Apple has announced that all of the music on iTunes will be available without DRM at Macworld, according to many sources (see J. Mintz, "Apple cuts copy protection and prices on iTunes", http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5i3ReXnAcLX_j_MTvXbpQ3v63azvQD95HR2580).
I suspect that the only real impulse for this is the rise of Amazon's DRM-free music service. After all, iTunes' DRM is an effective form of lock-in for the service.
It will be interesting to see how much longer Apple's AAC format will last until it is replaced with MP3.
Apparently, scammers in Guild Wars use a classic confidence scheme to get people to reveal their user names & passwords... the scammer asks the player to hold onto a valuable item (giving trust), in return, in order to verify that the item is safe and being held for their access...
.. or some variation on the theme.
... or they could just ask for the password (see previous article).
NOTED: Guild Wars bans around 1000 accounts weekly. The Guild Wars (Buy + Free To Play) business model is particularly suited to punishing scammers by banning - after all, the game makes nothing from players AFTER they have purchased the game.
It would be interesting if anyone ever took the initiative to sue ArenaNet for being banned... after all, the game is no longer really valuable without the service.
Square Enix's "Special Task Force" for fighting gold farming and such has produced a wonderful end-of-year report for its activities protecting Final Fantasy XI.
This report discusses several security tools including a gold farming network analysis tool: RMT-PWNER V1.337, a banning tool that bans players based on a threshold of Gil (the game's currency): The Gilded Tomb, an Auto-Jailer that restricts, but does not ban players based on certain activities, and, apparently, Final Fantasy is moving towards a one-time password (token-based?) system similar to Blizzard (it is not clear if this is going to be optional or required).
Interesting stuff. Well worth reading.
Gives me lots of good ideas for other security tools.
I will say that I'm a bit surprised that they had not automated things earlier.
It is interesting to speculate how effective the Special Task Force has been in eliminating gold farming. Without more data that only Square Enix possesses, I cannot be sure.
One thing that is definitely interesting is that nearly 90,000 accounts were banned in 2008 - or just under 20 percent of the active subscriptions in the game (using MMOGCHART's subscriber number of 500,000)!
It appears that hackers have found a leg into an attack on the newest version of the PSP by exploiting a corrupted save file in the game GripShift:
This does raise a couple of issues:
1. Even if the new PSP was "unhackable", the need for games to be backwardly compatible means that there are many, many older PSPs that are still easily attacked.
2. This does raise the interesting question for the PSP as to why the console continues to sell well even as there are very few games released for it. It could be that basically people buy the console & get all of the games in pirated form. This is not great of Sony, but they would make some money as long as the system itself is sold at a profit.
3. There are a couple of core technical problems here that do not appear to have been fixed by the PSP 3000. First, the PSP should not "trust" its own storage system. Save files should either be digitally signed or authenticated via a secret key in the console itself. Second, firmware updates should be truly irreversible. There is little need for game saves to be exchanged between devices, so having some sort of authentication and integrity for game saves would be prudent.
4. Console developers should consider game developers "the enemy", or at least outsiders, from a security perspective.
K. Erickson (2009), "Hackers Cause a Run on GripShift", http://www.pspworld.com/sony-psp/news/hackers-cause-a-run-on-gripshift-009652.php
K. Erickson (2009), "Is PSP Piracy Increasing?", http://www.pspworld.com/sony-psp/news/is-psp-piracy-increasing--009649.php
In a savvy move, seven online game companies in China have announced a deal with Chinese security software firm 360 to include anti-trojan software with their games or as a recommended partner.
This is a good move on both sides. The game companies have substantial customer service costs due to trojans (and phishing attacks), so subsidizing security software for their clients makes great sense. The security company, of course, gets a nice, healthy revenue stream and radically lowered customer acquisition costs. I'm sure both parties have a revenue share on any security product upsells.
The companies including the software are: NetEase, The9, Perfect World and Ourgame
and the companies recommending the software are: Shanda, Holdfast and Giant
This actually could also be done in the US either in cooperation with a smaller security firm or as a discounted/recommended product.
