Pro Tip: If Your Game Gets Trashed In Reviews For Sucking, Don’t Blame It On ‘Woke Reviewers’

Say That Again

from the woke-or-broke? dept

There are lots of shitty ways game developers and publishers can handle their games getting crappy reviews. The best bet would obviously be to read the reviews from customers, learn something from them, and make a better product. Far too often, however, developers and publishers instead try to disappear bad reviews, fake reviews, or otherwise juice their review scores.

But then there’s the writer and director for Days Gone, John Garvin. Garvin stared at a wide swath of negative reviews for the game, most of which largely panned the game for being unoriginal, having a poor gameplay experience, and otherwise being all kinds of “meh.” Garvin then distilled this into an explanation for why the game was reviewed so poorly into the following list:

Three reasons:

1. it had tech issues like bugs, streaming and frame rate;
2. it had reviewers who couldn’t be bothered to actually play the game
3. And three, it had woke reviewers who couldn’t handle a gruff white biker looking at his date’s ass

Garvin wrote that in a now-deleted tweet. You will immediately notice that the list consists of two-thirds of blaming reviewers for the negative reviews. On the one hand, there is a certain amount of this that is understandable. After all, being a creative and having people you don’t know call your baby ugly is never a fun thing.

But that’s also something you sign up for when you release a creative work to the public. There’s no evidence presented by Garvin that reviewers hadn’t “bothered to actually play the game.” That statement is just made as though it’s expected to be taken as gospel. And the “woke reviewers” thing appears to be largely nonsense. There is a scene in the game that went semi-viral that consists of the player character following a female character. She bends over while asking if what she was looking at is what the player is looking for. He looks at her backside and basically says yes. It’s fairly dumb and a bit gross, but certainly nothing that the gaming public is going to lose its mind over. Were that the case, every GTA game would be completely panned by reviewers as well.

But because a certain segment of the population now seems to think you can shout “teh woke!” at any problem to make it not your fault, well, here we are. It’s a crappy way to run a game studio, frankly. If your customers are telling you what’s wrong with your product, that should be useful information to internalize and use for the future.

Or I guess you just blame the “woke,” and suddenly your product that is reviewed poorly and hasn’t sold particularly well is no longer your problem.

Filed Under: days gone, john garvin, reviewers, reviews, video games
Companies: bend studio

Ubisoft Runs Away From Epic Store And Back To Steam

Too Much Free Time

from the they-be-back dept

It’s been a long while since we last discussed the platform war that started between Steam and Epic several years back. The crux of the situation was that Epic began offering a far better revenue split for game publishers compared with Steam, with something like a 10-20% delta in how much of the revenue Epic takes versus Steam. This led to all kinds of public reactions, particularly as Epic began gobbling up game and publisher exclusives as part of that revenue split offering. In general, the public sentiment was essentially: yes, pay publishers more, but to hell with your exclusives.

Ubisoft was one of the publishers that jumped into Epic’s arrangement back in 2019. At the time, the company said Steam’s revenue split made remaining on the store unattractive. Well, it’s three years later, and if you want to take the temperature on how well Epic is doing in keeping publishers away from Steam, guess who just got back on Valve’s platform?

A page for 2020’s Assassin’s Creed Valhalla was officially added to Steam Monday, listing a December 6 launch date on the platform. Ubisoft has also told Eurogamer that 2019’s Anno 1800 and Roller Champions will be coming to Steam, confirming earlier rumors to that effect.

“We’re constantly evaluating how to bring our games to different audiences wherever they are, while providing a consistent player ecosystem through Ubisoft Connect,” a Ubisoft spokesperson said in a statement provided to the press.

Ubisoft isn’t a one-off case, either. Activision Blizzard had also been off of Steam for some time but recently came back to the platform.

So, what does this mean? It means there is more to the value of a platform than just a revenue split agreement. Say what you want about Steam and how it operates, but the platform has built a robust following and a massive market share percentage. Between that and the familiarity gamers have with Steam, the fact is that the delta in revenue splits may not make up the difference for publishers looking to move the most amount of titles.

The platform wars aren’t over, of course, but they also aren’t going to end in a trouncing by one side or the other.

