I. Whereupon Our Hero Does the Right Thing

One of the most successful PC games of all time is Blizzard Entertainment’s StarCraft. It has sold approximately nine million copies since it’s release in 1998. It is, by all accounts, something of a religion in South Korea. It is to my eternal shame that although I have been playing PC games since the late 80s I never finished the game. Indeed, I had never even owned it until recently. When I was in high school, I played the game mostly at a friend’s house and at netcafé’s and so never progressed all the way to the end.

In June of 2007, feeling slightly bad about this, I took the opportunity to purchase a copy of the game. A friend of mine picked it up for AUS$10 and I very happily paid him back for it. $10! For a classic of gaming! What a steal².

But still I didn’t finish it. There was always something else to do and although I pottered around here and there I could never muster up the motivation to play through the entire campaign. I logged onto to multiplayer on occasion but after 10 years you can imagine the type of people that still play this game online. They have become almost one with the product. More machine now than man. Twisted and evil. They would kick my ass.

So I left the game for a while.

II. Whereupon the Fire is Rekindled

About two years ago Blizzard announced they were working on the sequel to StarCraft, imaginatively titled StarCraft II. Blizzard is notorious for taking a very, very long time to develop its games so no one expected anything especially soon. And that’s probably a good thing since it is, as I say, almost two years later and the game’s still not out.

To keep our appetite whetted (whet?) Blizzard recently released a clip of two of its developers playing an alpha build of the game. Called the StarCraft II Battle Report, I watched it the way an ex-smoker watches someone sucking down on a Marlboro. I had to play it. And if I couldn’t play it I oculd at least play the next best thing to it. It didn’t matter that most of what they were doing in the video wasn’t possible in the original version. I just wanted to be in that universe again.

I contacted a friend who’d been similarly afflicted and after spending a good portion of Friday afternoon discussing how awesome it would be rushed home to fire it up and play a few games. My wife was in Tokyo for the weekend which was perfect. She dislikes me wasting time playing games but with her not home it seemed like God himself was trying to tell me to play this game.

In the back-and-forth my friend had informed me it was now possible to download the game directly from Blizzard. All you needed was your CD key and you were then able to download it to any computer you were on. Now I love this type of thing. It’s why I have a terribly bad thing for Steam, the digital content delivery platform developed by Valve Entertainment for their Half-Life franchise.

Starting up my web browser, I pointed it at Blizzard’s site and was quickly setting up my account for their online store. It was all smiles until I got to the point where I needed to enter my key. Checking my email I typed in the code and was promptly informed that my key was already registered to another user. Surely this couldn’t be right. The game might have been purchased for $10 but it had been purchased new.

But it was true. I tried the key a few times but it was no good. The site refused to budge. A Google search promptly revealed the ansewr. Some enterprising individual had created a key generator for the game and it was common knowledge that you could use the keys it generated to download the game for free from Blizzard. Whoever had entered my code had stumbled upon it by chance. Unfortunately, Blizzard’s site didn’t recognise this and as far as they were concerned the game was now this person’s.

This is where it gets a little sad³. Still desperate to play the game I did the only thing I could do at 9 pm that night. I bought it again. This time for US$15 but this time directly from Blizzard, secure in the knowledge that they would recognise me as the legitimate owner of the game.

III. Whereupon God Shows Displeasure Towards Our Hero

I ended up playing StarCraft a few more times over the weekend but as good as the game is, it is 10 years old. I missed a lot of the innovations that have come to the RTS genre StarCraft helped establish. There is little squad combat in StarCraft and the game does next to nothing to help you stay organised and on top of things. For Korean masters this is perhaps part of the fun but for me it’s part of the not fun.

My collection of RTS games does not begin and end with a $10 (now $15⁴) copy of StarCraft, however. I also own a copy of one of StarCraft‘s illustrious successors, Relic Entertainment’s Company of Heroes.

