One of my favourite games of the past few years is a game called Beyond Good and Evil. It never got a lot of press, but did garner a dedicated fan base.

Now Ubisoft have revealed they are finally making a sequel, most likely for the Xbox 360, PS3 or both.

Now, if only someone would develop a sequel to Zanzarah…

A story from the games industry popping up today has word of a patented technology that would allow tracking of vehicles in a race, which can then be inserted into a simulation, allowing gamers to participate in real-time with a real-world race.

During the BarrysWorld days, we sponsored a racing car for a while, and one of the conversations we had with the racing team at the time was the possiblity of taking a copy of the car’s real-time data feed and inserting this data into a racing simulation, allowing computer gamers to participate - albeit virtually - in a race as it happened, or to replay a race with perfect accuracy.

Events conspired to prevent this, however the idea was so blindingly obvious I’m surprised it’s taken this long for the idea to gain traction.

SoE have announced that the forum for their new MMO Vanguard: Saga of Heroes will close once the game launches. In place of these forums, the company is asking fan sites (’affilited sites’) to take up the slack and provide chat forums around the game.

Of course, spreading out the community in this way will only ensure that it remains fragmented and disconnected, and will also ensure that any problems which could have come to the attention of the developers through the forums will be missed, as it’s much harder to monitor multiple forums than just one.

That said, since none of the affiliate sites will actually be official, there will be no need to monitor those forums for potential problems, ensuring that there is little to no communication between the players and the developers or publishers of Vanguard, and that the level of notice generated by any problems which do occur will be minimised.

SoE did something similar with Star Wars Galaxies a couple of years ago, closing the official forums to the public (which were full of customers complaining about problems with the game) in what appeared to be an attempt to mask problems that subscribers were facing.

By closing the official forums, it appears SoE are trying to avoid a repeat of this by removing any official way for subscribers to communicate directly with all other customers. And it also makes the support cost much lower, as the company also doesn;t need to employ community managers or forum moderators to interact with the game’s players.

There are reasons to like Valve Software’s Steam service. It makes buying and delivering new software easy. It lets you find friends you want to play with. And I’m sure a lot of other good things as well.

However, I don’t like Steam. I don’t like Steam to the point where I no longer want my Steam account.

My major criticism of Steam harks back to the release of Half Life 2. I bought the game using a credit card from a reputable high street store. In fact, I still have the original game box, DVD and receipt. The only problem is, Valve thinks I’m a pirate. And the only way to prove I’m not a pirate, that I bought my game legitimately, is to let Valve’s Steam software rummage around on my hard drive to ‘verify’ and ‘enable’ my game.

I know nothing will ever be done to change this, far too many people have acquiesced and Steam is far too ingrained amongst gamers to ever be changed to remove the automatic assumption that a person who buys a Valve game is not a pirate. Which is why I have chosen to never buy or play a game that uses Steam.

However, this does leave me in the position of still having a Steam account, which I did use to ‘verify’ and ‘enable’ the copy of Half Life 2 I bought on my credit card from a reputable high street store. I had to prove to Valve I wasn’t a pirate if I wanted to play their game.

Once I had finished with the game, I contacted Valve to have my account deleted, as I had no wish for them to retain any of my details, including my email address, and I had no use for the Steam account any longer.

One of the responses I got was frankly ludicrous:

As steam is a free product, you cannot cancel the account. You can disable the account by uninstalling
it.

What has being a free product got to do with cancelling an account?

It took several emails, and an assumption on the part of Steam’s support staff that I was trying to reset CounterStrike CD keys (which tells me they didn’t check my Steam account, which would have shown that I did not have any CounterStrike CD keys associated with the account.

I finally received the following email on September 24, 2004, after cc’ing Gabe Newell into the discussion - it says a lot when you have to include the company CEO in a support query to actually have your request read and dealt with:

Dear Tom, per your multiple requests I am disabling your Steam account efective imediatelly, remember that
this will not allow you to receive any emails from Steam including account/password recovery emails or have
access to your account.

If you have any more questions feel free to contact Steam Support.