Filed Under: exclusives, platform wars, video game stores, video games
Companies: activision blizzard, epic, ubisoft, valve

Video Game Addiction Is Over, Says Chinese Video Game Addiction Regulator

Overhype

from the thing-we-have-been-tasked-to-do-has-been-tasked dept

We should always be wary when a government entity charged with ending [insert issue here] declares said issue ended. We should be doubly wary when a Chinese government agency says anything about anything.

So, it’s with a huge amount of skepticism that we greet this announcement by a Chinese regulator, which claims the thing it’s keeping an eye on is no longer a problem. (via Eurogamer)

China has resolved the problem of game addiction among its youth, a report co-written by the country’s top gaming industry association said, in remarks likely to be welcomed by the regulations-battered sector.

The comment came from a report by the China Game Industry Group Committee, affiliated with the online game publishing regulator, China Game Industry Research Institute and data provider CNG, CNG said on its official WeChat account on Tuesday.

Parents and government officials (some of whom are both) have always felt the youths are spending too much time playing video games. The Chinese government, however, has made it a government issue. Whether or not “video game addiction” is really a thing doesn’t seem to matter. The government has declared it to be a problem and now the Chinese video game industry is in the uncomfortable position of acting against its own best interests.

The more games people play, the more they buy — whether it’s new games or very profitable add-ons, like expansion packs, cosmetic items, or simply paying to win. But with regulators breathing down the neck of the local video game industry, the industry has responded by… well, at the very least, claiming video game addiction is no longer a problem in China.

Here’s what happened late last year:

Chinese regulators in September last year stepped in with new rules barring anyone under 18 from playing video games for more than three hours a week…

How the video game industry was supposed to apply this restriction was left up to video game developers. This is yet another weird rule pushed by the Chinese government, which has frequently targeted gaming and gamers in an attempt to strengthen the nation (or whatever). The rule put into place last year was immediately gamed by gamers, which made it appear as though the three-hour time limit was being followed. In response to the new restriction, an entire sub-industry devoted to selling or renting adult-owned video game accounts was ushered into existence.

So, the supposed success is likely nothing more than minor gamers moving to adult-held accounts to bypass restrictions. But a victory on paper is apparently enough to declare victory in public — something the Chinese government can point to as evidence that its populace wastes less time than pretty much every other nation in the world. It’s a supremely hollow win, but that could be said about plenty of Chinese government “wins,” especially when it comes to regulating leisure activities.

Maybe this is the Chinese government hoping to put one of its many issues to bed. In 2008, a minor, who poisoned his parents, blamed his “video game addiction” for his actions. With this addiction officially (if not actually) ended, future killers will have to come up with different excuses for their psychopathy.

Filed Under: addiction, china, video game addiction, video games

‘Deus Ex Go’ To Be Completely Disappeared With Studio Shutdown

Failures

from the deus-ex-no dept

It’s a lesson that apparently keeps needing to be re-learned over and over again: for far too many types of digital purchases, you simply don’t own the thing you bought. The arena for this perma-lesson are varied: movies, books, music. And, of course, video games. The earliest lesson in that space may have been when Sony removed a useful feature on its PlayStation 3 console after the public had already begun buying it, which is downright insane. But while that was an entire console being impacted, the lesson has been repeated in instances where games and mobile apps simply stop working when the maker decides to shut their servers down, or purchased DLC disappearing for the same reason.

And here we are again, with the announcement that Onoma, previously Square Enix Montreal, is going to be shuttering some of its mobile games. The end result is not that new purchases won’t be available. Instead, the game will just not be a thing anymore. Anywhere.

Arena Battle Champions, Deus Ex GO, Hitman Sniper: The Shadows and Space Invaders: Hidden Heroes will be shutting down on January 4th. The games will be removed from the App Store/Google Play Store on December 1st, and current players will not be able to access the games past January 4th.

Effective immediately, in-game purchases are stopped. We encourage prior in-game purchases to be used before January 4th, as they will not be refunded. On behalf of the development team, we would like to thank you for playing our games.

