Stay on top of all our E3 2013 coverage here.

Microsoft’s E3 conference presented an onslaught of awesome-looking games, but we still have a lot of lingering questions about the console they’ll all appear on, the Xbox One.

From the very start, Microsoft has appeared cagey about what its upcoming console (due to launch this November for $499) does and doesn’t do in terms of digital rights management (DRM), playing used games, and a whole host of other issues. Its PR attempts to clarify those sticking points only led to more and more questions. We’ve also heard, but cannot confirm, that Microsoft has cancelled 1-on-1 interviews with at least one outlet that was outspoken on the company’s policies.

But we still see a number of things we need to know before we’ll spend money for an Xbox One.

Will your Xbox 360 Gamertag, Gamerscore, and purchases carry over?

The Xbox One’s all-new architecture makes backward compatibility of retail discs a nonstarter, but we’ve heard for a while that the noncompliance doesn’t end there.

It might seem like a no-brainer to let people carry over all their account information after a simple sign-in, but apparently, the new Xbox Live might not be compatible with the old version, either. Supposedly, that means all the downloadable games you’ve purchased won’t apply to the Xbox One, either, effectively wiping away all the money you’ve invested in Xbox software over the last eight years. Does Microsoft have a solution for that that doesn’t involve their customers having to buy their favorite games twice? It would be very nice if they did.

Can we still rent games for the Xbox One?

Microsoft says it won’t charge gamers to play a second-hand game, but it has danced around the question of whether that disc will play at all in an Xbox One. But then, the rules around simply borrowing a disc from a friend are so complicated — you can play for an hour offline, but maybe longer online, but only if you’ve been friends for more than 30 days, and only once — that they practically qualify as a deterrent in and of themselves.

Rented games, however, have slipped under the radar in terms of hard information. With that “loaned games only play once,” the signs point to bad news for rental services like Gamefly, but maybe Microsoft has a labyrinthian scheme to allow for such games, too. Or maybe it’s still figuring this one out, because so far, nobody at the company has given us a straight answer on the subject.

Will Xbox One offer a solution for customers who can’t always be online?

Hope you’ve got a good Internet connection. The Xbox One requires an online check-in every 24 hours or else your games won’t work anymore. “Offline gaming is not possible after these prescribed times until you re-establish a connection,” according to Microsoft’s PR release, “but you can still watch live TV and enjoy Blu-ray and DVD movies.”

That’s a problem for roughly 60 percent of the planet. Your $500 Xbox One basically becomes a very expensive cable box/DVD player unless it can ping home base and verify that you, the Microsoft customer, are not a criminal using stolen software. Given that a borrowed game will only play once for one hour while offline, it’s unclear why this extra layer of security is even necessary. Certainly, its benefit to consumers seems to be somewhere below zero.

But either way, unless Microsoft has some kind of escape clause, they just gave entire countries — not to mention American soldiers serving in combat theaters — a reason not to buy their products.

Kinect

How mandatory is Kinect?

Personally, I don’t feel like playing one-man charades just to access my content, but we’re getting indications that some Kinect-based motion controls are the only way to do certain things. That also seems unlikely, but the straight answers from Microsoft just aren’t forthcoming.

And the story seems to be changing, anyway. Originally, we were told that the Kinect camera would always be on … until the German government put the brakes on it by launching a privacy-issues investigation into having an always-on camera pointed at you in your living room. Microsoft later stated that Xbox One owners could change the level of Kinect involvement in the setup. But can I turn it off completely? Can I possibly not use Kinect? Is that allowed? Or will I be forced to wave spastically at the screen just to bring up a video I want to watch?

Is an Xbox Live Gold membership vital to using these features?

Gold accounts will still be a part of Xbox, and in fact, it sounds like you only need one Gold account per household now — those benefits will apply on that console whether that specific member is signed in or not. But this is an always-online console, with features keyed into always being online. When does Microsoft start charging for those?

