Category: News

The Console War : The Price of the Wii

Posted by DarkJedi – April 12, 2009

Nintendo can already be crowned the king of this generation of gaming consoles with its super-selling Wii. However, what started as a major success for Nintendo, which helped completely change the gaming market and especially the gaming crowd, is starting to go sour now!

The Wii now has the lowest user activity since there is no quality titles on the console – which means that even though there is a lot of sold Wiis out there there is still little incentative to develop costly titles for the Wii since no one uses their Wii for long (it can basically be said that people use the until they get fed up of Wii Sports).

At the same time the numbers are turning for Nintendo. They used to sell double as many consoles in Japan as Sony and Microsoft combined. Now things have changed. Japanese people tire easy of technology and the Wii has little, in terms of technology, to offer. Now Sony is outselling Nintendo for the first time… and the tide is rolling! Even Nintendo knows that the Wii is heading towards a bad, bad place!

The selection of titles for the Wii is filled with crappy titles and has less than ten quality titles all together – most of which are first party. No wonder people are leaving their Wii’s to collect dust after finding Wii Sports repetitive. However, Nintendo are readying the followup title on Wii Sports, Wii Sports Resort, which promises more of the same – but will it deliver new life to the Wii – and more importantly: For how long? At the same time they are releasing Wii MotionPlus, finally delivering the one-to-one motion mapping Nintendo promised many years ago with the Wiimote and Nunchuck, that completely failed to deliver!

While Sony and Microsoft continues to lower the prices of their consoles Nintendo has still to do this for the first time – even though the Wii already had the a solid profit margin at launch.  They have already, like Sony and Microsoft, invested a lot in reduction of production cost on the Wii. This means that Nintendo’s margin is gone up way high, while Microsoft and Sony have been bleading. This begs the question: What will Nintendo do now?

The natural idea now would be a serious price cost to spur sales yet again – perhaps combined with the inclusion of both Wii Sports and the new Wii Sports 2 plus two controllers with Motion Plus for a slightly reduced original price! They need to get a version down below that of the Xbox. There is no way they can justify their price anymore – not without a High Definition mod and more quality titles included (they will quickly see how difficult it is to find more than two quality titles for their console)… However, Nintendo has already claimed that no price cuts are coming!

In my opinion Nintendo needs to do two things – and fast! One: Cut the goddamn price, Nintendo! Between 30 – 35% at LEAST and then make some nice bundles with Wii Sports and Wii Sports 2 and make the Wii Motion Plus standard in the Wiimote. Two: Start delivering quality titles NOW! Not just first party, but also third party… Show that you have the game development teams behind you! Oh, and while you are at it… STOP the junk titles from reaching the market! How do you think your customers feel when they buy another “Wii Sports Wannabe Clone” for good money and find it to be worth less than Summer Games for Amiga in monochrome colors?!

What Nintendo needs to understand is that the Wii is not really a console – it is a toy and should be price like it… The controllers are not gaming controllers, but gimmicks for the toy meant to offer a mild imitation of reality… and the graphics are not much better than that of the Amiga – especially on a HD TV!

So, in short… Nintendo – wake up! Lower the price and start paying money to quality assurance for once!

Apple: When is enough DRM enough?

Posted by DarkJedi – February 18, 2009

Coming from the company, who’s CEO a year back claimed that he would love to be able to provide music over iTunes without DRM, one could be surprised to see Apple’s latest claim: Jailbraking a phone is suddenly against the DMCA... Suddenly you find Apple siding with the likes of MPAA and realize one thing: Apple is only against DRM as long as they keep complete control of their customer and their market. The entire ecosystem around Apple’s products, from the iPod to the iPhone and iTunes are surrounded by guarding technologies that “protect” the customer against other choices than that of Apple. Meanwhile the customers are complaining widespread about DRM… A complain that apparently goes on deaf ears at Apple!

Naturally Apple gets its fair beating on blogs and criticism for being this arrogant on the DRM issue, but one would not expect them to receive a direct attack on this issue from Microsoft. However, Steve “Throwing Chairs” Ballmer apparent goes out criticising Apple for being a closed company… Guess it takes one to know one :)

It is, none the less,  strange to hear Steve Jobs talk about Apple as an open company, when their entire moneychain is built around fencing in their customers completely. In my opinion they should rethink their strategy and become an open company! But who cares?…. As long as there are customers for their fenced-in technology they will continue to build more DRM into their products!

