Spiderweb and Freedom

[Marc Dequènes (Duck)]

Coin,

 

As one of your customers, i wanted to react to your recent news.

 

Quoting "Spiderweb Software Inc." <mailinglist@spiderwebsoftware.com>:

 

> * Spiderweb Software Announces Glorious October Carnage Sale!

 

I'm happy you're able to do such a permanent effort. It probably means the company is going very well :-).

 

Nevertheless, for games i don't have yet, i would have paid the old price again or more with pleasure, in the hope older games, which should be quite beneficial, are released as Free Softwares. It would also quite help in at least two fields :

- maintenance of the old but still pleasant games over time, while your company move on to new projects

- help port games to new platforms (GNU/Linux, Android…)

 

> * Spiderweb Software Is On Steam At Last

 

Steam, besides eye-candy and goodies, is a DRM-oriented distribution platform. This is quite problematic, as it does not respect basic rights any customer should have. And by the way, if you ever decide to stop your old distribution method, i won't ever be able to play any of your games, as my system (GNU/Linux) is not supported by Steam.

 

Here is an article which summarize the major problems with this system:

http://www.defectivebydesign.org/topic/steam

 

> We are hoping that our other new games will be accepted by Steam, and

> we'll let you know if they are. Also, note that Steam selects the price

> of games that appear on its service, and that price might be lower than

> what we offer on our web site.

 

That is to say, you're not anymore in control of your own business… That's quite sad.

 

 

That said, thanks for your good work.

[Lilith]

If you don't like Steam, rest assured that you don't have to buy from it: there are no plans to stop selling Spiderweb's games directly from the official website, nor to include any form of DRM in those versions of the games. There's a significant number of potential customers who now use Steam as a primary means of finding and purchasing games. Those customers evidently don't think the concerns your link raises are a major issue for them, and I don't think it's wrong to try and cater to them when it doesn't come at the expense of anyone else.

 

As far as releasing older games as free software goes: for the record, the source code for Blades of Exile was released a while ago.

[Tyranicus]

Some of the points that article makes are true, but many of them are not the whole truth.

 

Quote:

As far as I can tell, the software even won't work on my operating system. It only works for Windows and Mac.

Spiderweb games do not run natively on any other OS either, and, for the record, Steam runs quite well in Wine.

 

Quote:

You must have an Internet connection to play your games.

Not true. You must have an internet connection to set up the game in the first place, but you can run Steam in offline mode to play the games.

 

Quote:

People can't offer it in Internet cafes (no commercial usage):"Agreement does not allow you to exploit the Steam Software or any of its parts for any commercial purpose including, but not limited to, use at a Cybercafe"

I think you will find this is part of the license agreement in many games.

 

Quote:

You're forced to install Steam's software updates onto your computer.

Yeah, ok, there is no easy way around this, but I don't really consider it an issue.

 

Quote:

You're only permitted to use Steam Software how Steam says you can.

What other way would you like to use it?

 

Quote:

You do not own the games you buy:"The Steam Software is licensed, not sold. Your license confers no title or ownership in the Steam Software."

This is part of the license for most software.

 

Quote:

You're not allowed to modify Steam Software.

You can't modify Steam itself, but you can modify games that you have installed through Steam.

 

Quote:

You are not allowed to re-sell your game.

This is definitely true for most games anyway. Why do you think video game stores don't sell used PC games anymore?

[Earth]

if SW would stop selling their games via SW then there would be quite big drop on salex.

[Tyranicus]

Originally Posted By: Earth Empires

if SW would stop selling their games via SW then there would be quite big drop on salex.

I don't think anyone actually thinks that's going to happen.

[Alorael at Large]

Especially not while SW is the one place where 100% of sales go to SW.

 

—Alorael, who thinks the latest from Jeff explains why quite candidly. He can sell his games for more here, so he'll keep doing so.

[The Mystic]

Yeah, I sincerely doubt Spiderweb will ever stop selling their games directly. I just consider the higher price to be more of a "convenience fee" than anything else; and unless I'm very much mistaken, it's the only place where I can get the games on CD.

[Earth]

SW is only who sells cd-versions.

 

outside players who might be selling his/her cds.

[Marc Dequènes (Duck)]

@Lilith:

Thanks a lot for your reply. I feel relieved this was not the first step towards Steam-only distribution and the end of my adventures in your nice games.

The intent of my post was also to inform other customers, so they can think about it and make their own opinion on the subject. If they still want to use it, so be it.

