The Top 10 Game Industry Disasters of 2013
04. Big Brother Really is Watching
This is nor really new news -- in fact it was a well-known fact that certain government agencies in the intelligence business were actively monitoring the MMO worlds for illegal communication.
In my capacity as a business and tech columnist I wrote about the matter for the Cape Cod Times back in November of 2008 in a column titled 'The fox monitoring the gamers' that revealed a number of agencies were actively involved in such monitoring -- this revealed by an unclassified report to Congress by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
It is one thing to say that the intelligence community is monitoring MMOs but it is an entirely different matter when you have specific examples that have been confirmed. Such as the National Security Agency actively intercepting communications in the games Second Life and World of Warcraft!
If you like disasters then wait, because this one gets better.The column I wrote almost six years ago addressed the automated spying that the government agencies were exploring in the MMO community - but the confirmed actual spying that is now taking place is not automated. It is... Wait for it... Wait for it... Classified as a HUMINT Program.
If you are not up on government code, HUMINT stands for 'Human Intelligence' and, if you can't extrapolate what that means, then we will tell you: It means that the NSA is paying agents to PLAY those games and stand around LISTENING to conversations.
I know your gut reaction is to say 'Seriously? Where do we sign up?'
But can you imagine the review process they must be subjected to? How boring it must be to hang out in a disco in Second Life or in some town in WoW to eavesdrop on conversations while looking for code words or, probably, little elf characters speaking with each other in some other language?
Then there is the ever-present concern that an agent will be recruited by the bad guys -- I mean after all who can resist a cute elf girl asking 'Do you want to date my avatar?' Do you suppose that in addition to secret agents assigned to play the games and eavesdrop on players, they have teams of agents who play the game to monitor the activities of other agents?
How much trouble do you suppose that the agents will get in if they get caught joining a Raid? Or can they just say they were trying to stay close to some suspects? Do they get overtime for all-night gaming sessions?
More to the point, does the government participate in real-money-trade in WoW?! We need to know this!
DRM should be a crime. Publishers need to realize that ownership is what capitalism is all about. People move, have friends, share with their friends, and PC's and consoles die. Hard drives crash. No one should be punished for having to deal with an already horrible situation, ie: catastrophic HD failure.
DRM also creates more piracy that it stops.
I personally was sad to hear about the loss of THQ.
But thankful that the Warhammer franchise was bought over. For all of their terrible games, their Dawn of War and Space Marine IPs were solid, fantastic games!
Will Sims freeplay be a contender for 2014 given the uproar of their new update? Should be its been bsit and switch. A real time game where sims live 42 days! Disgraceful.
"The fact that the vast majority of the content that was being targeted legally qualifies as fair use under the current interpretation of the law considered"
That's where a lot of people have a misunderstanding about Fair Use. Their vids might be seen as Fair Use but ONLY a court of law can make that decision no one else can. Also Youtube isn't at fault here, they are doing only what the law says. If someone files a copyright claim against a vid Youtube has to take it down or they may face legal action from the content owner.
Youtube has been sued multiple times by companies and other people over copyright infringement. Youtube was actually going to shut down do to all the legal troubles until Google bought them.
I took a gamecube to Iraq as well. Eternal Darkness was the kind of thing that made war seem not so bad.
Considering the Steam OS, I personally think that was a very big announcement from Valve and as you can see, lots of game developers thought the same.
Linux is going to be the future, like it or not.
Great list. On a positive note for us non multiplayers The Last of Us single handedly saved the single player game 2013.
Who cares about THQ. In the long run something else will fill the void. And the Xbox one is hardly a failure as they are still selling strong and making microsoft money. They told us before that it will be a gaming system AND a multimedia system. People just need to understand that.