For example, do you need a Gold account to lend a game to a friend, or to play a game that friend loaned to you? Microsoft’s language to date suggests got to download code from cloud storage in order to do that. So does Gold membership change how the Xbox One’s cloud computing access operates? Or Twitch streaming? Or anything else, really. I highly doubt it, but for all we know right now, Gold membership could be mandatory to that once-a-day check-in. We just don’t know.

But now we do know this: Sony’s PlayStation 4 doesn’t have mandatory online, won’t require a daily check-in, isn’t restricting the use of rented or borrowed games, and costs $100 less, just as Patcher guessed. So the really big question now is will Microsoft stick to its guns or flinch in the face of a simpler, more customer-friendly alternative.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Stay on top of all our E3 2013 coverage here.

LOS ANGELES — Shots fired!

Publisher Sony said it won’t have any online authentication or digital rights management on its PlayStation 4 console games this evening at its pre-Electronic Entertainment Expo press briefing. It won’t require you to check in your console and games with online servers periodically, either. It said you own your games forever.

“When gamers buy a disc, they have the right to use that disc,” Sony chief executive Jack Tretton said. “Your games won’t stop working if you don’t check in after 24 hours.”

Tretton confirmed you can trade their games at retail.You can sell the game to another person, lend it to a friend, or keep it forever.

This is in direct opposition to the stance Microsoft recently took in regard to its Xbox One console. That console requires a daily authentication with its servers or else games will stop working. The hardware works with used games, but the process has many restrictions. For example, you can only trade discs at “participating retailers.” You can lend the game to friends, but only those that have been on your friends list for at least 30 days. This effectively kills second-hand sales on online marketplaces like eBay and Craigslist as well as at many indie game stores.

Additionally, Microsoft will allow publishers to enact a fee on used-game sales at the aforementioned participating retailers. Now that Sony won’t support that practice, it is unclear if publishers will treat Xbox players differently than PlayStation owners.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Netflix has unveiled the first details of a long-term strategy to shift towards using HTML5 for its web-based video playback.

Netflix, which owns about one third of the market for prime-time Web streaming video, far ahead of competitors like Amazon Prime and Hulu, currently uses Microsoft’s Silverlight plugin for video playback. That’s in contrast to many other video services, which use Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime, or other services to play video within their web pages. However, Microsoft has announced plans to wind down Silverlight by 2021. That means Netflix — and anyone else relying on Silverlight — has eight years to find an alternative.

HTML5 is a promising, if somewhat half-cooked, alternative. The open web standard, while widely hyped, proved disappointing to many developers in 2012, failing to live up to expectations for cross-platform support, performance, and other issues. But while mobile consumers spend far more time in apps than in their mobile browsers, HTML5 still has potential as the underlying rendering framework used within apps. Also, developers like HTML5, as does the guy who invented the Web.

And fortunately for Netflix, HTML5-based solutions that meet Netflix’s requirements are in the pipeline. Chief among those requirements are the need for content encryption and copy restriction (aka digital rights management, or DRM), “a requirement for any premium subscription video service,” the Netflix blog post drily notes. The W3C’s Encrypted Media Extensions specification provides just that support, Netflix says. In addition, the Web Cryptography API (also from the W3C) gives Netflix programming tools for encrypting and decrypting data, and for digitally signing content and verifying customers’ identities, which are also needed for the delivery of DRM-restricted video.

Finally, the W3C’s Media Source Extensions specification gives Netflix the ability to embed a video player in a web page, via the <video> tag, and also to control how to deliver audio and video to that player via its HTTP servers and content delivery network. It also gives Netflix the ability to switch to different servers in case one goes down, and to control the playback in various ways using JavaScript, which gives it flexibility to experiment.

“In addition, this allows us to implement our industry-leading adaptive streaming algorithms (real-time selection of audio/video bitrates based on available bandwidth and other factors) in our JavaScript code,” the blog post states.