One of John Smedley's (CEO of Sony Online Entertainment) most interesting (and, I think successful) moves was to get into the virtual trading business. Interestingly, SOE recently launched a venture with the trading card company, Topps, to create physical cards for Free Realms.
Trading cards (especially virtual trading cards) seem to have huge promise. They are firmly 2D art, so they are a lot less expensive to develop than 3D graphics, they are trade-able, which, as Magic: The Gathering, baseball, and pretty much everyone else has shown creates a huge opportunity in its own right, and they can be meshed with any number of abstract game mechanics creating a lot of interesting game play opportunities at reasonably low cost that are also widely accessible.
What is even more interesting is how few people in the games industry, or outside it, have really built on the power of trading cards or a trading card business model. Online trading card numbers are not often disclosed. Wizards of the Coast has not shared any details of Magic: The Gathering Online and SOE Denver, formerly Worlds Apart, had some impressive numbers that I vaguely recall - something like $70 per MONTH per paying customer (see Denver Post).
WOOF!
I really think that the Free-to-Play model should move towards the "virtual booster pack" model used in trading card games. You don't buy individual items, you buy booster packs that give you an assortment of "stuff". This facilitates an interesting secondary market (controlled by the game company) and makes purchasing items more interesting for everyone.... you only have to look at the "Prize Boxes" in Giant Interactive's ZT Online to see the added appeal a bit of "item roulette" adds. This approach can also be used to standardize rewards - instead of allocating items, you allocate booster packs that people can win by game play or purchase... no more "loot drops" just "booster drops". With proper game design, this can also finesse the crazy level treadmill and bias against new players that plagues many MMOs.
.. an interesting alternative to the dual currency approach that Matt Mihaly wrote up a while back.
D. Leonard (2008), "Sony's online card trick", http://money.cnn.com/2008/11/24/technology/sonyonline.fortune/?postversion=2008112511
Tim Arango of The New York Times has an interesting article on the growing problem of real-time piracy of video broadcasts of sporting events. All sports are taking this issue seriously and there are discussions between sporting organizations globally.
I suspect this problem is going to be very hard to fight.
There is a massive, growing underground sports betting business (see previous articles) and I suspect that these video pirates are supporting that business (a lot of the illegal wagering is coming out of Asia as are most of these pirate video services).
[This was not discussed in the article, but is my conjecture]
This creates a real problem as it is not likely that traditional economic incentives or technical measures will deter these thieves as they are being supported by a large, lucrative business (sports wagering).
My guess is that at the end of the day, sports leagues are going to legalize and regulate sports wagering globally so that they can protect the integrity of the sport, monitor players, and freeze out illegal betting operations.
But this is going to be a long, difficult battle.
T. Arango (2008), "Online Piracy Menaces Pro Sports", http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/29/business/29piracy.html?_r=1&ref=technology
NetDragon Websoft has had success fighting private servers / pirate servers for its game Eudemons Online according to Redline China. The private server problem has been a growing trend in 2008. Basically, these are unauthorized game servers for various MMOs that are run where the company "isn't looking" or laws are difficult to enforce.
The size of China makes is a major center for these types of pirate services which (usually) charge a discounted price for the service.
One of the myths of MMOs is that they solve the piracy problem by running the game on the server.
Actually, precious little of the game is really on the server - the bulk of the cost of development is in the graphics & code on the client side, so it is often not too difficult to reverse engineer the game server (a database, mostly). Also, many games have very simple underlying mechanics, so they can be emulated by an independently developed server.
... and, of course, game companies have had a number of problems with theft or compromise of game server code.
I would also think that the pirate server problem is more serious in areas where there are a lot of Internet cafes as the pirate server companies can cooperate with the Internet cafes to create a good business while not attracting a lot of attention online.
NetDragon seems to be getting good cooperation from the provincial governments in Fujian and Fuzhou.. I suspect this is helped by the fact that the company is based in Fujain.
Another side note is that it is interesting that I have not heard much about private servers for World of Warcraft even though there are a lot of them, it does not seem that Blizzard has taken much public action on this issue.