The Game of Protection

Posted by DarkJedi – February 17, 2009

What is the difference between protecting your Intellectual Property from Illegal Copying and Trying to control the consumer and the free market? The difference is often difficult to spot if you are a company in this digital age apparently… The first thing that goes wrong is that you start of with the assumption that every possible customer is a criminal. The second thing that goes terribly wrong is that you mistake illegal copying with stealing. You do not loose the original when you copy – big difference! Imagine someone stealing the Mona Lisa compared to someone who can make a perfect duplicate… BIG difference! The third and last mistake is that companies thinks that this problem can be solved using DRM…

How did they expect their customers to react when they are essentially taking over the rights of the customer’s PC? … And when customers complain they keep singing that old, worn-out song of piracy problems even though nothing in the ever-booming sales numbers of videogames supports this! Let’s be realistic here. This has nothing to do with piracy and the company already knows this. They are instead fighting a market they have little or no control over and which costs them millions of dollars each month: The second-hand game market. Normally you would not be against the forces of the free market and just be happy that you are in a market that keeps growing with incredible speed in the midths of a major financial crisis… but not in this market! They want to control the customer, their PC and instead lease their products for full price…

Of course when you act that way in the face of your customers you better not mess up and that’s exactly what Epic did with their major title “Gears of War”. Of course EA had already created a great fuss on the market by creating some of the most restricted DRM on the games market ever on their release of their major hope, Spore, which was suppose to take over the success of The Sims. However, they quickly found out that in this digital age gamers will let their voices be heard quickly once you try to screw them like EA did. It didn’t help that the CEO of EA came out and showed the whole world what little understanding of their customers and how much arrogancy EA had at that point. Later on EA put the same titles on Steam – now without the DRM…

Now, there’s no denying that piracy exists to some degree, but since the numbers can never be validated it will always be used as a poor excuse. However, as Valve and others keep reminding us: Pirates are just unsatisfied customers! Why not try to find out at what price mark pirates vanish, like you do with other software in third world countries? Why not offer the choice between a cheaper copy with DRM and the “normal” game for a normal price without DRM – thereby letting customers show their intent with their vallets. Naturally this can only be done if the companies start to make it clearer on the boxes for their games what restrictions actually applies when they sell DRM-ridden titles.

Ubisoft has already had its trouble with DRM and are now searching for new alternatives. They have now released their newest Prince of Persia game for PC without DRM to see how it fares. Naturally it can easy become a quick excuse for Ubisoft: “See… We did it without DRM and we didn’t sell 100 million copies over night! Pirates will never change!”. A poor game will never sell – even without DRM.

At this point in time gamers are fed up with non-functional DRM schemes that only hurts the paying customers. Pirates never feel the poor quality of DRM since their version never contain any, which in itself is the clearest point one can make in this matter. The DRM doesn’t help because every title is out there in a pirated version – WITHOUT DRM – so only the remaining paying customers are being screwed. Lately gamers, together with the EFF, have started speaking out publicly about the many problems in DRM, which are illegally taking away user-granted rights without consent.

Let’s hope that some headroom is finally made. The situation is unacceptable. We all know that DRM is doomed to fail. A perfect solution doesn’t exists and never will. It is clear now that this situation with ever increasing strictness of DRM is a passing period – however, one that is annoying to be living in. In five years time everything will be digitally sold and shipped and at that point those silly schemes will have been replaced by a few centralized, transparent dsitribution solutions, like Steam. God, I wish I had a time machine… and so should many of the game publishing companies! EA and Epic aren’t the last to make a big public scandal on DRM and who knows which company will end up being remembered as the Sony of the gaming world with their version of the XCP copy protection and the following massive lawsuit, followed by a publicity nightmare… I can’t wait :)

Sony’s problem

Posted by DarkJedi – February 7, 2009

Red as blood. That is the only way to describe the latest numbers of lacking income at Sony. A company that once was at the top of the hardware business with enormous successes such as the Walkman, the Trinitron TV technology and the PlayStation 1 and 2. A hardware company that lead the business with innovation for many years. Now the times have changed and some might be wondering why. The answer, however, is painfully obvious… Sony is no longer one company, but rather a gathering of businesses with opposite directed interests.