These three key specifications aren’t completely baked yet, nor are they usable in most browsers, which is why Netflix isn’t quite ready to jump fully into the HTML5 pool. (Nor does it have to, given the long, eight-year sunset period for Silverlight.) Instead, it’s dipping its toes in the water, working with Google to implement support for its HTML5 player starting with the Chrome browser on Samsung’s ARM-based Chromebook.

Hat tip: Ars Technica

Photo: Netflix CEO Reed Hastings plans world domination, back in 2010. Credit: Ben Lucier/Flickr

You only have the rights to this chair for eight uses. The second your butt leaves the chair on the eighth time, it will deteriorate without pause. And you paid for it.

Does that make sense? The DRM Chair is the physical manifestation of Digital Rights Management (DRM) that companies employ to dictate how you use their digital products.

Les Sugus created the chair. It’s a team of art and design students and alumni from Switzerland who entered into the The Deconstruction competition. The Deconstruction promotes taking apart different elements of our world and putting them back together to make something “awesomer-er.” In Les Sugus’ case, they rethought a chair in the light of Digital Rights Management.

It is capable of keeping track of how many people sit in it, and clicks audibly to how many “uses” it has left. After the eighth butt, however, the chair’s makes a sound reminiscent to film winding up at the end of a roll and the joints slowly start melting. Yes, melting. After a little smoking, the chair completely falls apart.

It’s an appropriate translation of online policies, especially after this morning’s announcement from the White House supporting the legalization of unlocking phones. Recently the Library of Congress — which has the authority to rule on what must adhere to and what can be exempt from following the Digital Millennium Copyright Act — ordered that it is illegal to unlock any smartphone or tablet purchased after Jan. 1. The White House responded to a petition for the opposite, which got over 100,000 signature, saying that it agrees unlocking devices should be legal and hopes to spur conversation to that end.

via CNET; DRM CHAIR from thibault brevet on Vimeo.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Big Brother has a new face, and its name is Xbox.

GeekWire has picked up on a Microsoft patent for a scary bit of sensor technology that can count and identify the people watching a television. Using the technology, content owners could charge consumers based on how many people are watching content, limit viewing to certain users, or punish consumers if they exceed their number of licensed views.

This so-called “consumer detection” could conceivably be implemented in future versions of Kinect, Microsoft’s motion-sensing camera.

And if you think you could just trick the Kinect by unplugging it, think again. If this sort of thing becomes commonplace, that camera’s going to need to be on. All the time.

It’s a brave new world — and it’s horrifying.

The really crazy part is that the idea isn’t even that farfetched. Many PC games already force players to maintain constant Internet connections in order to play them. Microsoft’s patent is just that technology taken to its most absurd extreme.

While people-detecting cameras sound like the kind of thing consumers would avoid buying,  keep in mind that there’s probably a camera staring you in the face right now. Attitudes change, privacy concerns relax with time. People learn to welcome their new insect overlords.

Fortunately, patents don’t mean all that much by themselves. Companies patent things all the time with no real concrete intention of acting on them. So, no, Microsoft’s probably not working on this right now. But it’s at least thinking about it.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

This post was written by Jaafer Haidar, vice president of mobile at cloud-based content platform Synacor.

Every once in a while, necessity brings strange bedfellows together towards a common goal. Apollo Creed and Rocky joined forces to take on Clubber Lang in Rocky III, Batman and Catwoman teamed up against Bane in The Dark Knight Rises … and lately my wife and sister are working together to prevent me from trying skydiving. Either way, unexpected couplings must occur to ensure success where one party couldn’t go it alone. When you take a look at the future of mobile, HTML5 and Digital Rights Management (DRM) are an unstoppable team, but they need each other in order to win the code wars.

Native Apps Mean Everyone Has To Sacrifice

Let’s first admit something: We don’t love apps — we love what apps give us. The content we want, when we want it, in the palm of our hand. It’s all about the delivery and experience; we could care less whether it’s in the form of an installed app or a web app as long as it is always there at our fingertips. That said, there is an impact for all when a native app is created.

