Community Content: The Sincerest Form of Infringement

Mon, Jul 21, 2008

Solid community-created game content, when done right, is every publisher's fantasy. Game companies hope and pray for the day when talented fans of their games take the time to explore the development tools and put together competent, high-quality additions to the original product. It's a win-win for everyone: Assuming the user's content takes off, the original publisher sees increased interest and sales for their game, the add-on creator gains attention, fame, a major résumé bullet-point, and a potential paycheck, and the end-users get added value to their favorite game (typically for free).

Witness Portal: The Flash Version. This was a project born out of a deep admiration for Valve's upcoming first-person puzzler, designed by a pair of ambitious young Portal fans at We Create Stuff. We interviewed the creators a while back, and they told us as much; they had no affiliation with or permission from Valve, they had no inside information on Portal beyond what the rest of the internet had already seen, and they had no intention of trying to sell their game and undercut the actual title. The game was merely the work of two devotees who wanted to play Portal so soon that they made their own version.

Months later, We Create Stuff would release the Portal:TFV MapPack, an adaptation of their 2-dimensional fan-game into the actual Portal game, realized in 3D as an add-on module that would run under Valve's game application. This game, too, had been created without commercial intent, except that this time, that was the end result. Last week at the E3 summit, Microsoft announced Portal: Still Alive as one of their new titles in the upcoming Xbox Live Arcade lineup. The game promised to function as a standalone version of Portal, with some new maps and puzzles for Aperture Science fans. Thanks to some investigation by Chris Remo, however, it's now known that the actual content in "Still Alive" is taken directly from We Create Stuff's MapPack, adapted and certified for the Xbox 360. Not without compensation, mind you -- a user of the We Create Stuff forums suggests that Valve purchased the maps from Hen Mazolski, creator of the MapPack, a few months ago, and this appears to have been the reason why.

From fan project to publisher-sponsored publication. It's a fantastic deal for Valve: The content is already done, they merely have to give it some technical polish and rake in the sales. This is the sort of community content that publishers dream about.

Guybrush The downside, of course, is that not all community content is desirable. Specifically, content such as cracks or DRM circumventions can be damaging to the publisher, in the form of lost sales and damaged reputation. The argued ideal, that such illicit modifications can be used by paying customers to remove the hassles of performance-damaging copy protection schemes, is outweighed by the fact that such programs can, and do, allow gamers to pirate the games without paying for them.

What happens, then, if a publisher commercializes that content? Ubisoft appears to have been caught releasing a "No-DVD" crack from a notable warez group as an officially-published patch for Rainbow Six: Vegas 2. According to complaints (and taunts) in the Ubisoft forums, gamers who purchased R6:V2 via the Direct2Drive digital delivery system were unable to patch the title to the latest version, due to their non-physical copies requiring the physical media in order to update. Ubisoft, in response, made available an additional patch which would correct this problem. Later, an enterprising gamer decided to investigate this patch, and discovered that Ubisoft was removing the physical DVD requirement through a previously-created "No-DVD" crack by warez group Reloaded -- complete with the group's signature still in the file.

The taunts and jeers, of course, arise from the apparent hypocrisy of a company, whose typical stance on piracy is adamant opposition, resorting to a pirate's crack in order to circumvent an unforeseen consequence of their DRM, just as users are so often forced to do. In essence, Ubisoft is encouraging users to apply a patch which, under a slightly different name, would be grounds for prosecution. The argument about DRM and its true victims has been made time and time again, but the curious argument being made by a select few is whether or not Ubisoft needs to compensate the crack's programmers for use of their content.

Scruples This is a tricky proposition at best. On the one hand, I feel extremely strongly about content creators being properly credited and compensated for their work. On the other hand, let's not kid ourselves: potential use for paying customers aside, this content was created against Ubisoft's wishes, against its EULA, and in all likelihood, against the law. On the one hand, we can point and laugh at Ubisoft, and say, "See how it feels when you have to deal with your own broken DRM?" On the other hand, maybe Ubisoft can point at the crack programmers, and say, "See how it feels when we steal your software?" Ubisoft is hard-pressed in this situation to even admit the true origin of their "patch," because it is hugely damaging to any future arguments they might make about piracy and "No-CD/DVD" patches. Of course, that's the sort of thing you'd hope they would have the foresight to avoid in the first place.

In an ideal world, a company designs a fantastic game, dedicated fans find ways to extend and improve the experience, lots of people get paid for their effort, and everyone goes home happy. Our hope is that this scenario is the future of user-generated content -- not the other kind where someone releases buggy software, someone else sneaks behind their back to fix those bugs, other people use that fix to steal the game, someone else steals that software, and we all yell at eachother for a while.

What other forms of community content would you like to see publishers embrace and support?