As for Blades of Exile, i found this game was Free software very recently, hidden in the old games page. I've been part of the Free software community since a lot of years, and never heard of it, so i guess at this time Spiderweb was not famous yet and you probably did not reach the community. Nowadays, it seems at first glance maintaining this software would need a huge amount of work to run on recent systems and improve the UI to expected standards. So i hoped you would reiterate this experience with less old games and more advertisement among the FOSS community. Anyway, i'm happy this one has been Freed, thanks.

 

@Tyranicus:

Thanks for you correction about the internet requirement. I'll ask for a fix on the linked website.

As for running Steam using wine, that's not an easy way to run games. Wine is working much better since last year, that's true, and require less and less tweaking to work well, but it's still difficult or slow on a lot of configurations. I'd also like my CPU cycles to be spend on more useful tasks than emulation.

Being able to lend or resale your game is a basic right we lost a few years ago. Many people still exchange game cadriges with friends or resale them, why should we loose this still useful abilities? For your own information, in France, *many* video game stores still sell used PC games nowadays.

Being used to restricted rights since childhood is not a justification for such restrictions.

[Tyranicus]

Originally Posted By: Marc Dequènes (Duck)

@Tyranicus:
Thanks for you correction about the internet requirement. I'll ask for a fix on the linked website.
As for running Steam using wine, that's not an easy way to run games. Wine is working much better since last year, that's true, and require less and less tweaking to work well, but it's still difficult or slow on a lot of configurations. I'd also like my CPU cycles to be spend on more useful tasks than emulation.

You said you wouldn't be able to play Spiderweb games if the only way to procure them was through Steam because Steam doesn't run on your platform. Well, neither do Spiderweb games. If you're against using Wine, how are you running these games in the first place?

[Marc Dequènes (Duck)]

@Tyranicus:

I explained other reasons why Steam is a problem from my point of point.

I'm using wine to play Spiderweb games, true, but being a developer myself I'm able to tackle with problems while most users would have abandoned. And that's not to say it's easy or the game experience is always smooth. Last time i tried playing Avernum 4 it was really painfully slow, and Nethergate is slow and flickering as hell. So if it's possible to remove Wine from the equation, or at least one part, it would be great.

I also asked about releasing games as Free Software, because it would help porting these games to many platforms. I understand developing for several platforms is a huge work and Spiderweb had to select a few which would bring them wealth. I believe releasing as Free Software would help mitigate this problem while not adding burden to Spiderweb. This would then remove Wine from the equation completely.

[Tyranicus]

Spiderweb is a business. They aren't going to release old games for free if they can still sell them. BoE was released as open-source because the majority of BoE content is user-created.

[Marc Dequènes (Duck)]

@Tyranicus:

I never said "for free". Free Software is about freedom, not price. Many companies all over the world have proved you can release an open-source products and be wealthy. I've worked for one and releasing the source was clearly the key to its success, as a large user community gathered around us, the company got know, and it is now a leader in the domain in France.

 

Nevertheless, for software which does not evolve much after release, it is a bit more difficult. Several ways are possible, like releasing the program but not the data, which would allow porting to another platform without altering the business. Releasing when the game is old enough and sales drop to a negligible amount is another.

 

When Spiderweb cuts off prices like they did recently, they lower their income but gain popularity and attract more people which in turn increase the income in the long term. Releasing sources for old games could attract developers, which would port the game (often for free even if not a lesser job than creating one), which in turn would attract users on other platforms (Android, GNU/Linux, BSD…).

 

Releasing the program (engine) without the data would also allow Spiderweb to reuse the ports, fixes, and improvements made by contributors in their future games, increasing the quality and development speed. The program source would then be available, but the plot/dialogs/graphics/… would still have to be purchased. This could be beneficial for both parties.

 

Remember that we're not all simple-minded and understand what does making a living means, and if we love the games we don't want the company creating them to die and have no new games.

[Kelandon]

Hmm, releasing the engine without the content. That's an interesting notion, but I still think it won't work, for a practical reason: I don't think Spidweb programmed carefully enough in the early Exile games to separate those two. I don't think it was so much that, "Hey, this bundle of stuff is the specific terrains, text, maps, and so on, and this bundle of stuff is the code that makes it all work," as it was, "Well, this whole thing, if you compile it, gets you a game." I think that's the major roadblock there.

 

As evidence, I put forward the BoE code, which by all accounts was a mess when it was first released.

 

Spidweb, I think, got more careful about separating out engine and content later (possibly much later). That kind of a partial release might be possible for, say, Avadon. But even the original Nethergate/Avernum engine isn't outdated yet; until Avernum 1-3 get put into the new engine (which won't be several years), Avernum 1-3 are as updated as those games go. So we're really talking about the first three games Jeff programmed.