• For Publishers: Native apps mean developing an app for every platform or sacrificing part of the audience you’re trying to reach. Developing and supporting all these apps is very expensive.

• For Consumers (all of us): (a) Hope there’s an app for your mobile platform (b) If you have devices operating on different platforms, you need to purchase the app for each platform (c) Hope the app is specifically designed for your phone and tablet.

Content Should Live Free but that Doesn’t Mean it is Free.

There are HTML5 apps and games that rival and even outperform native applications. The biggest brands such as Google, YouTube, LinkedIn and OpenTable (among others) are championing HTML5 — and delivering the goods. The only thing holding back HTML5 from killing native apps is DRM.

Let’s be honest, production studios are in business to make money from the content they produce. Right now, native apps provide the protections studios require, but the ironic thing is that every video delivered through native apps is not Flash-based. Publishers have already done the heavy lifting for HTML5 delivery. They want to deliver videos in a mobile app that works across all devices — phone, tablet, laptop, and connected TVs. They want to build once, deliver everywhere. Publishers will then be able to get out of the dev shop business, and premium content will flourish online. HTML5 DRM enables this to happen — opening the floodgates.

HTML5’s Missing Key

Before the tech-must-be-free purists get excited, let’s discuss the current landscape. HTML5 is the promise of the web being a platform where content can live freely; a world where the device doesn’t matter, whether it’s your iPhone, iPad, Android device, laptop, or connected TV – all you need is the Web and you can get your stuff anytime anywhere. I agree 100% with this sentiment (in fact, I co-founded a company based on these exact principles of freedom). It’s a beautiful promise, but you know what’s missing from its current form? Video.

Video is one of the most popular thing to do online after checking email, conducting a search, or using Facebook. As tablets and phones are rapidly becoming the way most people use the web, few sites outside of YouTube have worked some back-end magic to ensure you can watch what you want when you want it. Ever visit your favorite site on an iPad only to see a black box where you could swear there should be a video? It sucks.

There are three things to consider with mobile web video:

• Free or not, most video is in Flash format: That’s how it’s been forever, and there’s a whole ecosystem of rights management, advertising, social, and more tools at play.

• The Chicken and the Egg: Publishers need a full ecosystem of tools to make money. At the same time, we’ve seen limited evolution of a non-Flash web video ecosystem because toolmakers need publisher demand before they invest in creating the tools. HTML5 DRM is the catalyst for the ecosystem’s development.

• Native Apps fill the Void: Nobody supports Flash on mobile. Not Apple or Microsoft or Android … and soon not even Adobe. Flash on mobile is a dying technology. If you want to watch videos from your favorite places like Hulu, HBO, or even TMZ, then don’t go into the web browser, visit the app store and download the native app.

And therein lies the rub: if you want to watch videos on your mobile, download the app. The reason? Within native apps, the video content can be protected. Of course, if you get the app, you’re tied to your device (iPhone, iPad, Android, etc.). This is where DRM comes in handy for the ecosystem.

HTML5 Needs DRM to Win

Yes, there are some who believe DRM in any form goes against the very idea of HTML5. This ideal forces them to make a decision: Either believe that a video-less mobile web world can win or understand that consumers want the good stuff and to get it, it needs to be protected.

Even the large “Internet companies” recognize this. A previously proposed joint HTML5 DRM proposal from Google, Microsoft, and Netflix was a step in the right direction. Without a doubt, the industry needs a standard way to protect and deliver video over the web.

So lace up and get in the ring, my freedom loving friends. HTML5 and DRM are coming together for the better of the web – like Rocky and Apollo – it’s inevitable and only natural. DRM will fulfill the very promise of HTML5 — an open world where we’re free from device lock-in, and the web is the platform that rightfully wins.