The three faces of Sony is their hardware business, Sony Pictures in the movie industry and Sony BMG in the music business. The main problem appears, however, in their software department. While the hardware business is trying to create open, innovative hardware, the two content businesses Sony Pictures and Sony BMG is trying to prevent that hardware from being used in piracy. Here is where the customer gets completely forgotten. We then see failures such as the rootkit fiasco in their CD publishing part and the Walkman relaunched that was supposed to smash the iPod but failed completely because of unusable software as it was too ridden with DRM and copy protection technology making it impossible for customers to use. The Walkman’s price was slashed by more than half, but little did it help. The software was useless and people kept returning their Walkmans as they saw them as broken.

Sony, however, learned nothing from this. They still struggle with technologies that Sony Pictures and Sony BMG wanted to push in order to control their customers. Think of the many failed formats Sony has tried to push: ATRAC, MiniDisc, SACD, MemoryStick and so forth. ATRAC is a perfect example here. When the rest of the market had already accepted MP3 as the standard and Microsoft was pushing WMA Sony kept forcing their poor customers onto ATRAC and nothing else. After several years of being practically the laughing stock of the MP3-player market with a ridiculously small percentage they finally yielded to MP3 and released the Walkman player which could play both formats. However, the software was so riddled with DRM og copy protection technologies that it failed completely. Hardware is only as good as its software. Why didn’t they learn?

Even though music has been distributed over the Internet for nearly fifteen years Sony BMG and the rest of the music industry still hasn’t found a digital strategy. In this field Sony is also showing its many faces. It wants to give its customers as many options as possible, but also to completely control their use. This can be seen clearly in the fact that Sony is one of the companies pushing the hardest for the power to use selectable output – a technology that takes away a lot of the consumers rights without asking. So on one side Sony wants to push HD content in all your equipment – on the other side Sony wants complete control to fully disable all your equipment and remove the ability to display the HD content.

Then came the PlayStation 3 and Sony’s newest push of technologies. Now it wanted its customers onto the Blu-Ray path, so that it could force new copy protection technologies onto its poor customers. Another HD technology riddled with DRM. However, when one focuses too much on technology and marketing and forgets about software, which has always been Sony’s soft spot, one is set up for a major disappointment – especially when one is as arrogant as Sony Entertainment. The PlayStation 3 didn’t quite know what kind of machine it wanted to be. It wanted to be a game console, but also a media center and a Blu-Ray player… but as everyone knows: The Jack of All Trades is a Master of None… And that also happened with the PlayStation 3, who is suffering greatly on the market today.The holiday sales has shown that in this time around Sony is way behind its two competitors…

What Sony failed to do Nintendo did to perfection. They focused their console on a major market and didn’t put everything into the console – only what the market was asking for. The result is remarkable – especially compared to the once master of the market, Sony. Even their newest competitor, Microsoft, understood where they needed to beat Sony. Microsoft didn’t have Sony’s innovation in hardware or even remotely their experience in this field. When it comes to software, however, Microsoft is million miles ahead of Sony. They made the right tools for developing software on their platform and they made a brilliant working network service in Live far ahead of Sony’s PSN, which most of all looked like a small afterthought from Sony in hindsight of Microsoft’s success. Microsoft success came from ensuring a lot more titles than Sony did – especially when it came to exclusives, where Sony was once master. Sony simply forgot that consoles are about games. At the same time Microsoft is cutting prices making it harder for Sony to sell consoles, who are already seen as expensive…

Times has changed. Hardware is no longer everything. These days a console is measured by its software and in that field Sony is having serious problems – not only with its countless delays, but also with the quality of the software, which almost always fails to live up to the hype. A clear example of Sony’s problem with software is that every game studio claims that it is much simpler and thereby cheaper to develop on Microsoft’s Xbox platform compared to Sony’s PlayStation platform – even such former Sony exclusives as Square Enix.What is Sony’s response to this criticism? Well, even more strange… They claim that they have made it difficult to develop on the PlayStation 3 on purpose to make it last the ten years they somehow expect this console to last – even though it is far behind all its competitors in every way… sheeesh!

The strangest thing about this is that Sony doesn’t seem to learn anything. They keep on lying through their teeth and spinning numbers in their marketing. They keep on screwing their customers with DRM and copy protection and the removal of consumer rights, using lobbying. One would think that a company that makes a PR nightmare like the CD rootkit would learn something, but it doesn’t seem to happen. What Sony needs a common sense czar…

Digital Music or Digital Protectionism

Posted by DarkJedi – January 25, 2009

For many years the digital sales have only gone one way – up and up! Consumers wants an easy to use music and movie download service that just works. iTunes is already doing what the music business should be dreaming about. Alternative earnings are hitting the music business from unexpected sides, such as the console market. Most businesses would be happy in such a situation. In the midst of a financial crisis they have upcoming market with unlimited potential, but how are they reacting now that they haven’t done anything to spur this development for more than a decade?