Deus Ex Go costs $6 on the Google Play Store. You can go buy it right damned now if you wanted to. But why would you, given that the game will simply brick and no longer function in five weeks? And, more importantly, did any of the 500k-plus people who downloaded the game over the years know that it disappearing was a possibility? I mean, I’m sure that buried in the ToS is the standard “you’re just licensing this for as long as we let you” language exists, but I’m also sure that the vast majority of the people who paid for the game didn’t realize this would be a possibility.

I’ll also note that the announcement concludes by saying: “thank you for playing our games.” Not, notably, “thank you for purchasing our games,” since apparently nobody ever really purchased them at all. What I’d give to do some person-on-the-street interviews with folks who “bought” this game only to have it disappeared.

And on the point about it disappearing, I’ll remind the class yet again that video games are art and culture, and those types of things deserve preservation efforts that none of these publishers seem to even pretend to think about.

But it’s also a tragedy from a games preservation standpoint.

People made this game, people bought this game and people enjoyed this game, for years, and with the closure of a studio and some rights changing hands it’s now just going to cease existing in an official capacity?

Perhaps piracy and illicit storing of the game will do the preservation work that the publisher should be doing. Perhaps it won’t.

But leaving a piece of culture’s preservation existing at all at the feet of those the publisher would call copyright infringers is untenable. The least the publisher could do would be to release the source-code and figure out a way for fans to host the game themselves legally.

But that won’t happen. Instead, this game may well just disappear forever.

Filed Under: arena battle champions, deus ex go, disappearing games, mobile games, ownership, video games
Companies: onoma, square enix

Hobbyists Once Again Do Preservation: Every ‘Nintendo Power’ Mag Digitized Online

Culture

from the power-to-the-people dept

One of the wonders of a digital world is that art preservation in many forms suddenly gets much, much easier. For all kinds of art, be it video games, music, drawings/paintings, etc., at the very least an uploaded digital simulacrum of the art means that it can’t be easily lost due to the pernicious lack of care by the creators of the art itself.

I’ve spent quite a bit of ink and time discussing how this applies to video games. And, beyond just the games themselves, which are obviously digital in nature, the peripheral art and culture that surrounds those games, such as game manuals. The truly frustrating part of those otherwise very cool stories is that it really shouldn’t be left to fans and hobbyists to do this kind of preservation and archiving. Why don’t gaming companies want to preserve their own cultural output somewhere? Publishers? Developers? It’s almost never them that does the hard work. That is typically done by a small number of fans in the public, who then risk being slapped around over intellectual property concerns by those whose job they’re doing.

That certainly would be the case if I were going to upload every Nintendo Power magazine to the internet, as was done recently.

Uploaded to Archive.org today by Gumball, all 285 issues of Nintendo Power are now unofficially available in .cbr format. At just over 40 gigabytes for the whole shebang, the vast majority of the collection comes courtesy of Retromags, a community-run project dedicated to archiving classic video game magazines. A couple of remaining issues were sourced via Reddit by Gumball. Scanned in full color, the collection is a wonderful way to browse through gaming and media history.

The escalating Reddit post is gaining a lot of attention and appreciation from gamers who have either been looking to complete their own collections or to find the couple of missing issues that weren’t in the Retromags collection. “I just wanted to get every issue in one place,” Gumball says in another Reddit reply. “The ones that I could not find were issues 208 and 285. Retromags did not have them [but] a dude over in the r/DHexchange happened to have both of these [and] allowed me to complete the set.

If you’re a gamer of a certain age, Nintendo Power magazines were the absolute best. And even if you aren’t, or if you happen to think that the magazine is pointless trash, that doesn’t really matter. Those magazines are still cultural output that are absolutely worth preserving. I plan to go through them myself and just drink in the nostalgia, thinking back to when I was a child diving into these magazines.

But this is Nintendo we’re talking about. And Nintendo has never been shy about attacking anyone who remotely comes close to stepping on their IP, even if, as in this case, the company can’t be bothered to do any of this archiving or preservation itself.

Unfortunately, Nintendo’s history with these sorts of efforts isn’t exactly comforting. But as physical media, especially printed manuals and magazines like Nintendo Power, become harder to find, having access to archives like this is an essential way to preserve this history.