The other day I saw my copy of Half Life 2 (which I can no longer play, as I’ve had to re-install my Windows OS several times) and thought I’d check out my Steam account to see if Valve had actually disabled it as I requested (something I really should have done at the time).

Of course, the first thing that happened was I was able to log straight into the account that Valve claimed had been disabled.

So I read through the Valve and Steam website again, and tried contacting Valve through the usual channels. I emailed SteamSupport (which timed out), and I emailed Privacy. Interestingly, the email given in the Privacy Policy as a contact point if you have concerns over privacy and the way your data is handled results in this auto-response:

Thank you for contacting Valve. This email address is monitored, however due to the volume of email we
get daily, you may not necessarily get a direct response.

So, if I have a concern over privacy, they may check the email inbox eventually?

I guess I need to go back to SteamSupport and create a new account just to have the old account disabled? After all, despite assurances from Valve that the account had been disabled, it appears that in reality it has been active and useable for more than two years.

And given Valve’s disinterest in actually dealing with privacy issues, what recourse do I have if the account is used fraudulently? From what I have been able to discover, I have no resource at all - I can’t even take the basic step of protecting my own data by requesting the account be disabled so that no-one, not even me, can use it. And should I actually want my details removed - well, that’s just not possible - after all, it’s a free service…

Technorati Tags: Valve, Steam, Half Life 2, Privacy, Identity Management

There’s an interesting article over on Ars Technica today about the recently released SiN: Episodes and piracy.

Within three hours of the release of Ritual’s SiN Episodes Emergence, the game was pirated and up on the ‘Net; releasing it on Steam had little effect on piracy, at least initially. When a bug in the game was discovered, Ritual patched it and released the update via Steam… and that update was applied to the game slyly, in the background. Users who had paid for the game received the update. Those who had pirated the game didn’t, but that didn’t stop them from complaining to customer support.

The issue of the cost of providing support is very briefly touched on in the article, since of course there are costs involved in providing this support.

One of the side effects of our own GTIP service is that it equally applies and provides support to all copies of game, legitimate or not, and equally generates revenue from all copies of a game, legitimate or not, so companies can continue to earn money from a game even if it is pirated. They may not make the full retail cost of the game back, but at least some of the cost can be mitigated.

How does it do this? The service is a pure question/answer service, and is not tied electronically or functionally to any particular game, and there is no ‘vailidity check’ made. The service is entirely seperate from the actual, physical game, and is an information service. It just happens that each answer sent to a question generates income, regardless of why the question was asked.

Another side effect of this seperation is that it also generates revenue from second hand games, rental game and games no longer available for sale, and can help to achieve a higher return on a title, as well as improving customer relations by ensuring that customers always get a personal response to their questions.

OK, end of sales pitch. But it also shows that providing customer support doesn’t have to be a loss.

The following is a crost-post from the Dark and Light forums.

I’ve eagerly awaited Dark&Light, and with the launch comes a few major teething problems that I am yet to overcome.

Firstly, as a UK resident, I have to pay in either Euros of US Dollars. Of course, at today’s exchange rates, this works out as:

US$54.99 = UKP£29.23
€54.99 = UKP£37.34.

I think I’ll pay in US$ thanks. Almost £10 cheaper to pay in US$?

Second problem - trying to pay via Click&Buy redirects me to the local UK partner BT Click&Buy - or rather, to an error page, telling me there’s a problem with the URL. OK, we can get around this by going to the main page.

Third problem, and I know this isn’t DnL’s fault - BT Click&Buy can’t seem to recognise the credit card I use for every other MMORPG I play. Oddly, it’s the same one I’ve been using for two years now. Worked fine for Everquest 2, World of Warcraft, Anarchy Online, DDO and a few others as well (including some in Asia). It’s also the one linked to my Amazon account, and I never have any problems buying stuff from there.

I know this has been thrashed out before, but I really have to question why the decision was made to use the services of Click&Buy when Worldpay has a standard creditcard payment interface that just… works. Sure, have alternate payment systems to allow people to pay (as in my case) through their phone bill, but if your chosen payment provider can’t even process a VISA from a major international bank (it made about US$8billion in profit last quarter), it indicates a wider problem for your potential customer base.