Jaafer Haidar is head of Synacor’s mobile and multi-screen strategy. He is an expert and visionary in the power that HTML5 provides to consumer electronics OEMs and service providers in creating the best possible consumer experience across devices.

The French video game publisher Ubisoft hasn’t engendered a lot of goodwill with PC gamers over the years because of its aggressive digital rights management (DRM) policies. But the company made some big changes a year ago, and it wants gamers to understand that it is playing nicer these days.

“We realized we haven’t always been clear and consistent about communicating what our DRM policy was in the past, and that has led to a bunch of misunderstandings,” said Chris Early, vice president of digital publishing, in an interview with GamesBeat.

Ubisoft’s past policies have created a firestorm of abuse from angry users, both pirates and legitimate customers.

But some observers haven’t noticed yet that Ubisoft has made changes at all, and consumers have a long memory. But Early said the company instituted a big change in June, 2011, with respect to how it implements DRM in PC games. Since then, Ubisoft’s packaged good PC products require a one-time online activation, and then they can be played offline. If you buy the games from Ubisoft online, the games are authenticated at that time. If you play multiplayer sessions or if you play free-to-play games, you have to log in online. Authentication takes place during each session.

“The key date is June 2011,” Early said. “Everything since then is based on our current practice. Every game coming forward is based on that policy, and old games that came before that date are being switched over to that policy. It was originally much more of the stick approach. Now it is much more of the carrot.”

The new policy does a better job of staying out of the way of legitimate and loyal players who just want to enjoy the game.

In 2006, Ubisoft tried to implement the StarForce copy protection technology, but it ran into compatibility issues, and customer complaints led to its disuse. Then,  in January 2010, Ubisoft unveiled an online services platform which required users to log into an online service and remain connected while playing Ubisoft PC games. That meant they couldn’t play the games offline and they couldn’t resell their titles on the used game market. Technical problems accompanied the policy. If you were disconnected while playing, your saved game progress was lost in titles like Assassin’s Creed 2 for the PC. Ubisoft stood out in the industry for being aggressive. Angry users responded with denial-of-service attacks and other protests against the company.

“That, combined with challenges we had with uPlay hardware at the time, made for a pretty poor user experience for a couple of games,” Early said. “Listening to consumers, we then removed the DRM requirements for the games, and by June 2011 had this policy in place going forward.”

Accordingly, the negative feedback is lower these days, except when Ubisoft has some hiccups with the technology. (A Google researcher reported a flaw in Ubisoft’s DRM recently, but the company fixed it and said it had no incidents related to that flaw).

He added, “There were enough online components to those games that we mistakenly believe the earlier policy would not be an imposition for players. That was not the case. Players wanted to be able to play in an online and offline mode. They didn’t want to be online all the time to play.”

The earlier policy also limited the number of times a player could install the game Anno 2070 to just three. But if you installed a new graphics card, it would use up one of the installations and require you to reinstall that game. Ubisoft had to correct that again.

“Listening to our customers, we don’t have that as a limit anymore,” Early said.

The point of DRM in the first place is to establish with the consumer that they are getting value when they buy a Ubisoft game, and they should pay for that value, Early said. It helps stop piracy, which can be very high in the PC market. By emphasizing the “carrot” rather than the “stick,” Ubisoft is making use of alternatives that could help reduce piracy and generate more revenue at the same time. For instance, free-to-play games like Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Online open that franchise up to more territories where it isn’t feasible to sell a $60 Ghost Recon Future Soldier game.

“You can participate in a wider variety of services and content or choose a different business model,” Early said. “That allows access to games at a variety of different price points. We can reach a wider variety of people around the world. You can get to our games in more places without pirating them.”

Part of the reason why Ubisoft is the target of piracy is that its games are good.

“If we made terrible games, we wouldn’t have to worry about it at all,” Early said. “The more popular the game is, the more people want to play it wherever they are. As an industry, we need to talk about piracy. At the time when we took a very aggressive stance, we realized it impacted our customers more than it impacted our pirates.”