I purchased Company of Heroes a month after StarCraft in July of 2007. It is an excellent game. It builds on a lot of what StarCraft did and takes great pains to flesh out the tactical dimension games in the RTS genre often neglect⁵. I purchased it through Steam and have never had a physical copy of the game. As far as I’m concerned it lives inside Steam. Whenever I log in to Steam, no matter where I am, I have the option of playing it. It downloads updates automatically and remembers my settings.

Feeling in the mood for an RTS that was slightly more cutting edge, I loaded up Company of Heroes. However, instead of loading the game presented me with a login form for Relic Online. I’ll admit it’s been a while since I last played Company of Heroes — probably around about a year — but I never remember needing to sign up for something called Relic Online just to play my game.

Oh well, I shrugged. I suppose this is what everyone does these days. I chose my usual username, filled out the remaining details and clicked ‘Create’. But of course it didn’t create. Instead it informed me that my CD key was already in use and that my account had now been banned. I was provided with an email address to contact to have the notice explained further. That was it.

Now I’ve written about what happened next (or didn’t happen, as the case may be) so I won’t repeat it here. Suffice to say that the problem turned out to be an old .ini file from a previous installation of the game. I don’t know why that .ini file had a stolen CD key in it. I guess that’s just one I’ll find out when I die.

IV. Whereupon the Ire is Rekindled

So here’s the thing. Over the space of a week, with two different games that I paid money to play, I was barred from doing so. In one of the cases I had to repurchase the game. In the other I spent about a week wrangling with customer support before I discovered what was wrong and fixed it. In neither of these cases was I able to play the game I had purchased, even when I was offline. In neither of these cases did anyone ever apologise. In neither of these cases did I, as far as I can tell, do anything wrong. And yet at the end of the day I was the one who was screwed.

It did not pass without notice that if I had just pirated the games I would have been able to enjoy them. I considered doing this several times but decided not to each time. Why should I? Why should I, a person who has paid money for these products, pirate them and receive an inferior product? Why shouldn’t I, a person who has paid money for these products, not be extended the courtesy of support from the developer?

This is what media companies need to understand. Call us old-fashioned but we as consumers expect something when we purchase a product: we expect to be able to use that product. We don’t expect to have to negotiate with someone via email to let us use the product. We don’t expect to have to purchase the product again. We just expect it will work. Now is that unreasonable? Is that asking too much? Is that something we should even need to ask?

We’re waiting for your answer.

Since I frequently get reactions to things I write about on this blog (much to my surprise) I thought in light of my failure to get a response from Relic Entertainment I’d write them a letter and publish it here. Letters don’t usually have titles but if mine did it would be called, ‘Hi, I want to play the game I bought from you with real money.’

Dear Relic,

I would like to be able to play my game. It is called Company of Heroes. I purchased it from you via Steam on 22 July 2007 at 7:54 am. I know the exact date and time I purchased it because I still have the email receipt that Steam sent me.

Unfortunately for me, you do not seem to know this. When I tried to play my game on the weekend of the 24th/25th I was taken to a new Relic Online login screen that I had not previously seen. After attempting to register an account with your service I was told that my serial number had already been used and my account was now banned. This confused me since I do not have an account with Relic Online and had never previously entered my serial number while playing your game.

Your service suggested that if there was a problem I contact coh-abuse@relic.com. Since there was a problem I did contact coh-abuse@relic.com. This was on the morning of Sunday 25 January 2009 my time (Saturday your time). I had not received a response on Sunday. Or Monday. Or Tuesday. It is now Wednesday and I still have not received a response (more than 80 hours later). I have written to you again asking that my inquiry be answered. This too has not had a response.

I would like to be able to play my game. I purchased it from you with real money and I am angry that this does not seem to matter to you. I have enjoyed your games in the past and was thinking about purchasing future games from you. I am now reconsidering this decision.

Please let me play my game. (I cannot believe I just had to ask that.)