Hopefully Nintendo can manage to see that as well. Somehow, though, I suspect the lawyers already have pen to paper.

Filed Under: archiving, nintendo power, retro mags, video games
Companies: internet archive, nintendo

Google Begins Refunding Years Of Stadia Purchases

Failures

from the exit-stadia-left dept

The somehow both long-running and surprisingly quick death of Stadia is now complete. We have been covering Google’s attempt at a video game cloud-streaming service for several years now. Frankly, it’s been a mess from the jump, from a banal launch that was rife with user experience issues, to poor game performance, and a laughably limited game library. It was all the way back in early 2021 that the trouble became more serious and public. First, Google disbanded Stadia’s game developers. Then other Stadia employees voluntarily headed for the exit. Then, after briefly pitching Stadia as a backend for other platforms to deliver game-streaming, Google eventually said it was just going to shut the whole thing down.

And now Stadia’s failure gets its final nail in its digital coffin. Google has announced that refunds for most Stadia purchases are available upon request, sans the subscriptions for the service itself.

We will be offering refunds for all Stadia hardware purchases (Stadia Controller, Founder’s Edition, Premiere Edition, and Play and Watch with Google TV packages) made through the Google Store and software transactions (games and add-on purchases) through the Stadia store. Stadia Pro subscriptions are not eligible for refund, however you will be able to continue playing your games in Pro without further charges until the final wind down date.

Sadly, as the ArsTechnica post notes, if you bought your Stadia gear from someplace other than Google directly, well, you’re SOL.

Regardless, this is likely to be a complete shitshow on multiple levels. Figuring out how to refund purchases made years ago throughout the world sounds like an absolute nightmare. Ars also notes that Google can refund the public for bought games all it wants, but it still has to pay the game developers that provided those games.

And then there’s the Stadia controllers, currently locked down so that they cannot be used for any other purpose. Why they’d want to refund those controllers instead of allowing for a more general use of them is beyond me.

As for that single-use hardware, there’s an ongoing campaign to get Google to unlock the Stadia controller so that it can be a general-purpose Bluetooth controller. Google has yet to comment on this idea, but the FAQ notes that if you don’t mind turning the clock back 20 years, you can still use the controller with a wire. That’s not ideal, and considering the controller is already Bluetooth compatible, it would be nice if Google patched in generic wireless support to cut down on e-waste.

Not to mention to cut down all the red on the Stadia balance sheet, which must look like a bloodbath at this point.

Filed Under: refunds, stadia, video game streaming, video games
Companies: google

IKEA Bullies Indie Developer Into Changing Game Set In A Furniture Store

Trademark

from the the-horror dept

Big businesses really should know better as to how trademark law works. Or, failing that, their corporate counsels should. And yet we see far too often that big businesses take an aggressive approach to anything remotely resembling trademark infringement that they do not like.

Take The Store is Closed, an as yet unreleased video game stemming from a Kickstarter campaign. This game takes place in a neverending furniture store, has horror game and crafting elements, and heavy exploration gameplay. Said horror store briefly is shown to have a blue box architecture, a Scandanavian name, and gray floors. Basically due to that, IKEA reached out to the game’s creator, Jacob Shaw, demanding that the game be changed to remove all of that “trademark infringement.”

“Our client has learned that you are developing a video game, ‘The Store is Closed’,” the legal letter explains, “which uses, without our client’s authorization, indicia associated with the famous IKEA stores. Your game uses a blue and yellow sign with a Scandinavian name on the store, a blue box-like building, yellow vertical stiped shirts identical to those worn by IKEA personnel, a gray path on the floor, furniture that looks like IKEA furniture, and product signage that looks like IKEA signage. All the foregoing immediately suggest that the game takes place in an IKEA store.”

Where to begin. For starters, some of the items listed among the complaints are fleeting at best. For instance, Kotaku’s review of a build of the game notes that the look of the store and the signage IKEA is complaining about only show up on the menu screen, rather than in the game itself. Also, IKEA isn’t mentioned anywhere in the game or the Kickstarter. Instead, the store is named STYR, which is a Swedish word meaning “controls.” As Kotaku notes, IKEA isn’t even a Swedish or Scandanavian word.

