[A brief note: anyone who’s read my last English post on this blog may be interested in this series of article at Slate.com, written by a journalist who just spent five days in Thailand’s troubled Southern provinces. The last ‘dispatch’ was over yesterday, and I think the writer did a good job of presenting a balance of opinions on this crisis. Now hopefully the world will realize that Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra is an egotistical power-hungry autocrat who has no idea how close we are to a ‘religious jihad’ situation. I’ll post my comments in a few days; for now, I’d like to write about something else that I’m quite passionate about.]
As webmaster of Home of the Underdogs (HOTU), one of the Internet’s largest abandonware websites, I would be remiss if I never talk about HOTU or abandonware on my personal blog. For anyone who’s never heard of abandonware, that Wikipedia article sums it up nicely.
I started HOTU back in October 1998 as a ‘tribute site’ to games I feel are underrated, both new and old. The site grew to host downloads for thousands of ‘abandonware’ titles because, pretty much by definition, underdogs never sell well and tend to disappear from retail stores and everyone’s memory in a matter of months.
Over the years, running HOTU has become more than a hobby for me. It’s now a testament to a lot of things I believe in, something I can point people to and say “that’s what I mean” when I discuss my belief in the Buddhist philosophy of sharing, my disgust at how often large corporates successfully lobby for laws that protect their (debatable) interests but harm the society at large, and my fondness for games and gaming history.
HOTU is where my passions in Buddhism, free culture, and games fortuitously and gratifyingly converge. Running HOTU gives me no stress, no moral dilemmas, and no impossible demands to meet (well, freeloaders *do* make demands, but their e-mails are much easier to ignore than angry customers and bosses in real life ;)), unlike my day job at an investment bank.
[A brief note: anyone who’s read my last English post on this blog may be interested in this series of article at Slate.com, written by a journalist who just spent five days in Thailand’s troubled Southern provinces. The last ‘dispatch’ was over yesterday, and I think the writer did a good job of presenting a balance of opinions on this crisis. Now hopefully the world will realize that Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra is an egotistical power-hungry autocrat who has no idea how close we are to a ‘religious jihad’ situation. I’ll post my comments in a few days; for now, I’d like to write about something else that I’m quite passionate about.]
As webmaster of Home of the Underdogs (HOTU), one of the Internet’s largest abandonware websites, I would be remiss if I never talk about HOTU or abandonware on my personal blog. For anyone who’s never heard of abandonware, that Wikipedia article sums it up nicely.
I started HOTU back in October 1998 as a ‘tribute site’ to games I feel are underrated, both new and old. The site grew to host downloads for thousands of ‘abandonware’ titles because, pretty much by definition, underdogs never sell well and tend to disappear from retail stores and everyone’s memory in a matter of months.
Over the years, running HOTU has become more than a hobby for me. It’s now a testament to a lot of things I believe in, something I can point people to and say “that’s what I mean” when I discuss my belief in the Buddhist philosophy of sharing, my disgust at how often large corporates successfully lobby for laws that protect their (debatable) interests but harm the society at large, and my fondness for games and gaming history.
HOTU is where my passions in Buddhism, free culture, and games fortuitously and gratifyingly converge. Running HOTU gives me no stress, no moral dilemmas, and no impossible demands to meet (well, freeloaders *do* make demands, but their e-mails are much easier to ignore than angry customers and bosses in real life ;)), unlike my day job at an investment bank.
So despite massive bandwidth costs (thousands of US dollars a month) that force me to use annoying pop-ups and banners to keep HOTU free, sporadic threatening letters from the ESA, and a demanding day job, I am determined to keep the site alive for as long as possible.
Since the issue of abandonware and piracy in general has already been discussed very often on the Internet (you can read my general views on abandonware in this GameSpot article, and hopefully by now everyone knows that abandonware is illegal), here I want to share my thoughts on one specific issue: the question of whether or not abandonware distribution really ‘harms’ the copyright holders.
Let me first say that I am by no means an ‘expert’ on this subject. I’m just an avid gamer who follows the debate on intellectual property (IP) rights, and reads about the business of gaming from time to time. So if I make any stupid comments or if my ‘facts’ are way off, please feel free to post corrections/suggestions in the comment area.
As summarized in the abandonware definition at Wikipedia, some people argue that abandonware distribution is harmful because:
“…[as seen in successes] some companies like Nintendo and Activision have had in releasing old games for newer platforms like the GameCube, Game Boy Advance and the PlayStation 2, all abandonware has potential value, and that distributing it free on the Internet decreases the profits to be had from a legal rerelease.”
Similarly, the ESA argues in their anti-piracy FAQ that:
“…copyrights and trademarks of games are corporate assets that are sometimes sold from one company to another. If these titles are available far and wide, it undermines the value of this intellectual property and adversely affects the copyright owner.”