Kind Regards,

Michael Camilleri

Still, try as I might, it’s not always easy to give Apple money. Especially when you’re in a different country to them. As most people are aware Apple segments their online stores by country. If you don’t have a credit card issued from a bank in the respective country it’s almost impossible to purchase from the store. This is the case even if your credit card will otherwise work in that country (as mine does). Why does Apple do this? I’m sure they’d blame the rightsholders who license content for the store and maybe they’d be right. I can’t help but think it’s a nice way for Apple to extract maximum value from different markets.

Now I’m a believer in both the power of globalisation and the power of the Internet and I’d be damned if some artificial trade barrier was going to stop my monetary transaction. Also, and more importantly, music is cheaper at the US iTunes Store. This is the case even when you take into account the Australian dollar-US dollar exchange rate. After my last foray into downloading from iTunes I was also eager to give it another whirl and see for myself if those download problems weren’t first day jetters after all.

First step was to try to create an account at the store. I knew it probably wasn’t going to work but I felt it was worth a try. But nope, no sooner had I entered my credit card details than Apple informed me no can do. Not put off I moved onto Plan B.

I was aware that not so long ago Apple had started taking PayPal payments. Well, I had a PayPal account, I thought. It was connected to the Australian subsidiary but they weren’t to know that. Turns out they were to know that. I didn’t progress any further than I had with my direct credit card attempt.

Now it was time to tap into the vast data store that is the Internet. With Google at my side I tried looking for sites talking about purchasing from the iTunes Store in the US. If there are any doubts in your mind as to how US-centric the web is try that search on for size. I had more luck finding information on purchasing from the Japanese iTunes Store. You could almost see Fate chuckling at me.

It was MetaFilter which came to the rescue with their excellent and answer subsite. A bright spark there explained iTunes Gift Cards could not only be redeemed by those outside the country but could be used to set up an account without an associated credit card. My prayers had been answered! Or almost answered. There was one small snag. It turns out you can’t buy iTunes Gift Cards for the US store outside of the US. Gift cards in other regions are tied to their version of iTunes. I’d known it was too good to be true. And then I remembered eBay.

Blessed, blessed eBay: where you can find almost anything for sale. And there they were! Two US$15 iTunes Cards for about US$34. Sure there was a markup but it wasn’t much and the guy was willing to email me the codes. Instant gratification! I quickly paid my knight in shining armour, set up Outlook to check for new messages every minute and waited. It didn’t take long. Soon the codes were in my inbox and almost as quickly punched into the iTunes Store. Oh, sure there were a few extra steps. I did have to create an identity for myself in the US. I do hope Apple doesn’t actually try to contact the phone number I provided. Unless they want to order a Domino’s pizza, that is.

So I was in. And what a rush! There was something almost illicit about it. My hands trembled as I looked over all that I could purchase. For some reason it hadn’t occurred to me that I would now be able to purchase not only cheap music but movies and television shows. I could download episodes of the Daily Show! The excitement in the room was palpable.

Still, as tempting as it might have been to order a TV show or a movie (Oh my God! I just remembered they have old Law and Order episodes!) I told myself to remember why I was there. I was there to purchase music. This was for science. I couldn’t let myself be distracted by the bright lights and vivid colours of Pixar’s movies. Clicking on the iTunes Plus link I delved further into the shop.

I already knew what album I wanted. It was the Queen Greatest Hits CD I’d seen on the Australian store for $20. $20?! Ha! Who did they think I was? Joe Average Knucklehead? I wasn’t going to pay $20 for something that came to me down an Internet tube! At least not when it was possible, at least in theory, to get the very same content for a lower price.

Unfortunately Fate hadn’t finished laughing yet. See it turns out in Australia Queen’s music is licensed by EMI. But in the United States its handled by Hollywood Records (who distributed through Universal). Since EMI is the only major label to agree to selling its music DRM-free this meant that while I could buy Queen in the iTunes Plus format in Australia (so long as I didn’t mind being milked) I couldn’t from the US store. Aren’t intellectual property laws wonderful!