As for the claim that the furniture looks like IKEA furniture, well…

Shaw disputes that he designed any furniture with Ikea in mind. “I bought generic furniture asset packs to make this game,” Shaw said, meaning that this is furniture that can be featured in any game for a price. “I don’t know what that means.” The game does, however, have a grey path on the floor. It is also common for stores to have signage that tells the customer where to go.

None of this constitutes trademark infringement. But, where IKEA is likely getting irritated is when several press outlets that have reviewed early builds of the game have referenced the company, stating that the store reminds them of playing the whole thing out in an IKEA store. But that still isn’t trademark infringement. The First Amendment allows content creators to create parody or homages using real world brands and this is done all the time. Just think of literally almost everything in many Grand Theft Auto games, for instance.

But IKEA’s threat letter demanded Shaw remove all the “offending” content within 10 days or risk legal action. And, because trademark bullying works, Shaw is complying.

“I was going to spend the last week of my Kickstarter preparing an update for all the new alpha testers,” Shaw told Kotaku. “But now I’ve got to desperately revamp the entire look of the game so I don’t get sued.”

All while IKEA is trotting out the well-worn excuse that it had to take these actions or risk losing its trademarks, which also isn’t true.

In fact, the real horror here isn’t so much the game, but the mega-brand that bullied a small creator for no reason.

Filed Under: fair use, the store is closed, trademark, video games
Companies: ikea

How Price Tourism Propelled A Switch Game To Nintendo Switch Fame

Culture

from the price-is-right dept

While we’ve had a lot of conversations about how some forward-thinking content creators have managed to look at understandably frustrating things like copyright infringement as opportunities rather than threats. There’s a lot of ways that can happen: looking at infringement as free marketing research, looking at it as an avenue for exposure, looking at infringers as under-served customers, etc.

But it might be more difficult to see the potential benefits of something like price tourism in the video game space. If you’re not in the know, price tourism is where some folks out there will spoof their location identity in order buy a video game that might cost $25 in the United States, but is offered for the equivalent of a much lower dollar amount in a different country. Publishers set up those price differentials due to economic conditions in different areas of the world. Price tourism is generally, and understandably, seen as skeevy shit that people shouldn’t do. Publishers generally get very angry about it.

But not the creators behind Let’s Build A Zoo. The publisher of that game, No More Robots, released the 2021 game recently for pre-order on the Nintendo Switch. Mike Rose from the team has an awesome Twitter thread about what happened with those pre-orders, but Kotaku also has a nice writeup of what occurred.

It started with Rose going to bed after setting up the pre-orders for the game. Then he woke up and saw that there were a ton of those pre-orders. Except it seemed that a huge percentage of those pre-orders were coming from Argentina, where the game cost a fraction of what it cost in the United States.

Now, Argentina is not a strong economy, and due to the Switch’s regional pricing, the usually $24 game and DLC bundle was priced there at around $1.50. Obviously these weren’t genuine Argentinian sales, and Let’s Build A Zoo was the victim of price tourists, who use various websites to identify the cheapest location to purchase a game, spoof their IP or register a Switch account for that country, and then buy the game at its local rate. All these pre-orders were netting NMR only a buck each. And it began to seem like a disaster.

And if you go read through Rose’s Twitter thread, you’ll see that he too thought it was a disaster. He was ready to have a full on freak-out. And, really, who could blame him? A bunch of people who didn’t live in Argentina were getting the pricing afforded to that country by spoofing their location. Suddenly, the publisher, an indie publisher, was selling a game like crazy but getting a fraction of the compensation it would have expected. At this point you’re probably thinking, “Well, how is that not a disaster?”

Here’s how.

However, due to a weird quirk of the way Nintendo compiles its regional sales, it groups all of the Americas when monitoring sales for the United States, and counts units sold, not revenue. All those Argentinian pre-orders were being registered by the Switch’s algorithms as U.S. interest, and it immediately began promoting the game far more heavily on its storefront to some of the highest-paying customers: Americans.

This then saw the EU Switch store think this game was big business, and it started being promoted to much of the rest of the world’s full price-paying nations. By launch day, September 29, the game was high up on both stores’ “Great Deals” tabs, getting—as Rose tweeted—“loads more attention than we would have got.”