Ubisoft has also created its uPlay PC game client. That brings together PC game functions together, including a game library. It has social features like chat and leaderboards. It has rewards across platforms and an offline action mode. It has integrated saves, a shopping function, free-to-play games, and a general overall Ubisoft destination. Ubisoft has some rental systems that it supports, but in general it believes users should pay for their games. With online passes, players can reactivate a portion of the multiplayer play with a small fee from the secondary user. That view makes sense because multiplayer play requires Ubisoft to invest money in ongoing support for multiplayer operations, Early said.

“We don’t have excessive complaints about that,” Early said. “In that case, we were not the trailblazer. [EA was]“

There isn’t a consistent view on used games across the industry. But as free-to-play games expand, the used game market isn’t necessarily as relevant anymore, Early said. He didn’t have a comment on what the new game consoles being launched in the future will have as far as DRM policies go. If the platform owners change their policies, you can bet the topic will come up again.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Update at 12:02 p.m. PST: Apple will delete negative reviews upon request. See bottom for more details.

Appagedon is over, for now. Apps are once again being downloaded from Apple’s app store, they’re working, and all is well in Apple’s app-dom.

Or is it?

Maro Arment of InstaPaper first noticed the issue: Apps that were recently updated and working perfectly for developers (and presumably for Apple testers) crashed and burned after users updated them from the app store. Apple fixed the issue — a bug caused when adding digital rights management technology to apps — and said it only affected a small number of users.

(I was one of them, for the record, and the smallness or largeness of my group doesn’t make me feel any better.)

But two issues are more important than a few corrupted-and-now-fixed app updates.

One is reviews.

Developers whose apps received scathing, negative reviews for app crashes that were not their fault are stuck with the reviews on their apps.

Source: iTunes

Reviews on iTunes

Apple at first seemed to remove negative reviews submitted during Appageddon, but then, as MacStories noted, simply updated the version number of the app, causing the negative reviews to just move down a little in visibility.

A prime example is entertainment app Tap Sonic by Neowiz.

Users who updated on July 5 say “I can’t even open the app” and “crashes as soon as I touch it.” As of this moment, those reviews are staying there, and they are on Tap Sonic’s permanent app store record…even though the problems were Apple’s fault.

That’s not OK. Apple should remove any reviews for affected apps.

The second issue is DRM.

Or, more specifically, the app store process of packaging, wrapping, and distributing apps.

Tap Sonic from Neowiz

In a statement, Apple said ”the issue has been rectified and we don’t expect it to occur again.” Most developers don’t expect bugs to reoccur either, but they do.

The Android Market…err…Google Play is a more open environment, and there are multiple Android app stores that don’t have the same processes as Apple’s. That can and has resulted in more security issues, but it also means the app store owner has fewer opportunities to make mistakes that affect great swaths of apps (at least 114, according to Arment) in one fell swoop.

This all means that updates to DRM or app store packaging that potentially affects hundreds of thousands of apps are unbelievably sensitive.

And it means that Apple needs to do — and say — more than “we don’t expect it to occur again.”

Update: It appears Apple will now delete negative reviews. We just received the following from Reuven Moskowitz, founder of Penguin Digital.

Our app, MoPho App, was effected as well. However, Apple has been really great to us over the past 24 hours. Dev support was really responsive, and they’ve just contacted us to let us know that they will remove the negative reviews.

Apple developer support said:

“Thank you for your message regarding these customer reviews. After evaluating your request, it has been decided that these customer reviews meet the criteria for removal.  Please allow up to 24 hours for these reviews to be removed from your Customer Review section on the App Store.”

Image credit: iQoncept/ShutterStock

VentureBeat has contacted a number of app developers for their comments. We’ll update this post as necessary. If you are a developer and have a comment, please let us know in the comments, or email me.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Following Louis CK’s successful digital distribution experiment, popular stand-up comedian and actor Aziz Ansari is doing the same with his $5 digital release of one-hour special Dangerously Delicious, which is available today.