But not being able to download the album I wanted was only a minor inconvenience. There were still plenty of other fish in the sea. I like AIR and noticed they had released a new album. After briefly checking out some reviews to ensure it wasn’t another 10,000 Hz Legend I clicked to go to the checkout and start downloading.

Now the last time I downloaded something from iTunes it was not a pleasant experience. Komala assured me this wasn’t typical of regular usage and I’m pleased to confirm she is correct. The downloading began straightaway and went off without a hitch. In about five minutes or so I’d sucked down the whole thing and it was only sheer restraint that prevented me from grabbing something else.

All in all, this time around the whole thing was very positive (once I’d set up the account that is). It was more contrived than it ought to have been for 2007 but such is the current state of intellectual property. With any luck the new Amazon store that’s set to launch later this year will make this whole process a lot easier. In which case I’ll give up fighting to give Apple my money. I don’t like Steve Jobs that much.

Well, maybe not. I’m sorry to say that my first experience with the process wasn’t particularly positive. First step was to upgrade to iTunes 7.2. I’m not sure why this is necessary but long ago I stopped questioning why various iTunes upgrades were required. If the Mighty Steve issues a dictate I obey it. With iTunes updated I moseyed over to my iTunes account (up until this point only useful for downloading album art) and ‘enabled’ iTunes Plus. ‘iTunes Plus’ is what Apple is calling their sans-DRM files. As well as sporting improved portability these files are also encoded at a higher fidelity than the old 99c ($1.70 if you’re unlucky enough to be a member of the Australian store) ones did.

OK, so far and so good. Downloading a 30 MB file isn’t the most user friendly experience in the world but it could be worse. Rest assured, it got worse.

Just as an aside: Is there no way for Apple to make their software more modular? Perhaps I’ve become spoilt by Firefox’s automatic update system (which, coincidentally, is updating itself as I write this) but frankly, if you’re a major developer producing software in the year 2007 and you require me to manually download your entire program every time you fix a bug you’ve screwed up somewhere. It shouldn’t be this difficult.

I digress. The next step was to see if there was any music I actually wanted. Luckily for me EMI is the big music label based in England and controls the works of a number of English artists I like. I recently listened to a dynamite live set from Arctic Monkeys on Triple J and decided their new album, Favourite Worst Nightmare, would be a good one to experiment with. Purchasing music on iTunes is notoriously easy and after adding Favourite Worst Nightmare to my shopping cart it was all I could do not to toss a few other ones in there as well. When I’m in an actual store and I have CDs in my hands they have a certain weight – the weight of responsibility saying, ‘You can’t afford all this music.’ But online there is no weight; it’s effortless. I don’t even take out my wallet so there’s no moment where I realise this is my grocery money I’m spending. Luckily I was able to hold firm this time but who knows what will happen if more labels start to add their music. What of Amazon’s upcoming store? If I can purchase music at US prices… well, I might never be seen again.

I say ‘might’ because I’m not particularly looking forward to using the iTunes Store again. While things up to this point in the story were relatively positive it quickly went downhill when I tried to actually download the music I’d purchased. You see, when you purchase songs in iTunes it automatically begins to download them. Or so the theory goes. For me it was a little less with the downloading and a little more with the endless waiting. While the download appeared to initiate it didn’t seem to want to go any further than that first step regardless of what I did. Occasionally one file would randomly download while another complained that the network connection was timing out. Deciding maybe it was just slow I left the computer on overnight and went to bed, looking forward to listening to my new music on the train to work in the morning. Unfortunately my early morning commute was without musical accompaniment. I awoke to find the download still pretty much where I’d left it – going nowhere. Since a torrent had successfully downloaded overnight I knew the problem wasn’t that the connection had dropped out.