Well, not very inspiring to say the least. The Greedy Business ™, consisting of the Big Four in the music business, IFPI, MPAA and the likes of those, instead wants to crumble the rights of the Internet users and expect special threatment on the Internet. They want complete monitoring of the Internet – and naturally they do not want to pay for it. For some reason they expect the tax payers to pay for monitoring themselves in order for the Greedy Business ™ to misuse this monitoring for protecting their market. They are dead scared that the powers of the market is shifting and they want to use fear and money to pull their weight around to ensure that no one starts making money on innovation in this business.

In the mean time the Greedy Business ™ are spending their time publishing papirs on Internet piracy to get some support to their “take-control-over-the-internet”-scheme. Naturally these papirs are as filled with errors as the one would expect from these blind managers. They simply doesn’t know the rules of the scientific world and instead are just proving how little truth they have in what they claim instead. Perhaps they should invest all that energy into innovation instead – might be a welcome change!

The problem for the Greedy Business ™ is perhaps that they simply weren’t ready for the realities or for the fact that most business have to actually do something in order to earn money. Instead they just kept on claiming that it was the pirates’ fault – not theirs. They did nothing to better the situation – just kept on complaining! What a normal business would do in such a situation is to change ones strategy (or actually make one in this case), not act like a spoiled child and start suing your customers thereby ruining your market of tomorrow. However, the Greedy Business ™ kept on acting like idiots without an idea in what direction they wanted to go and showed no understanding of what their market demanded what so ever!

Even when it is going perfectly in their sales in the midst of a financial crisis they keep on crying piracy … Won’t you guys just shut the f*ck up and die soon?!

The Console War : The Battle Situation

Posted by DarkJedi – November 29, 2008

There is no one who can argue that the war for the consumer in this console generation has been clearly won by Nintendo. But while Nintendo continues to rack up amazing sales for their Wii console Sony and Microsoft are fighting a cruel war for their consoles: The PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360.

For Sony the most important focus became to win the HD war that was raging between the two competing formats: HD DVD and Sony backed Blu-Ray. The inclusion of a Blu-Ray drive in the PlayStation 3 was a brilliant move in this war, but made the PlayStation 3 expensive and difficult to manufacture. Combined with the expensive and likewise difficult to produce Cell processor the price of the PlayStation 3 was way higher than that of Microsoft’s Xbox 360, while also lacking the ability to output enough numbers of SKU’s. However, what Sony forgot in this battle was the games. A few exclusives – especially compared to the Xbox 360, have ensured that a lot of faithful Sony fans shifted sides. Game developers also preferred Microsoft’s wellknown Xbox platform for developing, compared to Sony’s new Cell-processor, that required a completely new way of thinking and heavy investements of time from the game studios. The outcome of this strategy was that games was now developed on Xbox and ported (often poorly) to the PlayStation platform afterwards. Adding to the trouble was the fact that backward compatibility was less than Sony had promised – which was a big problem as the PlayStation and especially the PlayStation 2 had a lot of faithful following. All these factors played their part. Suddenly Sony was no longer the sole leader of the console scene, but is still tracking behind Microsoft and especially Nintendo. In this generation Sony wanted to win the HD war and forgot about the games and especially the developers.

Sony didn’t see Nintendo as a competitor. They only focused on graphics – not on gameplay. That was a big mistake. Games often sell on their graphics, but last on their gameplay – only a good gameplay will ensure a classic among games. Nintendo focused on gameplay and an entirely different audience, not the hardcore gamers that both Sony and Microsoft aimed for – but the casual gamer… and won big time! Now they are suffering on two accounts, however. They didn’t get third party developers behind them – and apart from Nintendo’s own titles, which were of good quality, the games that did hit the Wii was showelware. Bad ports and lausy gameplay with no depth whatsoever. The other problem, which is beginning to haunt the Wii is the lack of good graphics. Developers are abandonning the platform because of its limitations and because only Nintendo sells well on the Wii. When gameplay isn’t good people go for graphics – Nintendo can offer none of those at the moment… Even though the Wii is still selling good Nintendo have lost the gaming audience and have only the casual gamer left – which will hurt them a lot in the next generation. Nintendo was too fast in becoming, like Sony in the last generation, arrogant in their success. I think what Nintendo needs these days is a good “Wii-ality Check” :)