Yeah. Now, there’s no good way to quantify just how much more money No More Robots has raked in because of the price tourism that occurred with its game… but it’s obvious that that dollar amount is not zero. And it’s likely that the exposure generated by the bad actors resulted in a considerable windfall for the game and publisher.

Does that make price tourism a good thing? No, not at all. It’s a shitty thing to do, full stop. Does it mean that, not unlike copyright infringement, that it’s at all worth the publisher to pursue all kinds of legal action and demands for remedies when it happens? Well, based on this story, absolutely not. It sure seems like this is yet another case of a game being acquired in less than above the board ways resulting in an overall net benefit for the content creator.

So, just like copyright, the question is what should the publisher do about this? Well, the answer, if you’re a Mike Rose, is nuanced.

“Every loophole always gets taken advantage of,” Rose tells me when I ask how he addresses the ethical issues, adding that he thinks a lot of developers will see it as an “‘Oh crap’ situation and raise the price.” But for No More Robots? “I’m just gonna keep pricing our games how they’re meant to be priced, and then if people take advantage of that, I guess that’s their right.”

I guess I don’t agree that it’s “their right.” But I think, at least in the case of Let’s Build A Zoo, it’s also not “their wrong.” After all, if everyone ends up winning, who is being harmed?

Filed Under: let's build a zoo, markets, price tourism, video games
Companies: no more robots

Anti-Cheat Software Continues To Be The New DRM In Pissing Off Legit Customers

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the screw-the-customers dept

Long-time readers here will know that one of the consistent themes over the years when it comes to video game DRM has been the absolute plethora of anecdotal stories you get about how DRM screwed up the playing experience for legitimate customers. Performance issues, inability to play online or single-player campaigns due to DRM failures, intrusive kernel-level access issues; the list goes on and on.

Well, if you’ve been paying attention over the last couple of years, anti-cheat software is quickly becoming the new DRM. Access to root layers of the computer complaints, complaints about performance effects, complaints about how the software tracks customer behavior, and now finally we have the good old “software isn’t letting me play my game” type of complaint. This revolves around Kotaku’s Luke Plunkett, whose writing I’ve always found valuable, attempting to review EA’s latest FIFA game.

I have reviewed FIFA in some capacity on this website for well over a decade, but regular readers who are also football fans may have noticed I haven’t said a word about it this year. That’s because, over a month after the PC version’s release, I am still locked out of it thanks to a broken, over-zealous example of anti-cheat protection.

Publisher EA uses Easy Anti-Cheat, which has given me an error preventing me from even launching the game that every published workaround—from running the program as an administrator to disabling overlays (?) to editing my PC’s bios (??!!)—hasn’t solved. And so for one whole month, a game that I own and have never cheated at in my life, remains unplayable. I’ve never even made it to the main menu.

Well, gosh golly gee, that sure seems like a problem. And Plunkett isn’t your average FIFA customer. He’s a professional in the gaming journalism space and has reviewed a metric ton of games in the past. If he can’t get into the game due to this anti-cheat software, what hope does the average gamer have?

He goes on to note that FIFA isn’t the only game with this problem. EA also published Battlefield 2042, which Plunkett notes at least lets him boot into the game menu and allows him to play the game for a few minutes before it freezes up entirely. The same anti-cheat software appears to be the issue there as well.

Now, console gamers may chalk this all up to the perils of PC gaming. But that is, frankly, bullshit. This isn’t a hardware problem. It’s a publisher and software problem.

To be clear, I’m not posting this as some kind of isolated, woe-is-me personal account. FIFA 23’s problems are very widespread, to the point it affected other outlet’s reviews, and in this line of work, across all the games and platforms we make use of, we run into hiccups and errors all the time that go unremarked because, well, that’s just life.

Here, though, I think the cause of the issues being an external thing just makes it so much more annoying. And EA are far from the only ones affecting users with heavy-handed measures. Look at Activision, with a frankly ridiculous mobile phone requirement for its latest games that was walked back on Overwatch, but which remains in place for Modern Warfare 2’s impending launch. It means that huge numbers of people, legitimate customers who wanted to buy the game and play it fairly, will be prevented from doing so because of their…phone plans. Then there’s Bungie, who saw innocent players accidentally banned—an extreme punishment!—earlier this month when their own anti-cheat went awry, while some Apex Legends players were booted for the same reason in August.

