Back From The Dead

It was literally a spur of the moment thing. I felt, 'I need to do this. I'm tired of just reading about this stuff.' Here was a topic that was close to my territory, so maybe I could do something about it. I was at CES working with Razer. I talked to the CEO of Razer about joining us in our opposition of SOPA. He was like, 'Why would such a ridiculous thing ever pass?' but I explained it to him and he said, 'Sure, let's do it.'

And then that weekend I founded the non-profit [League For Gamers]. I didn't want to distract my staff from Firefall or anything - I didn't know how they felt about it - so I was literally doing this all myself that weekend and into the next week, when I got some help from a couple of people [at Red 5 Studios] who were kind enough to lend me their time.

It seemed like [the ESA] was really eager to have a tool that would combat foreign sites that were distributing its members' software. I know that when I was at Blizzard there was a frustration at, if the site's in China, you can't do anything. So it seemed like an eagerness, and when it came to the gamers it was more like, 'This, too, will pass... They don't understand the good this will do them. We'll be able to make more games,' and things like that.

To me, that's fine. If you hold an opinion that differs from the gamers, and you think that it will benefit them in the long run, that's okay. But the fact that you're not saying that to them, when you've enlisted their support in the past and are now completely unresponsive, I think that was disingenuous.

And as the outrage grew - this is conjecture on my part - I think they found themselves between a rock and hard place. 'Oh my gosh, we really do have competing values here.' To me, it looked like they went into paralysis mode, and then afterwards when both bills were shelved, that was kind of damage control, to come out and say, 'Actually, we're withdrawing support.' They were trying to have their cake and eat it too.

This leads to my other point: why do I feel like the big studios seemed to align with 'For', while the small studios and newer studios springing up seemed to be aligning with 'Against' - companies like Riot Games?

What really sparked this is a very interesting TED Talk, released on the day of the blackout, talking about the music industry and the movie industry and what they were actually trying to do here. They're really after control of distribution, so that they don't have to compete on content.

We live in a world now where distribution is everywhere. It's a democratising process. You see these tensions everywhere; bloggers versus journalists was a huge one, right? Now everyone has a way to distribute their editorials and news pieces without actually having to be a journalist. Do they deserve the same protection as the Forth Estate? And these tensions arise because the model is changing. Information is becoming free, and you can't control it any more.

It used to be that to become successful as a game-maker you needed to have in-roads into all the gaming stores, the Walmarts, the Targets, and everything else. E3 is a huge show for the buyer - it started to get buyers to come and see the games. They would make deals there, and place their order for 50,000 units.

What's happening now is that it's not about distribution any more; it's about the content. That's Red 5's premise: we want people to copy our game, because it's free, and we find other ways to monetise that. And because we're free-to-play and because we have equal power over distribution, the big-box companies - console companies, in particular - have this whole area of competition they cannot control.

They can't squeeze someone out of distribution. They can't say, 'You've got to sign with us as a developer, there's no way you can self-publish.' That's a big threat to their business model... and they're financially motivated to stay that way forever.

Even if the organisation recognises it, it's still very difficult to change. But for the small guys, studios like Riot, they're free-to-play, they're online, they publish themselves. They're doing fantastically well, and they can do it with a game that costs a lot less than what the studios have to pay. When you sell a boxed game, it's like, 'Who can stuff more millions in marketing and in content into a $60, one-time purchase.'

I'm getting off course, but what we're really talking about is control of distribution, and these laws are coming out everywhere. It's not just SOPA/PIPA; there's a whole bunch of legislation coming. ACTA is being talked about a lot now, and you can look at the EFF site to see what other things are coming along.

It's not about attacking people who have your content on their site and demanding that they take it down, which is fine. It's all about restricting and condensing the distribution channels to just a few official ones.

What you're seeing is a reaction to try and preserve the old business model, and so you've got big companies lining up on one side and a lot of small studios lining up on the other. Small studios are tired of being reliant on publishers, for distribution, for finance, for everything else. It doesn't have to be that way any more.

I'll go ahead and say something controversial: I don't think publishers are meaningful any more for the developer. There's so many other ways to get out there, and you're going to have to find different ways to compete, but they can be just as valid. People say to me that free-to-play will never be another WoW, but if you look at a game called Crossfire, which is an Asian kind-of Counter Strike clone, they pull down about $1 billion a year in revenue. So did WoW, and that's a subs-based model, and one of those games was a lot cheaper to make.

You've got to evolve, and the more we try and grasp this with our hands the more it's going to slip through our fingers.