But what “value” a ten-year-old, long-out-of-print game could still offer its copyright holder? Companies argue that abandonware have two kinds of economic value to them: a) potential sales of a re-release or a modern remake of the game itself, and b) potential sales of new, commercial games that the company might ‘lose’ if people can download this abandonware game for free.
The first type of value does seem relevant. After all, classics like Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, and many others are being re-released and remade all the time for new systems. If I can download the original versions for free (and running them on modern computers is much easier now, thanks to emulators), then maybe I wouldn’t want to buy their modern versions anymore.
But how many oldies really have the potential to be re-released and remade? The ‘safest bet’ for a company that wants to re-release or remake game would be to choose titles that sold well in the past, i.e. best-sellers like Sim City or Civililzation. Since those games probably account for, at most, only 4-5% of the total number of games ever made, that means 95% of games are unlikely to ever be legally re-released or remade.
Because the vast majority of abandonware really have no more commercial value, abandonware distribution is actually adding value to the companies, not subtracting from it: people who download these oldies (because they are free) can discover great old games they might have overlooked (because of poor sales figures), and might then be inspired to buy new games from the designers or companies behind these games. I have received dozens of e-mails over the years that thank HOTU exactly for this scenario.
Abandonware sites essentially preserve and promote the companies’ back catalogs for free.
As for the second type of value (i.e. sales of new titles that might decline because of abandonware distribution), what many game companies don’t seem to understand is that gaming is not a zero-sum game: just because I can download 15-year-old games freely from the Internet doesn’t mean I will stop buying new games. Could anyone really say that sales of Civilization III were hurt because people can download the first game in this series, 15-year-old Civilization, from abandonware sites?
Some game companies are already smart enough to realize that releasing old games as freeware can have a hugely positive impact on sales of sequels. For instance, Sierra allowed people to freely download Starsiege: Tribes, Caesar, and Red Baron right before the releases of sequels, and more recently Rockstar Games released the first two games in their hugely popular Grand Theft Auto (GTA) series as freeware. I doubt sales of subsequent GTA games suffered as a result.
And Chris Crawford, in this Washington Post article, said:
…it would have been wrong to hold onto the rights to his creation just in case he decided to re-release it. “I feel strongly, if we’re going to do Balance of Power, I should redesign it,” he said. “It’s a different world, we’ve got newer machines. Just spitting out the same thing would be dumb.”
Nobody should force gamers to play crappy new games. If most gamers spend more time playing abandonware than new 3D-accelerated titles, that is not a sign that the authorities should aggressively shut down abandonware sites: it’s a sign that game companies should get their act together, play old games to see what make them tick, and stop putting out crappy products.
So, I really don’t understand how the ESA can claim that abandonware distribution “undermines the value of this intellectual property and adversely affects the copyright owner.” In contrast, distribution of the vast majority of abandonware does no harm to the value of IP because that ‘value’ is already nonexistent, and positively affects the copyright owner in the form of free press, free archive, and even free technical support (most abandonware sites have message boards where gamers help each other run oldies designed for old systems, like DOS). More importantly, a whole new generation of game designers is ‘studying’ gaming history from abandonware sites, drawing first-hand inspirations from oldies for their own creations.
Current copyright laws are horrendously out-of-date, especially with regards to software, and are being abused by corporates who are so possessive of their IPs to the detriment of society at large, like Gollum guarding his precious Ring, oblivious to everything else. James Boyle, in his excellent article at FT, says it better than I could:
Thomas Macaulay told us copyright law is a tax on readers for the benefit of writers, a tax that shouldn’t last a day longer than necessary. What do we do? We extend the copyright term repeatedly on both sides of the Atlantic. The US goes from fourteen years to the author’s life plus seventy years. We extend protection retrospectively to dead authors, perhaps in the hope they will write from their tombs.
Since only about 4 per cent of copyrighted works more than 20 years old are commercially available, this locks up 96 per cent of 20th century culture to benefit 4 per cent. The harm to the public is huge, the benefit to authors, tiny. In any other field, the officials responsible would be fired. Not here.
In general, companies have to stop treating consumers like simpletons who have only two possible “on/off” behaviors: either they are ‘good’ consumers who never pirate and never make any demands on companies with regards to their IPs, or else they are ‘bad’ pirates who never pay for what they play. The existence of abandonware proves that the reality is much more complicated, involving many issues that are more important than ownership of IP. This “Should I Rip This?” chart to your left from Inreview (click to zoom in; the original is here) illustrates the complexities quite well. In fact, if you replace “artists/composers” by “designers/programmers,” “song/recording” by “software,” “CD” by “modern computers,” and “import” by “download,” you can transform it into a “Should I Download This?” chart for software.
Every company would do well to heed the first sentence on Rockstar Games’ free download series page:
“Respect is everything.”