In December, CK made his performance of Live at the Beacon Theater available as a non-copy-protected download for purchase on his website for just $5. In 12 days, the release attracted more than 200,000 legitimate downloads, adding up to more than $1 million. CK said it cost $250,000 just to set up the special, $250,000 would be disbursed as bonuses to people who work for him, and $280,000 would go to charities.

CK’s distribution method was probably looked at questionably from media bigwigs because without DRM software that prevents copying, people can pirate the special easily. But there’s an argument on the other side that people pirate so much because of all the dumb restrictions companies put in place on a product consumers would be willing to buy at reasonable price.

What makes this set-up so appealing for both performers and fans is the cutting out of distributors. When a special is released on video-on-demand or DVD, it can cost as much as $20 to purchase. Much of that money goes to the company that distributed the special rather than to the comedian. And of course, on the consumer end, no one wants to pay $15 more for a special they could get for $5.

Ansari makes this point as well in a funny preview of his special, saying “Think of all the cool things you can buy with the $15 you just saved.” He goes on to list: Several small bags of cashews and/or almonds, a nice beach towel, Nelly’s SweatSuit album (“Sweat” disc only), a bag of screws, and more.

Aziz Ansari image: AzizAnsari.com

Digital Rights Management is a controversial technology used by many publishers to combat piracy and copyright infringement. When Ubisoft launched its Online Services platform in 2010, it implemented a DRM scheme that required customers to authenticate their purchases online the first time they were launched. It also required a persistent online connection while playing, even for titles with no multiplayer component. Losing network connection forced the game to pause, making it impossible to play offline.

Those affected by the upcoming transition include Assassin’s Creed for Mac; Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. 2 for PC; Might & Magic : Heroes VI for PC; Splinter Cell Conviction for Mac; Settlers 7: Paths to a Kingdom for PC; and The Settlers for Mac. The latest entry in the Assassin’s Creed series, Revelations, will not be affected, along with Driver: San Francisco, Anno 2070, Just Dance 3, and The Settlers Online.

Ubisoft’s Uplay service, however, will not be available during the server move. PC games will remain available for all players who have already connected to the Internet at least once.

And for those who bought a Uplay product but won’t have used it online before the server switch? We asked Ubisoft what would happen in that situation — if the consumer would just lose the purchase completely — but the company rep wouldn’t address that directly.

Ubisoft says the move will ultimately improve the maintenance of its infrastructure and will deliver better uptime and greatly improved services for its customers. There is no word on how long the servers will be offline.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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CD Projekt has spoken to Eurogamer, saying “we could introduce advanced copy protection systems which, unfortunately, punish legal customers as well. Instead, we decided to give gamers some additional content with each game release, to make their experience complete.”

“However,” CD Projekt added, “that shouldn’t be confused with us giving a green light to piracy. We will never approve of it, since it doesn’t only affect us but has a negative impact on the whole game industry.”

The Torrentfreak website claims that thousands of alleged Bittorent users in Germany have been contacted by lawyers acting on behalf of CD Projekt, over the past few months. They have been asked to hand over €911.80 ($1230) to pay off their apparent debt to the company.

This is not the first time that such mass settlements schemes have been used in the fight against piracy. Speaking of a similar scheme earlier this year, Virginia District Court Judge,  John Gibney wrote “the plaintiffs seemingly have no interest in actually litigating the cases, but rather simply have used the Court and its subpoena powers to obtain sufficient information to shake down the John Does”.

As Torrentfreak points out, such blanket initiatives are in danger of affecting innocent members of the public, and “aside from targeting many people who indeed downloaded and shared the game without paying, CD Projekt’s lawyers are also wrongfully accusing people who have never even heard of the game.”