The third party in the console war, Microsoft, has had a rough start with the RROD-problems and became the difference between Sony and Microsoft. Sony betted on the hardware, but Microsoft betted on the software. Both companies did what they have always done best. Naturally both companies spent entire fortunes on spinning both their hardware, their sotware, their platforms and their sales. Sony wasn’t ready for as serious a challenger as Microsoft had suddenly become. Microsoft on the other hand was first out the tube a full year before Sony and Nintendo and got a good headstart. This would later become highly important as this allowed Microsoft to improve their design, cut down production costs, lower prices faster and especially gather a consumer base, which is what developers look for in a platform. This got the third party developers onboard and a few years into the war it is apparent that Microsoft won the third party war with their HD console and are now cutting the prices because they can afford to. Furthermore their game attachment percentage is way higher than Sony and astronomically higher than Nintendo, which is what gaming consoles are all about.

In terms of network playability Microsoft was lightyears ahead of Sony’s PSN with their Live! services and Nintendo has barely to get their console online yet! This is also important for players – because players recruit more players to a platform and help them form their opinion.

Now the war for value is on – Microsoft already have the developers, the titles and the best online service… All with the lowest price point of the three consoles. All these factors mean that Sony is too far behind ensuring that Microsoft is now outselling Sony 2 to 1  – even though they entered the game a year earlier…

Sony might have made the best Blu-Ray player on the market this generation around, but Microsoft won the gaming platform. What Sony is left with is an all too expensive gaming console with too few titles and a good HD player for a format that is about to die before the next generation anyway. Wrong bet, I suppose!

My guess is that Sony is preparing a price cut. They simply cannot let this continue. Every day Microsoft improve their user base compared to Sony’s the developers get another reason to publish games for that platform. What Sony needs to remember is the effect they themselves created with the PlayStation 2. When your friends got a PlayStation 2 that’s what you want as well!

The great question here is what will Sony do if Microsoft keeps cutting the price of the Xbox 360?…

EA : Lost contact with the real world?

Posted by DarkJedi – October 15, 2008

After perhaps the most criticized game launch in history with Spore EA has been fighting with a PR nightmare their blinded analysts could never have foreseen. EA that for once are bringing a quality game line up, including “Dead Space” and “Mirror’s Edge” are now faced with a group of fans that feel betrayed by the company. They are angry that pirates get a far better deal on the versions of the games that can be found on the internet – and I am not talking about the price.

Most gamers spend several thousand dollars on their gaming rigs and they are not about to let control of that expensive pierce of hardware in the hands of EA’s runaway DRM-software.

The problem is that EA is no longer a game company, but just a publishing house filled with blinded analysts living in a world which is divided up into only two groups of people: Loyal Customers who apparently buy every EA game and countless expansion pack or the evil pirates who would never pay a dime for a game. It’s right up there with a certain american president’s dividing of the world into good and evil.

Every stupid comment from EA these days seems to be bridging the gap between this lost company and their former loyal fans. I, for one, own more than 30 original EA titles and that is not going to change… No, I’m not going pirate even though EA wants you to think that! I’m just dropping EA from my shopping options just like I dropped every music CD out there with DRM…

Let me know when EA becomes a gaming company and returns to reality again….

Games : Value for money

Posted by DarkJedi – September 26, 2008

While EA is now facing a class-action lawsuit for putting a crappy piece of Sony Rootkit on its new game on the block, Spore, what is left for people who wants to pay for a game without loosing complete control with your own computer?

Leave EA to claim that DRM is necessary, while its games are being copied more than ever and walk away. There is an excellent alternative to get your gaming fix, get a lot of value for your money and at the same time a perfect way to send the message to the game companies that DRM should be left in the dust… “Good old games” – Yes, classics for a small price on easy-to-figure-out digital download, guaranteed to work on XP/Vista, NO DRM, support, manuals and the ability to redownload whenever/whereever. This is exactly what the market needs. Now you have the chance to support the companies that are risking their titles on this, showing that this is how digital distribution of games should be like!

