 for four games a month.
You might notice we’ve not mentioned PC games in any of that, for obvious reasons. Physical rental was never popular for PC games because either the software worked against multiple installations or it didn’t. If the software came with serial keys with online activation, then that was a one-time install—useless for rental. If it didn’t, then players never needed to uninstall the games—so rental turned into pirated ownership every time. There were undoubtedly solutions—an online tracker that deactivated any existing installations, much like Steam locks down accounts to a single computer at a time—but with the already angry arguments about privacy and player-tracking over Digital Rights Management software, it was never worth any game company getting involved.
Digital rental
One form of digital rental is called cloud gaming or streaming, and the previous market leaders in this model of digital rental were OnLive and Gaikai. The former worked well, and allowed easy streaming to any device—but lost money month after month, and closed ignominiously, unable to find a buyer. The latter showed a great proof of concept by embedding streamed games in adverts on websites—but was bought out by Sony, and now works solely as its PlayStation Now game streaming service.
Other streaming services seem to have focused their efforts on acting as business solutions, allowing game developers to stream their hardware-intensive games to users without large downloads or highspec machines. Kalydo, for example, is used extensively by F2P game companies such as Wargaming.net, GameForge, and Gamigo.
GameFly is the only company we can find currently that operates a reasonably complete PC game digital rental service, through streaming from the cloud. However, it’s only available internationally on Samsung smart TVs, and has an extremely limited number of titles, with a bizarre way of packaging them. GameNow offers an even smaller number of titles, and is only available on LG smart TVs and Google TVs. Similarly, PlayStation Now has a huge range of old PlayStation 3 games, but only works on Sony consoles (such as the PS4 and Vita), and Sony or Samsung smart televisions. And all of these packages are subscription-based, with Sony’s being very generous and having lots of games, and GameNow’s having very few.
The biggest problem for us is that none of these systems works on PC anymore. If you want to stream games to your PC, you’re out of luck.
Publisher platforms
The only other viable systems for digital rental are the publisher platforms—that is, EA’s Origin, Valve’s Steam, Ubisoft’s Uplay, and Blizzard’s Battle.net. They’re really shell services, like Adobe’s Creative Cloud subscription service, which allow users to select from a handful of applications for download, and use them for a monthly fee, then restricting access to those applications if your subscription is canceled.
EA’s steps toward making Origin a rental platform seem to be along this line, but they’re only small steps, which is why the company is keeping the cost so low—just $5 for access to a middle-sized array of middleaged games.
Although Creative Cloud is a good model, the ultimate goal is something closer to Netflix—a streaming service with a low monthly subscription rate and a huge catalog. None of the major publishers can do that, because they don’t have a big enough range of games—while the EA games are relatively recent (such as Dragon Age: Inquisition), the firm doesn’t have a huge array to offer. Moreover, DLC for these games is often still an extra cost.
Only Steam, GOG, and possibly Itch.io have access to a large enough selection of games to make this viable. Valve’s focus seems to be very much elsewhere at the moment, with forays into PC building, VR, and in-home streaming. GOG still mostly deals with older games, but is the likeliest company with the relationships to make this work—if not the clout. And Itch.io only supplies the most independent indie games. Simply put, a wider rental market seems unlikely—at the moment.
Into the future…
EA’s experiment will be good for a small number of us, but it doesn’t supply the giant smorgasbord of mid-ranked and older games that Netflix brings to the movie and TV scene. Ideally, a streaming firm with good licensing relationships will spot this niche and step into the space—if the game companies think it makes sense, which is an entirely different question. For the moment, however, it looks as though most of us will continue to buy games digitally as we have always done.
The state of internet piracy. Does piracy cost the gaming industry big bucks?
If you read the music or film industry trade press, piracy is still rampant. “Why else would no one be buying music anymore?” they ask, as they thumb open Spotify on their phone. However, what of the pirate sites themselves? How easy is it to get a pirated game these days?
Really rather easy. The big obstacles to piracy aren’t getting the product or getting past copy protection; most big PC games are cracked and uploaded pretty quickly still, and a quick Google normally throws up a few thousand hits.
No, the obstacles are often technical; you have to jump through many hoops to install the title, which might leave your computer open to worms or viruses. Often, there’s a virus in a pirated file, just as a bonus—botnets don’t build themselves, you know. So serious pirates tend to join subscription-based or invite-only communities for safety.
That means you really have to be committed to pirating a game to do it these days. And that means you’re also highly unlikely to be willing to pay for it anyway, so logically, you’re probably not a lost sale. Whatever the MPAA says.