CD Projekt has a track record of being involved in such mass settlement schemes. In 2008, UK based file-sharing lawyers Davenport Lyons demanded cash settlements from individuals who were said to have illegally downloaded the original Witcher game.

In response to concerns over its actions, CD Projekt has insisted that “we only take legal actions against users who we are 100 per cent sure have downloaded our game illegally.”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Comedian Louis CK has divulged the results of his $5 web special experiment, and the numbers look good.

In just four days, the special has sold over 110,000 copies making over $500,000, CK said in a statement today. He made a profit of over $200,000 so far, after spending $170,000 on the production of the video, and around $32,000 on a website able to withstand his throng of fans.

“This is less than I would have been paid by a large company to simply perform the show and let them sell it to you, but they would have charged you about $20 for the video,” he wrote. “They would have given you an encrypted and regionally restricted video of limited value, and they would have owned your private information for their own use. They would have withheld international availability indefinitely.”

Many had expected CK’s web special — which was notable for its lack of digital rights management restrictions, or DRM — to be a smashing success. After all, he’s a popular comedian with a loyal fan base. But the numbers are still a good sign for CK, and for web distribution in general. The special will likely rake in $1 million within the next week, which could certainly convince other entertainers to take distribution into their own hands.

As for the production itself, CK said it was shot with six cameras over two performances at the Beacon Theater in New York City. He directed the special himself (he also directs his self-titled TV series), which was definitely another useful cost-saving measure. CK also revealed that the special sold 50,000 copies in its first 12 hours available, making over $250,000.

CK gave some further insight into the project yesterday in a thread on the social news site Reddit.

He also didn’t seem to be too concerned about the few people pirating the special: “If anybody stole it, it wasn’t many of you. Pretty much everybody bought it. And so now we all get to know that about people and stuff.”

PC fantasy RPG The Witcher 2 has been a massive success for the developers at Poland’s CD Projekt, with over one million sales since the game’s May launch. But that sales success is dwarfed by what the company’s CEO and co-founder Marcin Iwinski estimates is over 4.5 million pirated copies of the DRM-free game downloaded via BitTorrent.

Iwinski  generated the estimate by looking at online BitTorrent trackers, which registered an average of 20 to 30,000 people illegally downloading the game at any one time in the weeks following its launch. Assuming an average six-hour BitTorrent download for the 14GB game, that represents close to 5 million unpaid copies downloaded over an 8 week period, he told PC Gamer.

Despite all these illegal copies floating around, Iwinski says he’s not been tempted to add some form of digital rights management to CD Projekt’s games — mainly because he doesn’t think it would be effective.

“In my almost 20 years in the industry, I have not seen DRM that really worked (i.e. did not complicate the life of the legal gamer and at the same time protect the game),” he told PC Gamer. DRM solutions, in Iwiniski’s view, always end up either too light, and therefore easy to crack, or too heavy, and therefore disruptive to the paying players that you’re trying to encourage.

“DRM itself is a pain for your legal gamers – this group of honest people, who decided that your game was worth the 50 USD or Euro and went and bought it,” Iwinski said. “Why would you want to make their lives more difficult?”

Indeed, publishers from Sony to EA have faced player outrage in the past for overly restrictive DRM schemes that installed hard-to-remove “rootkits” on players’ systems, which hampers system performance and reporting on potentially private usage data.

More recently, Ubisoft faced criticism for re-introducing a DRM system that required a persistent internet connection for some of its popular PC games. The publisher scaled back the effort after an outcry from players, and eventually released a patch to remove such DRM from god game From Dust.

Yet, Ubisoft had previously touted such DRM schemes as a success, telling PC Gamer in June that it saw “a clear reduction in piracy of our titles which required a persistent online connection.”

For his part, Iwinski encourages gamers to “vote with their wallets” by refusing to support games with restrictive DRM. Only then will “the excel guys” (the guys who monitor a game’s bottom line via spreadsheets) realize that trying to lock a game down is not the best way to encourage people to buy it, he said.