[Alorael at Large]

The big problem with open-sourcing the program is that the program is what handles registration. I'd give it an afternoon before the tweaked pre-registered version became more widespread than the version you pay for. Spiderweb could work on open-sourcing its games in the future, but I don't think it will.

 

There's even a justification for that: BoE and BoA are both, to differing degrees, open. There's been some work done with that, but both were basically flops. There are other reasons for their financial failures, of course, but just open-sourcing isn't enough to build a community, and Spiderweb already has a community right here without opening up its code. I think you might be right and it might be a good idea, or at least not a harmful idea, but I doubt Jeff would go for it.

 

Actually, there's a bigger obstacle for previous games: Spiderweb moved in the opposite direction. Currently, the graphics, dialogue, and encounters are freely downloadable and in easily accessed formats. It's only the engine that's hard to access. In the future Jeff could reconfigure his games to make his content more secure, but that won't help with releasing old games. As Kel says, they're either inextricable or extricated the wrong way already.

 

—Alorael, who doesn't really see porting the games to Linux as a way to bring in a new market. The number of Linux users is tiny. The number of Linux users who don't also run another more mainstream OS is tinier. The number of Linux users who don't have another OS and can't manage Wine is probably near non-existent.

[Archaeolagent]

@ MD Duck:

 

Are there any examples of GAMES that have been released as open source, which are also commercial successes?

[Alorael at Large]

There are many games that have had their source code released after a delay. The question is how many achieved or maintained commercial success after being open-sourced and the ratio of successful commercial games that have been released as open software to total open-release commercial games.

 

—Alorael, who doesn't think there have been many of the latter at all. Especially not many that weren't niche games that were semi-donationware.

[Zkal]

Hi,

 

I agree with Duck about Steam (which I nevertheless use, but I'm restricting myself), and I'll continue to purchase directly from Spiderweb too.

 

Having an open-source engine and selling the data is an interesting idea. I hadn't thought of this possibility. Of course there is the problem of the registration part, as Alorael noted. But for the very old games, since it's of them that we are talking, is this really a problem ? Is Spiderweb still selling many copies of Exile I-III ? And they are only $10 now. I think the most important point is that these games don't work well on recent operating systems, so that people are even less likely to pay for them. People who want to pirate the games are and always will be able to do so.

 

I am looking forward to playing Avernum : Escape from the Pit, but Exile I was the game that made me discover Spiderwebsoftware many years ago (even though I only played the demo at that time, and later registered Avernum), and it's a shame that it is becoming unusable. Furthermore, Exile I had elements that were dropped in the Avernum rewrite, and I like the atmosphere of the first game. I would love rewriting Exile I in a "modern" language and make it multi-platform... this would be an interesting project to practice programming for me. Maybe in Scala, which I am fortunate enough to be taught by Martin Odersky himself.

[Randomizer]

Exile is written in C, but most of the game is hard coded with the data merged into the game engine unlike the recent Avernum games.

 

The problem with platform transfer isn't the software, but making sure that the compiled code works as intended on a new platform and coding for viewable graphics on the new platform.

[Death Knight]

Spiderweb can sell from other outlets such as steam, thats a good outlet and will enable jeff to gain new fans. However, i will always buy pretty much anything he releases from the official site. Thats just me.

[ixfd64]

Sorry for casting Resurrect on an old thread, but I have a few things to add.

 

Selling a game and releasing its source code are not mutually exclusive. There are indeed games that have remained a commercial success even after they were made open source.

 

Consider id Software, whose flagship product is the Doom series. The source code for the original Doom was released (under a semi-free license) three years after the game was launched, and was relicensed under the GPL two years after that. In fact, the company's philosophy is to open source their game engines a few years after they're released. For example, they just open sourced the id Tech 4 engine last November.

 

Despite that, id Software is still going strong. 3D Realms is another company that does something like this, with their releasing the source code for Duke Nukem 3D and Shadow Warrior.

 

In all of these cases, only the engine is released as free software. The actual game content, such as graphics and sounds, are still commercial products.

 

The older games have virtually no copy protection. Spiderweb's registration codes adds at least some protection, and I certainly don't see anything wrong with releasing the other game engines (Avernum, Geneforge, etc.) under a free license as long as the code for processing registration is omitted and the appropriate restrictions placed on the content.

 

That having been said, I do hope Jeff will open source more of his games in the future.