Following the game & forums over the past year (I was almost a Settler, but the DnL site failed with an error every time I tried to reply to the invite email), the decision to use Click&Buy has been one that rankled me. I’ve never been comfortable with using a third party intermediary when it comes to buying things - I like to deal direct (and I sideline as an Identity Architect, so the philosophy of Identity and who has copies of my details is one I am very conscious of).

I really do want to play Dark & Light, but the company has erected too many barriers to entry. The first, and largest barrier, is the decision to outsource payment services to a third party. I don’t know who Click&Buy are, I’ve never used them, and I have no reason to trust them.

I’ll keep an eye out and see how things go, but until subscriptions are offered directly I think I will have to skip becoming a paying subscriber. I think I might spend my US$55 on another MMORPG instead.

One of the things I find interesting is that as a potential customer, the decision to use a third party identity provider (effectively) has been the primary factor in my decision not to play. The question here in my mind is entirely one of trust: I simply don’t trust the payment provider the service provider requires me to use.

In the current climate I would much prefer to deal direct with the company whose services I am purchasing, as there is no Identity Infrastructure in place that I trust to act on my behalf - there’s no Transient Identity providers, no centralised Identity Providers, and certainly no user-centric identity service that I could use. The company behind Dark and Light has chosen to require potential customers to jump through a series of hoops with a third party provider (in some reported cases including telephone verification of an account created with a credit card) before they can participate. Not entirely sure that’s a sound business practise…

Technorati Tags: Dark and Light, BT Click & Buy, MMORPG, PC Game Online Game, Online Payments, Privacy

I’m on the hunt for a few people who can read & write German, are into computer games and would be willing to undertake some not-very-difficult freelance work for me on an ongoing basis. There is payment involved, and everything can be done in a web browser, very much along the Amazon Mechanical Turk lines.

I’m after one or two people immediately, for a long-term association. If you’re interested, leave a comment or drop me an email.

I really liked the original SiN game, although a lot of my contemporaries didn’t. Now a new life has been given to the franchise, with SiN: Emergence due for release tomorrow.

However, as much as I liked the original SiN and really do want to play the new game, the stated requirements of a Steam account to ‘authorise’ the game means I won’t be playing it any time soon.

The requirement that I ‘authorise’ a game I’ve purchased over the counter of a computer game shop is one that I don’t agree with, however having dealth with Valve and Steam in the past, it’s their reluctance to protect my privacy and information they hold about me that worries me the most. My original Steam account still exists somewhere on Valve’s servers, as they refused point blank to do more than ‘disable’ my account.

So, my details are still held somewhere on their servers, and I have no way of checking, amending, updating or removing those details. And if I want to play SiN: Emergence (which is, as far as I know, not an online game), I have to re-enable my account so that Valve can authorise the game I bought over the counter in a box.

I was reading Ars Technica (as is my wont), when this phrase popped out:

Are booth babes really necessary at a trade show like E3 (which is closed to the public)? Your typical E3 attendee is a journalist or industry player, likely male, and probably a big fan video games.

Of course, despite protestations to the contrary E3 is not a trade show, and the typical attendee is not a journalist or industry player. The last E3 I attended, whislt there may have been a lot of ‘journalists’ trying to get press passes, the majority of people attending the show were most definately not journalists or industry players.

They were game fans trying to get their hands on games early.

E3 (and the UK-based shows) stopped being trade shows many years ago, and are now no more than extended marketing excerises on the part of the major game companies.

I’ve just cancelled my Everquest 2 account. The reasons are not really relevant, but I was struck dumb by the processI had to go through to actually cancel.

I was not allowed to cancel my subscription without filling in a survey first, and then being subjected to reasons not to cancel. The point here is that you cannot cancel a subscription to Everquest 2 without filling in the survey form. If you try and leave it blank, it tells you you have not filled in any of the answers.

So I entered everything bad I could think of as answers to the survey, or chose every option offered. No, the answers weren’t accurate, but that’s my choice. But really, forcing me to answer questions before cancelling my account? I thought I was a customer…

Technorati Tags: Everquest 2, Sony, Sony Online Entertainment, MMORPG