I tried it a few more times and was able to get most of the songs from the album barring four or so. Not quite the replacement for going down to the old record store. I tried again 12 hours later upon coming back from work and met with varying degrees of success. Again, some files whizzed by while others stagnated. One track in particular, ‘If You Were There, Beware’, is still refusing to download as I type this. I’ve grown so desperate I’ve emailed Apple technical support in the hopes of a resolution to this problem. I’ll let you know how that goes.

All in all, not exactly the type of experience that fills one with confidence. I want to like this. It’s what I’ve been waiting for it for years. I guess I can wait a little longer.

Of course I can’t quite do it just yet. Try as I might I haven’t found any online stores selling EMI music sans-DRM so far. I figure this is probably because the iTunes Store is supposed to get first bite of the cherry. In the press announcement Apple’s Steve Jobs explained that EMI’s music would appear on the iTunes Store in May so hopefully we’ll have only another month to wait.

It’s not just a lack of DRM that we can look forward to, though. The EMI announcement also foretold of a world of higher quality downloadable music. This is fantastic news for anyone who wants to replace buying CDs with downloading mp3s. At the moment most online services (including the iTunes Store) sell their music with a far lower bit rate than you would get if you ripped a CD yourself. In other words, not only are downloadable copies saddled with restrictive DRM but they’re not even as good quality as CDs. When the new songs become available, however, this will change. Jobs announced that the iTunes Store which currently sells music at a bit rate of 128 kbps would be upping that to 256 kbps.

Who wants to wait until May for all of this, though? One of the benefits of listening to the entire conference (I, er, was bored) was that I heard Eric Nicoli, Chairman of EMI, mention that music from Damon Albarn’s new band The Good, The Bad & The Queen was not only part of the digital catalogue that would be available soon but was in fact available for sale from their web site right now. This was too good an opportunity to miss and I immediately paused the press conference and availed myself of the opportunity to consume.

Although Apple will offer the new versions sans-DRM they won’t be in mp3 format. Apple eschews mp3 for their preferred alternative, AAC. It wasn’t clear to me from the press conference what we could expect from other stores as a result. If my The Good, The Bad & The Queen experience is any indication we don’t have to worry. Not only were tracks available as mp3s but they were sampled with a bir rate of 320 kbps! This is the maximum bit rate mp3 supports. It’s a little difficult to directly compare mp3 and AAC so I won’t try and start an argument about which is better, suffice to say that at this bit rate they’re both much higher quality than what we’ve had thus far.

The purchasing process was as easy as one would hope it would be. I went to the web site, clicked a few links to get to the purchase page, entered my credit card details and voila! The songs were ready for me to download. Downloading was a little bit of a pain as I had to download the songs one at a time but as the site itself pointed out, this can be remedied with a download manager (such as Flashgot).

All up the album cost me £7.99 to purchase. This works out to be a little less than AUS$20. For some of you this might not be the massive discount you were hoping digital distribution would bring. Indeed, I could probably have got the album cheaper if I’d been able to find it on sale or in a bargain bin. However, considering I a) am in Japan and b) was able to complete the purchase in all of about 5 minutes I’m hardly going to complain.

I’m hopeful prices will drop now that online services can more directly compete with one another but we’ll have to see. Frankly, for the moment I’m happy. As I said back when I started using AllofMP3, this is as much about sending a message as anything. If I really wanted the lowest possible price I could just find a torrent. But I do enjoy buying music and if EMI has now made that possible for me in the digital age then I feel they desrve my support. At least for one album.

A few things have been rattling around inside my head since the story broke. First of all, what will this mean for Apple? Jobs has been claiming since at least February that he’s been against DRM from the beginning. This seems to have had more to do with trying to get European regulators of his back than actually changing things. (In the wake of Jobs’ essay, various labels came forward to say that they had pleaded with Apple to sell their music without DRM, all to no effect.) Either way, now his wish has come true and I wonder what this means, particularly for the ludicrous price mark-ups those of us from outside the United States are charged.