Instead of paying 50$ for the mediocre Spore, filled with DRM and waiting to claim our money again and again for small expansions you could go to Good Old Games and for example get this instead :

Fallout 1

Fallout 2

Freespace + Expansion

Freespace 2

Stonekeep

Sacriface

Giants : Citizen Kabuto

Descent

Descent 2

… And you still save 2$

That’s a lot of hours of good gameplay that has endured over time!

My respect goes out to Interplay and Codemasters … Now just get the Monkey Island and UFO : Enemy Unknown series up there :)

Spreading the Viral Spore?

Posted by DarkJedi – September 9, 2008

Well, it was highly awaited… Finally some innovation in the world of gaming – not just another FPS with slightly better graphics and even crappier gameplay!

Then EA decided to screw both the good developers at Maxis and their by-now-small percentage of faithfull customers… and so they did!

This game is not something you buy – it is something you rent for 3 goes and that’s it! Naturally it also fills your computer with what can only be described as a full-on rootkit. So if you have been trying to avoid virusses, trojan and other backdoors in your system for years now forget about ever buying an EA game… What reign of madness did ever get the idea that a game is of such worth that it requires to take over your computer, which represents a value at least 25 times as much?!

If only one could buy the pirate version which works without all these problems?!

So in short: Don’t buy this unless you want to pay for the most expensive rental game ever made (trust me: the game itself is certainly not worth it by a long shot) and naturally for those money you also get a full-on rootkit placed in your system forever and ever!

Get lost, EA!

Greedy Business ™ : Throwing bad numbers around

Posted by DarkJedi – April 27, 2008

When the music CEO’s are lining up to claim that “The times are changing” they are all wrong. The times has already changed, the entire eco-system around the music and movie industry is already in the new times and has been for a long while. The new generation are frantically leaving the old format in the dust, choosing instead the digital alternative and this development is going fast. Meanwhile the Greedy Business ™ is still acting like we were in the times of old, fighting to put one non-userfriendly DRM out after the other – everyone of them broken before ever entering the market… This attempt to control their customer and the customer’s needs and uses are failing miserably and often ends up in publicity scandals that can never be amended after the fiasco has gone public, like the example of Apple’s latest Quicktime DRM that ended up ruining your entire system, while trying to lock you into a single vendor. Just imagine for a second that any other industry tried to lock a consumer into a single vendor? They would be judged by the court and forced out of the free market immediately!

After a decade of darkness in the minds of the Greedy Business ™ ’s CEOs they finally started to realize that calling your customers pirates, suing your customers while at the same time locking their systems full of DRM might not be the best way to win their hearts. Then Apple along with EMI launched DRM-free MP3 music on iTunes and suddenly Amazon followed with the two more of the Big Greedy Four. All that was left was Sony, who still couldn’t believe why the others would ever want to abandon DRM. After pressure when every blog and newssite on the planet had written about the DRM-free campaign from the other three Sony decided to make their own “DRM-free” option. However, true to Sony’s way of handling their customers it was an extremely poor and difficult way to implement DRM-free, which forced you into a physical store, thereby removing half the incentative. Why would Sony ever want to implement it in such a horrible way? The answer is simple: It is the only way to “prove” that DRM-free doesn’t work. If their silly “DRM-free” attempt was a fiasco they could go out and claim that people didn’t want DRM-free and that the Big Greedy Four should go back to DRM – ensuring Sony a good deal in royalties for their tons of non-functional DRM-schemes.

The main problem the Greedy Business ™ is now left with is their legacy from this decade of DRM and customer-hating. Many analysts predicts that DRM especially will haunt the Greedy Business ™ for a long time. Meanwhile the Greedy Business ™ continues to sue its customers, however meeting a lot more resistance now! The problem with companies like RIAA/MPAA is that their only interest is to make the customers of the company that pay them look criminal – how did anyone ever expect a business model like that to work? EMI has already seen the problem in this constellation and are asking RIAA what it is getting for its annual 250 million dollars, while being prepared to leave the RIAA should their response not fit the bill! RIAA is in dire straits already for showing sides that the music industry shouldn’t like too much. RIAA itself is for some reason not ready to pay artists anything even though they claim to this in their behalf – nor do they ever expect to do this… Why should anyone pay them then? Why not pay directly to the artist that has been exposed to piracy? At the same time they are eager to stay in control in their role as gate keepers and constantly battles individual and independent artists to keep them and the Big Greedy Four in control of the entire music industry, which is also something that would never be allowed in any real free market. Their public announcement often creates hate among music customers and clearly shows that they haven’t got the slightest basic understanding of how a free market should work or what their customers want – or even what they are actually doing!