Everyone understands why publishers want to use anti-cheat software. Cheating in the online versions of these games takes away from the fun and experience from those who aren’t cheating goons. But when the cure is worse than the disease, which obviously is the case when the anti-cheat software simply breaks the game for paying customers, then it should be obvious that this strategy isn’t working.

Put another way, there’s certainly cheating going on in these games, but it seems like the anti-cheat software is the one cheating customers out of the games they bought.

Filed Under: anti-cheat software, cheating, customer experience, drm, easy anti-cheat, video games

Another Person Is Archiving Every English PS2 Game Manual

Culture

from the archiving-art dept

A couple of years ago, we discussed the work being done, essentially by one enterprising individual going by the handle “Peebs,” to archive a bunch of retro video game manuals for the sake of preservation. Earlier this year, we updated you all with the fairly impressive news that every SNES game manual had been digitized by Peebs. As we said in those posts, there were two major takeaways I had when learning about these efforts. First, it’s a good thing that fair use allows for this sort of non-commercial archiving to even take place. That’s important because of the second takeaway I had, which is that it sucks that these preservation efforts have been left for hobbyists or other individuals, rather than being an effort led by any of the content creators themselves.

Video games are art and they are culture. In addition, the game manuals that come along with those games are art and culture as well. The idea that any of that culture and art should fall into rarity or non-existence simply because the direct parties are uninterested in doing the work to preserve them is not something society would expect for other forms of art and culture. Fair use being a defense at trial is helpful, but these individuals still take the risk of reprisal or legal action by undergoing these efforts. Again, this sucks.

Fortunately, individuals that appreciate the cultural aspect of all of this continue to volunteer their efforts to preserve the art surrounding video games. Most recently we have the story of another individual, going by “Kirkland”, who has managed to digitize every single English language PlayStation 2 game manual online.

“The goal is to raise some awareness for game preservation efforts,” Kirkland told Kotaku. “So many games growing up shaped how we looked at and experienced the world. Of course as we ‘grow up,’ we move to other things but there are a lot of us who have nostalgia for these things and want our kids to be able to enjoy what we did. The whole ‘read the books your father read’ deal. And there have been great efforts to preserve games: VGHF, the Strong Museum, and grassroots efforts like MAME, redump.org, No-Intro, and Cowering’s Good Tools before that. Which I always thought, ‘This is great! We’re going to have everything preserved. But without the manuals, we’re not going to know how to play them.’”

Sadly, this is an aggressively manual process for Kirkland. It means tracking down all of these manuals, which is a tedious process all on its own. From there, he must remove the staples from the manuals and then scan them through a flatbed scanner, page by page, game by game. From there, software is utilized to clean up the images and present them in a manner consistent with Kirkland’s standards. From there, they get uploaded to Archive.org.

None of this, as you might imagine, is cheap.

Kirkland said he dropped about $40,000 on his U.S. PS2 collection as he methodically bought every U.S. release over the course of 22 years. “I grabbed new releases when they got down to $20 for about the first 800 releases, then I started picking up used sports games in good condition, then it was hunting down the odd variants (which is never-ending).”

“In the future, I’d love to have an AI that can truly reconstruct the text and images as they were intended, correcting skew and properly descreening without blurring line art,” he said. “As it is, no one really wants a 600 dpi scan with staple holes and black edges, they just want the polished, finished project.“

Which brings me back to one of my main themes with all of this: it’s great that folks like Kirkland are willing to lead these preservation efforts and that legal threats and/or action appear to be few and far between on them, but this shouldn’t be left to hobbyists. I don’t expect everyone reading this post to care about the art of video game manuals as much as as I do, but they are art. They are culture.

And the idea that the preserveration for all that art and culture is left to a haphazard effort by random individuals simply isn’t how preservation should be done.

Filed Under: archives, copyright, fair use, kirkland, peebs, playstation, ps2, video game manuals, video games