As anyone with a calculator can quickly tell you, every non-American customer pays more for their music than their American brethren. Moreover, you can’t use an iTunes Store if the nationality of your credit card differs from the nationality of the store. So while I can browse the US store (and even preview files), if I try to buy any I’m told my money isn’t welcome here. So long as Apple didn’t really have to compete with online music stores (the iTunes Store dwarfs all others) this racket hummed along quite steadily. But this will no longer be the case. The Good, The Bad & The Queen didn’t care that I placed an order in their British store from Japan with my Australian credit card. I suspect the same will be true of most online stores.

And what of AAC? Plenty of devices play it back but with nothing approaching the ubiquity of mp3. Will Apple abandon AAC if people abandon the iTunes Store in favour of mp3?

And what of video? Apple says music and video are different but don’t the same interoperable arguments apply to it as well as music? Especially with the growth of portable video players, whether they be an added extra with your new BMW sports utility vehicle or part of your latest cell phone, Joe Consumer is going to want to be able to transfer video between devices. Presumably people will be as pissed off when they realise all those Pixar movies they bought to entertain Junior on the trip to Grandma’s won’t work as they were when they found out Aqua’s ‘Barbie Girl’ was trapped on their PC. (Possibly more pissed off since the films will have cost ten times as much.) DRM might make sense for rental video but if purchasing online truly starts to take off and DVD sales continue to slide, what then?

Finally, what does this all mean for Big Content? The decision to ditch DRM by EMI seems to be a further step towards fully embracing a radically different distribution model to the one that has made all these companies filthy rich. But while many may see this as the final nail in the coffin for Digital Rights Management it seems to me to be one more nail in the coffin of the entertainment industry as we know it. Are we going to need record stores any more? Are we going to need record labels? If The Good, The Bad & The Queen can sell their music to me directly what exactly is EMI providing them with again?

And to be honest, so far my experience has been pretty positive. I created an account at the AllofMP3 web site in about a minute, added US$25 to my account and started looking for music to grab. I had already downloaded the AllTunes program that acts as an iTunes-esque front-end for the store but once I realised that it was using Internet Explorer’s Trident rendering engine I returned to the warm embrace of Firefox to surf around their web interface.

I selected three albums that I was interested in – Gnarls Barkley’s St. Elsewhere, Lily Allen’s Alright, Still and Bloc Party’s Silent Alarm – and had the most difficult moment of the entire experience, deciding what quality I wanted them in. Granted at the price you pay at AllofMP3 there’s really not that much difference. In the end it was the thought of the extra space it would take up on my HDD and the fact that the speakers I have here really aren’t good enough to tell the difference between lossy and lossless, at least for pop music, that prompted me to just go for 192 kbps mp3s. After all, that’s good enough for most of the other music I have on my computer.

There’s a slight delay between the ‘purchase’ of the tracks and when you can actually download them. Since downloading them via the web interface requires you to manually go through right-clicking each one and saving to your computer I fired up AllTunes once more and it automatically started downloading away. Pretty soon they were done and on my computer. Frankly, I was almost disappointed. I expected there to be more problems.

The tracks come with some rudimentary tag information but still required some editing to match the music already in my iTunes database. Oh, and there was no album art. Thankfully, Coveralia was to the rescue and that problem was solved. All in all, it was a pretty positive experience and I can see myself purchasing more music from AllofMP3 in the future. Why download it from a Russian site when I could just get it for free? Well, because I have a job now, I feel like I should have the disposable income to afford this type of thing and, most important of all, I really want to send a message to the record companies that I will pay for music but I want it to be cheap, I want it to be easy and I want it to be in a format convenient for me without digital rights management technology preventing me from using it where I want and when I want.

Hopefully AllofMP3 can make more beautiful music together. At least until they shut it down.