What is more of a problem is the fact that these “organizations” react so differently which has become painfully obvious in the many lawsuits against college students in America these recent years. The approaches and understandings of RIAA, MPAA and the TV-series are so different you wouldn’t think they even know what they really want – apart from more money. When their lawsuits hits prime news sites like Businessweek with a story of a poor mother who is innocent and who fights back against the Evil Empire ™ of RIAA and the cursed music industry it is a PR nightmare from day one. Of course with their lawsuit approach they are sure to create hate towards the entire industry from the next-generation consumers, which shows their understanding of business. How could the CEOs of the industry miss this? They are once again left with a PR nightmare, which they leave to their owners to clean up, while they still claim their annual wages for ruining the future market for their owners.

If they instead started to look at statistics – instead of “inventing” them – they might see that pirates sometimes actually help companies sell more products… A concept no CEO in the Greedy Business ™ would ever come to understand with their 1980′ies way of thinking. They haven’t even reached Web 1.0, while the rest of the world is ready to leave Web 2.0 and go forth.

What strikes me as particularly inconsistent is how RIAA for example handles its money. They claim to be doing this on behalf of the artists, who pay them quite handsomely to do this horrid job. On the other hand RIAA wants to use a method of pay themselves they refused to the webcasters, while at the same time doesn’t actually go out and support the song writers who is claimed to be their first priority. The RIAA is suppose to be the best lawyers the Big Greedy Four can get, but why are their methods then called into serious question? The same methods are called into question when it comes to the BSA, who are actually forcing companies to turn away from the software-producers who pay the BSA and turn to open source solutions – loosing them for the long run! A company like MediaSentry also quickly removes the earlier proof that they were using illegal methods from their homepage showing that all these companies are breaking the law to “uphold” what they consider to be a righteous cause! All in all these companies are no better than the mafia – and until the Greedy Business ™ understands that they customers will continue to hate them – continuing this PR nightmare!
These days are interesting days. Especially when a hacker found his way into the Media Defenders company and proved that companies like RIAA knows that their actions have zero effect on piracy. This is interesting as it proves that the RIAA isn’t actually working on the side of its employer, but rather is trying to stack up money for themselves while laying to their employer. And what would the BSA do when they see companies like Sony caught pirating software themselves? Sony are refusing to make amends, even though they have forced thousands to do this in a similar situation. How come they only respect copyrights and patents when it helps their own cause?

What are they even doing in the courts? The obvious have absolutely no sense of how to act as a lawyer or how to prove their desperate cases, clearly proven when the RIAA “expert” witness was deemed “borderline incompetent” by real experts in the courtroom, while all their “proving” techniques was called into serious question as well… Why do the Greedy Business ™ hire these guys and pay them so much money for being incompetent? They expect nothing in return, do no real statistics or analysis and still expect customers to buy from them after being sued!

When they cannot win in the markets or in the courtrooms what do they do then? Well the obvious answer if you lived in the 1940′ies Germany or in China today would be to secure a law that indoctrinates the next generation about their view and their view ONLY on file-sharing – ignoring all technological progress made the last two decades all together at the same time. Thank god I live in the real world … and not a country where a new law can make it possible to demand 1,5 million dollars per copied CD – even though no physical pierce has yet to be stolen and all evidence can be falsified digitally! Naturally such a law is made while a large company like Wal-Markt goes out saying that they will no longer accept the far too high prices on CDs as they are experiencing that neither will the customer! Of course a good CEO would know such a thing – if they didn’t read the statistics of companies like MPAA, which are at least a factor of 3 exaggerated and so are those from the college piracy numbers, which they have already admitted!

The grotesque part in this is that even though they are lying wildly and they admits it the CEO’s do nothing. They do not act on this, like a normal CEO would – and therefore they are lost in the digital race completely! The companies are offering no real alternative to piracy. Even the dumbest CEO should know his numbers so well that when he sees that the two biggest piracy nations of the world, China and Russia, bring down their piracy numbers and it doesn’t affect the CD or DVD sales, which continues to fall that this is not a major contributing factor! What a good CEO would do then is to find the REAL contributing factor – instead of relying on statistics that has already been proven false from day one! An industry led by so poor leadership is doomed to fail – and they will… sooner than those poor CEOs will ever realize!